Chrysantheme, 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, as soon as her prayer is ended. I know that
she has also a certain veneration for her Ottokes (the spirits of her
ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at the house of her
mother, Madame Renoncule. She asks for their blessings, for fortune and
wisdom.

Who can fathom 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 by saintly Chinese missionaries at the
epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a
muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the
childish brain of a sleepy mousme!

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 tortoise-
shell comb of rare transparency, one of those combs that it is good style
to place on the summit of the head, lightly poised, hardly stuck at all
in the hair, with all the teeth showing. Taking it out of a pretty
little lacquered box, she held it up in the air and blinked her eyes,
looking through it at the sky--a bright summer sky--as one does to
examine the quality of a precious stone.