peeping out of his nook ready to pounce upon any giddy fly or
wandering centipede. One of my amusements consisted in tickling the
spiders gently, very gently, with a blade of grass or a cherry stalk
in their holes. Mystified, they would rush out, fancying they had to
deal with some sort of prey, whilst I would rapidly draw back my hand
in disgust. Well, last year, on that fourteenth of July, as I recalled
my days of Latin themes and translations, now forever flown, and this
game of boyish days, I actually recognized the very same spiders (or
at least their daughters), lying in wait in the very same holes.
Gazing at them and at the tufts of grass and moss around me, a
thousand memories of those summers of my early life welled up within
me, memories which for years past had lain slumbering under this old
wall, sheltered by the ivy boughs. While all that is ourselves
perpetually changes and passes away, the constancy with which Nature
repeats, always in the same manner, her most infinitesimal details,
seems a wonderful mystery; the same peculiar species of moss grow
afresh for centuries on precisely the same spot, and the same little
insects each summer do the same thing in the same place.

* * * * *

I must admit that this episode of my childhood and the spiders, have
little to do with the story of Chrysanthème. But an incongruous
interruption is quite in keeping with the taste of this country;
everywhere it is practiced, in conversation, in music, even in
painting; a landscape painter, for instance, when he has finished a
picture of mountains and crags, will not hesitate to draw in the very
middle of the sky a circle, or a lozenge, or some kind of framework,
within which he will represent anything incoherent and inappropriate:
a bonze fanning himself, or a lady taking a cup of tea. Nothing is