"Wash me clean from all my impurity, oh Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami, as one
washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."

Alas for poor Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami to have to wash away the impurities
of Madame Prune! What a tedious and ungrateful task!!

Chrysanthème, who is a Buddhist, prays sometimes in the evening before
lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands
before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish
disrespect for her Buddha, directly her prayer is ended. I know that
she has also a certain veneration for her _Ottokés_ (the Spirits of
her ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at her
mother's, Madame Renoncule's. She asks for their blessings, for
fortune and wisdom.

Who can make out her ideas about the gods, or about death? Does she
possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure
chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect
for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final
annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by
saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what
a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together
in the childish brain of a sleepy mousmé?

Two very insignificant episodes have somewhat attached me to
her--(bonds of this kind seldom fail to draw closer in the end). The
first occasion was as follows:--

Madame Prune one day brought forth a relic of her gay youth, a
tortoiseshell comb of rare transparency, one of those combs that it is