August 3d, Nine O’clock P.M.

There are days when everything appears gloomy to us; the world, like the sky, is covered by a dark fog.  Nothing seems in its place; we see only misery, improvidence, and cruelty; the world seems without God, and given up to all the evils of chance.

Yesterday I was in this unhappy humor.  After a long walk in the faubourgs, I returned home, sad and dispirited.

Everything I had seen seemed to accuse the civilization of which we are so proud!  I had wandered into a little by-street, with which I was not acquainted, and I found myself suddenly in the middle of those dreadful abodes where the poor are born, to languish and die.  I looked at those decaying walls, which time has covered with a foul leprosy; those windows, from which dirty rags hang out to dry; those fetid gutters, which coil along the fronts of the houses like venomous reptiles!  I felt oppressed with grief, and hastened on.

A little farther on I was stopped by the hearse of a hospital; a dead man, nailed down in his deal coffin, was going to his last abode, without funeral pomp or ceremony, and without followers.  There was not here even that last friend of the outcast—­the dog, which a painter has introduced as the sole attendant at the pauper’s burial!  He whom they were preparing to commit to the earth was going to the tomb, as he had lived, alone; doubtless no one would be aware of his end.  In this battle of society, what signifies a soldier the less?

But what, then, is this human society, if one of its members can thus disappear like a leaf carried away by the wind?

The hospital was near a barrack, at the entrance of which old men, women, and children were quarrelling for the remains of the coarse bread which the soldiers had given them in charity!  Thus, beings like ourselves daily wait in destitution on our compassion till we give them leave to live!  Whole troops of outcasts, in addition to the trials imposed on all God’s children, have to endure the pangs of cold, hunger, and humiliation.  Unhappy human commonwealth!  Where man is in a worse condition than the bee in its hive, or the ant in its subterranean city!

Ah! what then avails our reason?  What is the use of so many high faculties, if we are neither the wiser nor the happier for them?  Which of us would not exchange his life of labor and trouble with that of the birds of the air, to whom the whole world is a life of joy?

How well I understand the complaint of Mao, in the popular tales of the ‘Foyer Breton’ who, when dying of hunger and thirst, says, as he looks at the bullfinches rifling the fruit-trees: 

“Alas! those birds are happier than Christians; they have no need of inns, or butchers, or bakers, or gardeners.  God’s heaven belongs to them, and earth spreads a continual feast before them!  The tiny flies are their game, ripe grass their cornfields, and hips and haws their store of fruit.  They have the right of taking everywhere, without paying or asking leave:  thus comes it that the little birds are happy, and sing all the livelong day!”