My intention, for the moment, was quite simply to go to pass an hour with you, and Lina was tempted to accompany me; I should have shown her Rouen, and then we should have embraced you in time to return in the evening to Paris; for the dear little one has always her ear and her heart listening when she is away from Aurore, and her holidays are marked by a continual uneasiness which I quite understand.  Aurore is a treasure of gentleness which absorbs us all.  If it can be arranged, we shall then go on the run to grasp your hands.  If it can not, I shall go alone later when your heart says so, and, if you are going south, I shall put it off until everything can be arranged without disturbing whatever may be the plans of your mother or yourself.  I am very free.  So, don’t disturb yourself, and arrange your summer without bothering about me.

I have thirty-six plans also, but I don’t incline to any one; what amuses me is what seizes me and takes me off suddenly.  It is with a journey as with a novel:  those who travel are those who command.  Only when one is in Paris, Rouen is not a journey, and I shall always be ready when I am there, to respond to your call.  I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance that I should find there something interesting.  I know so well how to live outside of myself!  It hasn’t always been like that.  I also was young and subject to indignations.  It is over!

Since I have dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can, up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life.  When these difficulties return he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth.

But why do I say this to you?  Because it comes to my pen-point; for in considering it carefully, your state of overexcitement is probably truer, or at least more fertile and more human than my senile tranquillity.  I would not like to make you as I am, even if by a magical operation I could.  I should not be interested in myself if I had the honor to meet myself.  I should say that one troubadour is enough to manage and I should send the other to Chaillot.

A propos of gypsies, do you know that there are gypsies of the sea?  I discovered in the outskirts of Tamaris, among the furthest rocks, great boats well sheltered, with women and children, a coast settlement, very restricted, very tanned; fishing for food without trading; speaking a language that the people of the country do not understand; living only in these great boats stranded on the sand, when the storms troubled them in their rocky coves; intermarrying, inoffensive