III
An intimate friend once said to me, as he watched his little son playing: “You see; he’s no longer the baby you knew last year. He’s another child. I have been cheated of the one I had last year. I shall never have him again. I have lost a child.”
O dear, big heart, how beautiful and how unjust those words are! How human! How they overflow with ingratitude and with adoration!
You know quite well that every object that appears on the horizon of our souls has, for us, two existences. One is sudden, sharp, almost always penetrated with an intense and, so to say, corrosive flavor: that is the existence of the present. Men agree in recognizing that its duration is hardly measurable. But the other existence is perennial, as ample as the measure of our life and our thoughts; in this sense it is almost infinite.
Thus each moment of the present survives in memory for years, and doubtless for centuries, since posterity can gather up and prolong the best of our acts and our works.
It is true, my friend, that each moment dispossesses us, even of the object we never withdraw our arms from. The miser, infatuated with his material riches, may well suffer agony of mind over them, but we, we? Do we not know that each moment restores to us, transfigured, all the treasures it has snatched away from us? It robs us of the frailer blessings, it offers us imperishable blessings, less mortal than ourselves.
You have conquered one whole happy day. Contemplate without regret the sleep that marks its end, for you will continue to live this day during all the rest of jour life. And if this day was truly beautiful, do you not know that others after you will continue to live it, down, ever farther down, the succession of the years?
Let your son grow, without too much anxiety, like a beautiful tree: the child he was once, the child he was but now, the child he is at present, you will not lose them, O insatiable heart! They will escort you toward old age, like a beloved multitude that increases every day and cannot die.
Owing to the war, I have seen my own child only seven times, and each time I have hardly recognized him. Seven times I have believed him lost. I know now that I have seven lovely images in my soul, seven children to adorn and hearten my solitude.