Here follow all the Emperors, all the Spirits, and
the interminable list of the ancestors.
In her trembling old woman’s falsetto, Madame
Prune sings out all this, without omitting anything,
at a pace which almost takes away her breath.
And very strange it is to hear: at length it
seems hardly a human voice; it sounds like a series
of magic formulas, unwinding themselves from an inexhaustible
roller, and escaping to take flight through the air.
By its very weirdness, and by the persistency of its
incantation, it ends by producing in my scarcely awakened
brain, an almost religious impression.
Every day I wake to the sound of this Shintoist litany
chanted beneath me, vibrating through the exquisite
clearness of the summer mornings,—while
our night-lamps burn low before the smiling Buddha,
while the eternal sun, scarcely risen, already sends
through the cracks of our wooden panels its bright
rays, which dart like golden arrows through our darkened
dwelling and our blue gauze tent.
This is the moment at which I must rise, descend hurriedly
to the sea by grassy footpaths all wet with dew, and
so regain my ship.
Alas! in the days gone by, it was the cry of the muezzin
which used to awaken me in the dark winter mornings,
in far-away night-shrouded Stamboul.
Chrysantheme has brought but few things with her,
knowing that our married life would be of short duration.
She has placed her dresses and her fine sashes in
little closed recesses, hidden in one of the walls
of our apartment (the north wall, the only one of
the four which will not take to pieces.) The doors
of these niches are white paper panels; the standing
shelves and inside partitions, consisting of light
woodwork, are put together in too finical a manner,
too ingenious a way, giving rise to suspicions of
secret drawers and conjuring tricks. We only put
there things without any value, having a vague feeling
that the cupboards themselves might spirit them away.
The box in which Chrysantheme stores away her gewgaws
and letters, is one of the things that amuses me the
most; it is of English origin, in tin, and bears on
its cover the colored representation of some manufactory
in the neighborhood of London. Of course, it is
as an exotic work of art, as a precious knick-knack,
that Chrysantheme prefers it to any of her other boxes
in lacquer or inlaid work. It contains all that
a mousme requires for her correspondence: Indian
ink, a paintbrush, very thin gray tinted paper, cut
up in long narrow strips, and funnily shaped envelopes,
into which these strips are slipped (after having
been folded up in some thirty folds); the envelopes
being ornamented with pictures of landscapes, fishes,
crabs, or birds.
On some old letters addressed to her, I can make out
the two characters that represent her name: “Kikou-San”
(Chrysantheme, Madame). And when I question her,
she replies in Japanese, with an air of importance:
