“The most essential?  It is the perfume.”

“No; that is a pleasure of the organ of smelling—­a sensual pleasure.”

“Then I do not know.”

“Listen.  The principal pleasure derived from tobacco smoking is the sight of a smoke itself.  You must never see it go out of the bowl of your pipe,—­but only from the corner o your mouth, at regular intervals which must not be too frequent.  It is so truly the greatest pleasure connected with the pipe, that you cannot find anywhere a blind man who smokes.  Try yourself the experiment of smoking a pipe in your room, at night and without a light; you will soon lay the pipe down.”

“It is all perfectly true; yet you must forgive me if I give the preference to several pleasures, in which my senses are interested, over those which afford enjoyment only to my soul.”

“Forty years ago I was of the same opinion, and in forty years, if you succeed in acquiring wisdom, you will think like me.  Pleasures which give activity to our senses, my dear son, disturb the repose of our soul—­a proof that they do not deserve the name of real enjoyments.”

“But if I feel them to be real enjoyments, it is enough to prove that they are truly so.”

“Granted; but if you would take the trouble of analyzing them after you have tasted them, you would not find them unalloyed.”

“It may be so, but why should I take a trouble which would only lessen my enjoyment.”

“A time will come when you will feel pleasure in that very trouble.”

“It strikes me, dear father, that you prefer mature age to youth.”

“You may boldly say old age.”

“You surprise me.  Must I believe that your early life has been unhappy?”

“Far from it.  It was always fortunate in good health, and the master of my own passions; but all I saw in my equals was for me a good school in which I have acquired the knowledge of man, and learned the real road to happiness.  The happiest of men is not the most voluptuous, but the one who knows how to choose the highest standards of voluptuousness, which can be found, I say again, not in the pleasures which excite our senses, but in those which give greater repose to the soul.”

“That is the voluptuousness which you consider unalloyed.”

“Yes, and such is the sight of a vast prairie all covered with grass.  The green colour, so strongly recommended by our divine prophet, strikes my eyes, and at the same moment I feel that my soul is wrapped up in a calm so delightful that I fancy myself nearer the Creator.  I enjoy the same peace, the same repose, when I am seated on the banks of a river, when I look upon the water so quiet, yet always moving, which flows constantly, yet never disappears from my sight, never loses any of its clearness in spite of its constant motion.  It strikes me as the image of my own existence, and of the calm which I require for my life in order to reach, like the water I am gazing upon, the goal which I do not see, and which can only be found at the other end of the journey.”