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flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes along the
tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names.
She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that
I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that,
since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high
time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But
as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover
some subjects to which I could impart a philosophical sig-
nificance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock,
I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would feel either
that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a mala-
dy of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes
I would depend upon my father’s arranging everything for
me. He was so powerful, in such favour with the people who
‘really counted,’ that he made it possible for us to transgress
laws which Françoise had taught me to regard as more in-
eluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we were
allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repainting
of the walls of our house, alone among all the houses in
that part of Paris, or when he obtained permission from the
Minister for Mme. Sazerat’s son, who had been ordered to
some watering-place, to take his degree two months before
the proper time, among the candidates whose surnames be-
gan with ‘A,’ instead of having to wait his turn as an ‘S.’ If I
had fallen seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands,
convinced that my father’s understanding with the supreme
powers was too complete, that his letters of introduction to
the Almighty were too irresistible for my illness or captivity
to turn out anything but vain illusions, in which there was

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