until the morning, one of those uninhabited bays upon the coast of
Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the
Antarctic winter when, in about the latitude of Magellan, we were to
go in search of protection towards those sterile shores that are as
inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the waters surrounding them.

The vision faded and I once more found myself in my grandmother's
large room enveloped in the shadows of the evening. My grandmother was
singing, and I was again a tiny being who had seen nothing of the large
world, who had fears without knowing wherefore, and who did not even
know the cause of the tears that he shed.

Since then I have often observed that the rudimentary scrawls made by
children, and which as representations are incorrect and inadequate,
impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults.
For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of
their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand
things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness--the things
which no brush would be able to paint.




CHAPTER X.



Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old
grandmother, who sang the Marseillaise so constantly, in that part of
the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt