XI
O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your landscapes, your problems, your combats and that heavy burden of jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will see us all together drinking of your waters.
But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred, greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone.
May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls, exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search for the lost grace.