Among the middle classes and the common 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 remains
a certain vagueness of feature, something childlike
which prevails to the very end of their lives.
They are so laughing, and so merry, all these little
Nipponese dolls! Rather a forced mirth, it is
true, studied, and at times with a false ring; nevertheless
one is attracted by it.
Chrysantheme is an exception, for she is melancholy.
What thoughts are running through that little brain?
My knowledge of her language is still too limited
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 should really
prefer that she should have one of those insignificant
little thoughtless faces like all the others.
THE NECESSARY VEIL
When night comes on, we light two hanging lamps of
religious symbolism, which burn till daylight, before
our gilded idol.
We sleep on the floor, on a thin cotton mattress,
which is unfolded and laid out over our white matting.
Chrysantheme’s pillow is a little wooden block,
cut so as to fit exactly the nape of her 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 sombre greenish-blue,
dark as the shades of night, stretched out on an orange-colored
ribbon. (These are the traditional colors, and all
respectable families of Nagasaki possess a similar
net.) It envelops us like a tent; the mosquitoes and
the night-moths whirl 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 lacking, and everything is 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 struggled vainly against my own inability
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 before me—the
matrimonial agent, to whom I am indebted for my happiness.
MY PLAYTHING
