Are they dead? Are they wandering among modern
streets like hopeless exiles? Are they dancing—grotesque
spectres—a fantastic minuet in the moonlight,
amid the cypresses of a cemetery, along the pathways
bordered by graves?
Their memory haunts me, obsesses me, torments me,
remains with me like a wound. Why? I do
not know.
No doubt you think that very absurd?
The two old friends were walking in the garden in
bloom, where spring was bringing everything to life.
One was a senator, the other a member of the French
Academy, both serious men, full of very logical but
solemn arguments, men of note and reputation.
They talked first of politics, exchanging opinions;
not on ideas, but on men, personalities in this regard
taking the predominance over ability. Then they
recalled some memories. Then they walked along
in silence, enervated by the warmth of the air.
A large bed of wallflowers breathed out a delicate
sweetness. A mass of flowers of all species and
color flung their fragrance to the breeze, while a
cytisus covered with yellow clusters scattered its
fine pollen abroad, a golden cloud, with an odor of
honey that bore its balmy seed across space, similar
to the sachet-powders of perfumers.
The senator stopped, breathed in the cloud of floating
pollen, looked at the fertile shrub, yellow as the
sun, whose seed was floating in the air, and said:
“When one considers that these imperceptible
fragrant atoms will create existences at a hundred
leagues from here, will send a thrill through the
fibres and sap of female trees and produce beings with
roots, growing from a germ, just as we do, mortal
like ourselves, and who will be replaced by other
beings of the same order, like ourselves again!”
And, standing in front of the brilliant cytisus, whose
live pollen was shaken off by each breath of air,
the senator added:
“Ah, old fellow, if you had to keep count of
all your children you would be mightily embarrassed.
Here is one who generates freely, and then lets them
go without a pang and troubles himself no more about
them.”
“We do the same, my friend,” said the
academician.
“Yes, I do not deny it; we let them go sometimes,”
resumed the senator, “but we are aware that
we do, and that constitutes our superiority.”
“No, that is not what I mean,” said the
other, shaking his head. “You see, my friend,
that there is scarcely a man who has not some children
that he does not know, children—’father
unknown’—whom he has generated almost
unconsciously, just as this tree reproduces.
“If we had to keep account of our amours, we
should be just as embarrassed as this cytisus which
you apostrophized would be in counting up his descendants,
should we not?
“From eighteen to forty years, in fact, counting
in every chance cursory acquaintanceship, we may well
say that we have been intimate with two or three hundred
women.
