Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight inmeasuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angleat which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the innerlife takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men liesbetween twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, offresh 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, twoyouths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action; these are oftencommingled in men whom Nature has favored and who, like Caesar, likeNewton, 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 theocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed myfuture, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacantground a palace or a fort.The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaitedPauline, 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 peninsulain Brittany; it was far from the port, and so inaccessible that the coastguardseldom thought it necessary to pass that way. To float in ether afterfloating on the wave!--ah! who would not have floated on the future as Idid! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?--who knows! Ideas dropinto our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. No courtesan wasever more capricious nor more imperious than conception is to artists; wemust grasp it, like fortune, by the hair when it comes.Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I wasgalloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I lookedabout me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild imaginationwas urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a woman issuingrefreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur of the rippling