Let me hide, too, these ridiculous monsters which ornament my chimneypiece.  Plato has said that “the beautiful is nothing else than the visible form of the good.”  If it is so, the ugly should be the visible form of the evil, and, by constantly beholding it, the mind insensibly deteriorates.

But above all, in order to cherish the feelings of kindness and pity, let me hang at the foot of my bed this affecting picture of the Last Sleep!  Never have I been able to look at it without feeling my heart touched.

An old woman, clothed in rags, is lying by a roadside; her stick is at her feet, and her head rests upon a stone; she has fallen asleep; her hands are clasped; murmuring a prayer of her childhood, she sleeps her last sleep, she dreams her last dream!

She sees herself, again a strong and happy child, keeping the sheep on the common, gathering the berries from the hedges, singing, curtsying to passers-by, and making the sign of the cross when the first star appears in the heavens!  Happy time, filled with fragrance and sunshine!  She wants nothing yet, for she is ignorant of what there is to wish for.

But see her grown up; the time is come for working bravely:  she must cut the corn, thresh the wheat, carry the bundles of flowering clover or branches of withered leaves to the farm.  If her toil is hard, hope shines like a sun over everything and it wipes the drops of sweat away.  The growing girl already sees that life is a task, but she still sings as she fulfills it.

By-and-bye the burden becomes heavier; she is a wife, she is a mother!  She must economize the bread of to-day, have her eye upon the morrow, take care of the sick, and sustain the feeble; she must act, in short, that part of an earthly Providence, so easy when God gives us his aid, so hard when he forsakes us.  She is still strong, but she is anxious; she sings no longer!

Yet a few years, and all is overcast.  The husband’s health is broken; his wife sees him pine away by the now fireless hearth; cold and hunger finish what sickness had begun; he dies, and his widow sits on the ground by the coffin provided by the charity of others, pressing her two half-naked little ones in her arms.  She dreads the future, she weeps, and she droops her head.

At last the future has come; the children are grown up, but they are no longer with her.  Her son is fighting under his country’s flag, and his sister is gone.  Both have been lost to her for a long time—­perhaps forever; and the strong girl, the brave wife, the courageous mother, is henceforth only a poor old beggar-woman, without a family, and without a home!  She weeps no more, sorrow has subdued her; she surrenders, and waits for death.

Death, that faithful friend of the wretched, is come:  not hideous and with mockery, as superstition represents, but beautiful, smiling, and crowned with stars!  The gentle phantom stoops to the beggar; its pale lips murmur a few airy words, which announce to her the end of her labors; a peaceful joy comes over the aged beggarwoman, and, leaning on the shoulder of the great Deliverer, she has passed unconsciously from her last earthly sleep to her eternal rest.