“If things can so speak to us,” she would say, “I am convinced that flowers look at us. They all have faces which express something, and most of them have perfumes which penetrate to our very souls. We can the more easily understand what is called the spirit within us, by smelling the perfume of a flower. I will explain that to you more fully a few years hence.”
Ah! the fairy-like, well-remembered hours I spent every morning with my aunt!
I was talking to her one day about the wind and she said: “I do not like it.”
“Why?”
“Because the voice of the wind is made up of borrowed sounds which it gathers on its way. Wind annoys me, makes me sad or puts me to sleep just like those authors who borrow ideas from others.”
I feel that I am badly expressing all that my aunt Sophie told me, that I speak less clearly and less originally than she. I was only eight years old and yet I understood all she said. She must have made herself much clearer than I can. I lived with aunt Sophie a life of dreams and a life of action at the same time. Every action accomplished by me when near her, seemed to have a fuller significance. If I watered a plant I seemed to be caring for it, and delivering it from the horrible pains of thirst; if I cut clover with a sickle, I seemed to be receiving a present from the earth, and felt that I must be grateful; if I plucked a ripe pear, I was easing the overloaded tree, which seemed to lean and offer it to me, and still did not let it drop. If I killed any harmful insect, I fancied I was doing, in person, the work of Hercules, and could hear around me a kind and approving murmur.
When Roussot and I sang our duet we were really having a musical discourse.
I could not stay indoors. The rain-drops, big and little, called me out.
Since my illness, a very strange thing had taken place in my young brain. I fancied that I had just been born or had been born over again. All that grandmother, who hated Nature, and thought it cruel and false, had taught me—which teaching had been already greatly counteracted by my father’s influence—had so entirely disappeared from my mind that I could not conceive how it had ever existed there.
All that grandmother believed in on this earth was love. “The passion of loving alone brings us near to superhuman truths,” she said. “All things that can be reasoned about, and proved, and weighed, come from what is inert and material, and ought therefore to have no place in our souls. It is a kind of knowledge that may be left, like cumbersome luggage, by the side of the road, that leads us to the Beyond.”