A dog trots by sniffing under the doorways. A wagon whose oxen have
slipped makes a grating noise. A lantern flickers, a voice is heard.
The angles of the roofs are clear-cut. The rest is consumed by the
darkness. Here and there, still, at great distances, a window of smoky
rose, and I am at the top of the slope.

At the left an enormous star trembles. It seems to breathe and its
rays alternately elongate and withdraw again. Its white fire appears
to flow. I look upon the constellations, behind which there are other
spaces of constellations, which hide still more constellations, until
the glance is lost in luminous embers like those of a hearth.

I am in no wise troubled by these stars. I do not see in them worlds
infinitely great or small according to the one with which we compare
them. They are in my thoughts, such as I see them: the largest like
hummingbirds the smallest like wasps. The space which separates them
one from another does not seem any greater than the pace with which I
measure the road. It is simply the sky of January above a little town.

* * * * *

A peasant-woman has sold me some mushrooms. They are very rare
nowadays. Their odor captures me, and I dream of the edges of
the meadows, of the elves who, according to Shakespeare, make the
mushrooms grow beneath the spell of the moon. They have been moistened
by the melting frost, and fine and long grasses have become attached
to their humidity. They bear within them the quivering mist of the
nights. The first, they came forth from the earth under their
umbels of ivory to find out whether the feet of the hedge were still
surrounded by moss. They must have been deceived. They could not have