The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man to have patience.
There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having the azure of heaven, say:
“It is enough!” dreamers absorbed in the wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and pitilessly satisfied.
Strange to say, the infinite suffices them.
That great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.
The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think about.
The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them.
Provided that they are face to face with immensity, they smile.
Joy never, ecstasy forever.
Their life lies in surrendering their personality in contemplation.
The history of humanity is for them only a detailed plan.
All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use of busying oneself over that detail, man?
Man suffers, that is quite possible; but look at Aldebaran rising!
The mother has no more milk, the new-born babe is dying.
I know nothing about that, but just look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under the microscope!
Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you can!
These thinkers forget to love.
The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child.
God eclipses their souls.
This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty.
Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of the birds are exhausted.
These are dark radiances.
They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so.
He who does not weep does not see.
They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.
The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior philosophy.
That may be; but in this superiority there is some infirmity.
One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan.
One may be more than man and less than man.
There is incomplete immensity in nature.
Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?
But then, what? In whom can we trust?
Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Who shall dare to say that the sun is false?
Thus certain geniuses, themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken?
That which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees not at all?
Is not this a desperate state of things?
No.
But what is there, then, above the sun?
The god.
On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o’clock in the morning, the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming.
The quincunxes and flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight.
The branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring to embrace.
In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering little pecks on the bark.
The flower-beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which emanates from whiteness.
The peppery odor of the carnations was perceptible.
The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall trees.
The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips, which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers.
All around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers, hummed.
All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse, by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the charming threat of flying low.
He who was there aspired to happiness; life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn.