Page 2271 - les-miserables

to go with it. The useless must be mingled with happiness.
Happiness is only the necessary. Season that enormously
with the superfluous for me. A palace and her heart. Her
heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand waterworks
of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her
a duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers,
and add a hundred thousand francs income. Open for me
a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a mar-
ble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy
spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superflu-
ous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves
no purpose. I remember to have seen, in the Cathedral
of Strasburg, a clock, as tall as a three-story house which
marked the hours, which had the kindness to indicate the
hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and
which, after having struck midday, or midnight,— midday,
the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,— or any
other hour that you like, gave you the moon and the stars,
the earth and the sea, birds and fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe,
and a host of things which emerged from a niche, and the
twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Epo-
nine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen,
who played on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning de-
licious chimes which it sprinkled through the air, on every
occasion, without any one’s knowing why. Is a petty bald
clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that? For my
part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg, and I
prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest.’

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