At first sight, the labours of their comrades, the quarrymen, are not very agreeable to contemplate. So many spoiled and badly quarried stones, so many fragments, so much dust and sand, have in them nothing attractive. It is but a field of ruin which is displayed before you. But what does Nature think of it? To judge by the eagerness with which the plants take possession of the sand, mingle with it, and convert it into a soil for their use, Nature is happy enough to see all this substance, which, while for thousands of years retained in the sandstone, did not enter into circulation, returning into the mobility of the Universal Life. That fortunate battle between man and the rock draws, at length, the captive element from its long enchantment. The grass seizes upon it; the tree seizes upon it; the animals seize upon it. All this sand, in which the rock never fails to end eventually, becomes permeable to the activity of a vast subterranean world.
Nothing aroused in my mind a greater number of dreams, no spectacle threw me back more directly upon myself. For I, too, through some degree of poverty or sluggishness, I have long been rebellious like this sandstone, upon which, frequently, nothing can make an impression, or which, splitting cross-wise, yields but irregular, shapeless fragments and useless refuse. It needed History, with its weighty iron hammer, to disengage me from myself, to separate me from my own obstacles, to shatter and release me.
A severe enfranchisement! What have I not lost of myself, in return for the few stones I have contributed to the great monument of the future! Sometimes, doubly stricken by the past and the present, I have felt as if I were crumbling into pieces—what say I?—into powder, into dust; and at times I have seen myself, as I see the bottom of yonder quarry, a mass of sand and rubbish.
Nevertheless, it is through these elements, through an undefinable sap hidden in the bosom of the flint, that all-powerful Nature has worked out my renovation. With a little grass and heather binding up what History and the world had crushed, she has said, smilingly: "You creature, you are Time. I am Nature, the everlasting."
Thus, then, observe the rough quarry, bristling with the débris of ages, which grows green, once more reproduces, and attires itself in a garb of such foliage as it never knew before man applied the iron to it. "A wild winter vegetation! Black firs! Melancholy birch-trees!" But with all the gloominess mingles the white hawthorn blossom.
What I have so eagerly craved, and yearned for, in my long years of silence, when I was as an arid block and a man of stone, was the fluid nature of the sap and its capacity of expansion. My tardy youth longed to dilate my lingering soul. Yesterday, I gave to the world "The Bird," an impulse of the heart towards light. To-day, the same force compels me, on the other hand, to descend below the earth, and embark along with you on the great living sea of metamorphoses. A world of mysteries and gloom, it is true; but where, nevertheless, the most penetrating light is thrown on the two cherished treasures of the soul—Immortality and Love.
