But in the world where she has been thrown, it would never occur to her to suppose that a woman might merit a different fate.

“And us, now, my precious! Seeing the hells that populate the world, how should I react to your pretty little hell? you who sleep on stuff soft as your skin, who eat only roasted meat carefully carved by servants.

“And what could they mean to me, you well-fed flirt, all these sighs that inflate your perfumed bosom? And all the affectations you’ve gotten out of books, and this tireless melancholy, meant to inspire the spectator with a feeling quite other than pity? It has truly from time to time given me the urge to teach you what real unhappiness is.

“And to see you, my so delicate beauty, your feet in muck and your eyes turned nebulously skyward, as if beseeching a king, you’re the very image of a young frog invoking the ideal. If you don’t like your King Log (which at the moment, as you know, I am) watch out for the crane who will crunch you up, gulp you down, kill you at his pleasure.4

“Poet that I am, I’m not the dupe you’d like to think me, and if you wear me out too often with your precious whining, I will treat you like a wild woman, or else throw you out the window, like an empty bottle.”

4. See La Fontaine’s fable “The Frogs Who Ask for a King.”

XII
The Crowd

It is not given to everyone to blend into the multitude: enjoying the crowd is an art, and only he can gain a stroke of vitality from it, at humanity’s expense, whose good fairy at his cradle bequeathed a taste for travesty and masque, along with hatred of home and passion for travel.

Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and productive poet. Those who cannot people their solitude can never be alone in a busy crowd.

The poet rejoices in this incomparable privilege, that he can, at will, be both himself and another. Like a lost soul searching for a body, he enters when he wishes into any character. For him all is vacancy; and if certain places appear to shut him out, in his eye they are not worth a visit.

Who walks alone with his thoughts draws a singular intoxication from this universal communion. Whoever readily commingles with the crowd knows feverish pleasures eternally denied to the egoist, locked like a strongbox, or the sloth, confined like the snail. He takes on himself all professions, all the joys and all the miseries that circumstances hand him.

What men call love is petty, limited, feeble compared with this ineffable orgy, with this sacred whoredom of the soul which renders itself entire, poetry and charity, to the sudden unexpected, to the passing unknown.

It is good sometimes to remind the favored of this world, were it only to bring down their stupid pride, that there are felicities greater than theirs, larger, more refined. Founders of colonies, pastors of their people, missionaries exiled to the end of the world, no doubt know something of these mysterious intoxications; and in the bosom of the vast family that their spirit has formed, they must sometimes laugh at those who pity their so troubled fortunes and so chaste lives.

XIII
Widows

In public gardens, Vauvenargues5 writes, there are lanes haunted mainly by disappointed ambition, by unlucky inventors, by fame come to nothing, by broken hearts, by all those tumultuous and dead-ended souls in which the last gasp of a storm still growls, and who shun insolent stares from the merry and idle. Such shady retreats are rendez-vous for those whom life has crippled.

These are the places towards which poets and philosophers prefer to aim their bold conjectures. There they find pasture. For if there is one place they disdain to visit, it is, as I have suggested elsewhere, the high glee of the rich. Its hollow turbulence does not attract them. They feel irresistibly drawn towards things feeble, ruined, depressed, orphaned.

An experienced eye never errs. In these rigid or dejected features, these sunken eyes lackluster or agleam with the latest sparks from the fray, in many deep creases, movements slow or spasmodic, it immediately deciphers unnumbered legends of love deceived, of unacknowledged devotion, of efforts unrewarded, of hunger and cold lived through humbly and in silence.

Have you not noticed widows on solitary benches, poor widows? In weeds or not, they are easy to recognize. There is always, for that matter, in the mourning of the poor some lack, some absence of harmony that makes it more heart-rending. They must skimp over their sorrows. The rich promote theirs in high style.

Which is the sadder widow, the more touching, the one with her arm around a child who cannot share her reverie or one alone? I am not sure . . . I happened once to follow for hours an old and afflicted woman, stiff, straight, under a threadbare shawl, her whole carriage indicating stoic pride.

She was evidently condemned by her absolute solitude to habits of an elderly celibate; the masculine cast of her manners added a mysterious piquancy to the austerity. I do not know in what miserable café and in what manner she breakfasted. I followed her to a reading room and watched a long time while she went through the newspapers, her eyes, already scorched with tears, searching for something of intense and personal interest.

Finally, in the afternoon, under a fine autumn sky, one of those skies from which masses of regrets and memories sift down, she sat apart in a park, to listen, off from the crowd, to the kind of concert army bands provide for the people of Paris.

That was undoubtedly the meagre debauch of the old innocent (or the purified old woman), the well-deserved consolation for one of those dull days, friendless, talkless, joyless, without crony, that God had let fall on her, perhaps for years now! three hundred sixty-five days each year.

Another:

I can never stop myself, curious if not always sympathetic, from taking in the horde of outcasts who mill about on the fringes of a concert in the park. The orchestra sends out across the night songs of celebration, of triumph, of voluptuousness. Dresses trail shimmering; glances cross; the idle, wearied from doing nothing, dawdle, feigning indolently to savor the music. Nothing here but riches, fortune; nothing but what breathes out or breathes in unconcern and the pleasure of taking life easy; nothing — except that rabble pressing up against the outside barrier, receiving gratis, at the wind’s pleasure, fragments of music, gawking at the glittering furnace within.

Always of interest: joys of the rich reflected in the eyes of the poor. But this particular day, among the people clad in cheap smocks or chintz, I noticed a figure whose nobility made a striking contrast with the surrounding triviality.

It was a woman tall, majestic, with an air so noble I could not remember having seen her equal in portraits of past aristocratic beauties. Her whole person emanated an aura of haughty quality. Her face, sad and emaciated, was in perfect accord with the deep mourning of her dress. She too, like the common crowd around her, to which she gave no heed, fixed her eye on the luminous world with a steady gaze, and she listened with a gently nodding head.

Singular vision! “Certainly,” I said to myself, “her poverty, if poverty it is, can be from no mean stinginess; her noble face assures it. Why then remain voluntarily in a crowd where she stands out so?”

But edging near her, I thought I began to understand why.