All at once Juliana drew back, and grew pale. Her eyes looked troubled, her mouth was contracted as if with nausea. She said:
"That odor is terrible. It makes one giddy. Are you not affected by it too, mother?"
She turned round, tottered a few steps, and left the room hastily. My mother followed her.
I watched them as they passed through the corridors, still dominated by what rested of my former sensations, lost in the dream.
II.
My confidence in the future increased from day to day. It was as if I had forgotten everything. My soul, too fatigued, no longer remembered its sufferings. At certain periods of complete abandon, all became disintegrated, diluted, dissolved, lost in the original fluidity, became unrecognizable. Then, after these strange internal decompositions, it seemed to me that a new principle of life had entered into me, that a new power had penetrated me.
A multitude of sensations, involuntary, spontaneous, unconscious, and instinctive, made up my real existence. Between the exterior and the interior there was established a play of minute actions and instantaneous minute reactions, that vibrated in endless repercussions, and each one of these incalculable repercussions became converted into an astonishing psychic phenomenon. My entire being was modified by the slightest odor of the circumambient atmosphere, by a breath, by a shadow, by a flash of light.
The great maladies of the soul, like those of the body, renew a man, and the convalescences of the mind are not less charming nor less miraculous than the physical convalescences. Before a small, flowering shrub, before a branch covered with small buds, before a vigorous shoot growing out of an old and almost dead trunk, before the most modest metamorphoses accomplished by spring, I stopped, artless, ingenuous, stupefied.
Often, in the morning, I went out with my brother. At that hour, everything was cool, graceful, unconstrained.
Federico's company purified me and strengthened me not less than the good country air. Federico was then twenty-seven years old; he had almost always lived in the country, where he led a sober and laborious existence, and the earth seemed to have communicated to him its mild sincerity. He was in possession of the rule of life. Leon Tolstoï, as he kissed his fine, serene brow, would have called him, "My son."