The lighted candle threw
my huge shadow on the opposite wall. From time to time a flash of
lightning blinded me.
I thought of the man whose early life was spent here and who filled half
a century with the clamouring of his grief.
I thought of him first in these quiet streets, playing with the village
boys and looking for nests in the church-steeple and in the woods. I
imagined him in his little room, leaning his elbows on the table, and
watching the rain beating on the window-panes and the clouds passing
above the curtain, while his dreams flew away. I thought of the bitter
loneliness of youth, with its intoxications, its nausea, and its bursts
of love that sicken the heart. Is it not here that our own grief was
nourished, is this not the very Golgotha where the genius that fed us
suffered its anguish?
Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills which
future great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to see
the spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it had
retained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there.
His room! his room! his childhood's poor little room! It was here that
he was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamoured
for birth: Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the soft
breeze of Florida, Velleda running through the woods in the moonlight,
Cymodocee protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, and
frail Amelie and pale Rene!
One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead,
never to return.
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