In the middle class and the people, the ugliness is
more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness.
The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open,
but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious;
and in the women there remains a certain vagueness
in the features, something childlike which prevails
to the very end of their lives.
They are so laughing, so merry, all these little Niponese
dolls! Rather a forced mirth, it is true, studied
and at times with a false ring in it; nevertheless
one is attracted by it.
Chrysantheme is an exception, for she is melancholy.
What thoughts can be running through that little brain?
My knowledge of her language is still too restricted
to enable me to find out. Moreover, it is a hundred
to one that she has no thoughts whatever. And
even if she had, what do I care?
I have chosen her to amuse me, and I would really
rather she should have one of those insignificant
little thoughtless faces like all the others.
When night closes in, we light two hanging lamps of
a religious character, which burn till morn, before
our gilded idol.
We sleep on the floor, on a thin cotton mattress,
which is unfolded and laid out over our white mats.
Chrysantheme’s pillow is a little wooden block,
scooped out to fit exactly the nape of the neck, without
disturbing the elaborate head-dress, which must never
be taken down; the pretty black hair I shall probably
never see undone. My pillow, a Chinese model,
is a kind of little square drum covered over with
serpent skin.
We sleep under a gauze mosquito net of somber greenish
blue, dark as the shades of night, stretched out on
an orange-colored ribbon. (These are the traditional
colors, and all the respectable families of Nagaski
possess a similar gauze.) It envelops us like a tent;
the mosquitoes and the night-moths dance around it.
* * * *
*
This sounds very pretty, and written down looks very
well. In reality, however, it is not so; something,
I know not what, is wanting, and it is all very paltry.
In other lands, in the delightful isles of Oceania,
in the old lifeless quarters of Stamboul, it seemed
as if mere words could never express all I felt, and
I vainly struggled against my own incompetence to
render, in human language, the penetrating charm surrounding
me.
Here, on the contrary, words exact and truthful in
themselves seem always too thrilling, too great for
the subject; seem to embellish it unduly. I feel
as if I were acting, for my own benefit, some wretchedly
trivial and third-rate comedy; and whenever I try to
consider my home in a serious spirit, the scoffing
figure of M. Kangourou rises up before me, the matrimonial
agent, to whom I am indebted for my happiness.
July 12th.
