Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in
measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angle
at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the inner
life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men lies
between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, of
fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires. After that age,
short as the seed-time, comes that of execution. There are, as it were, two
youths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action; these are often
commingled in men whom Nature has favored and who, like Caesar, like
Newton, like Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men.
I was measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop.
Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the
ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed my
future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacant
ground a palace or a fort.
The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaited
Pauline, who was also bathing, in a granite cove floored with fine sand,
the most coquettish bath-room that Nature ever devised for her waterfairies.
The spot was at the farther end of Croisic, a dainty little peninsula
in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so inaccessible that the coastguard
seldom thought it necessary to pass that way. To float in ether after
floating on the wave!--ah! who would not have floated on the future as I
did! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop
into our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. No courtesan was
ever more capricious nor more imperious than conception is to artists; we
must grasp it, like fortune, by the hair when it comes.
Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was
galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I looked
about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild imagination
was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a woman issuing
refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur of the rippling |
