CHAPTER VIII.



Someone has advanced the theory that those persons endowed with a gift
for painting (either with color or with words) probably belong to a
half-blind species; accustomed to living in a partial light, in a sort
of misty grayness, they turn their gaze inward; and when by chance they
do look out their impressions are ten times more vivid than are those of
ordinary people.

To me that seems a little paradoxical.

But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer
vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity
about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the
scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.

In the course of my life I would without doubt have been less impressed
by the ever shifting phantasmagoria of existence had I not begun my
journey in a place almost without distinctive color, in a tranquil
corner of the most commonplace little town, receiving an education
austerely pious; and where my longest journey was bounded by the forests
of Limoise (as wonderful to me as a primeval forest) and by the shores
of the island of Oleron, that seemed very immense when I went to it to
visit my aged aunts.

But after all is said, it was in the yard about our house that I passed