A rather curious coincidence exists in the two antipodes of the globe. In France, when a man retires from business or from official life, he says, “I am going to plant cabbages.” In China we say, “I am going to retire into the mountains, or into the forest.” This is another way of saying that he is going to give himself up to gardening. This coincidence is caused by the fact that the same tastes exist everywhere. When a man has had enough of the occupations of an active life, he is glad to withdraw completely from them, and to devote himself to innocent pleasure, which provides exercise for the body and rest for the mind, and charms with peace the last days of his life. What is called the world differs but little. When one is tired of its battles, it is that other world, the world of nature, that alone one yearns after.
In our history, as in our poetry, we are constantly reading of men of the widest fame who only lived in the hope of being able to retire at last. They often used to be heard saying that their gardens were running to waste for want of cultivation; and this thought is so popular a one, that even those who cling to their offices follow the example of the others, and constantly repeat that they are dying with the longing to go and cultivate their gardens. A philosopher thus characterises this contradiction between the word and the act:
“Everybody expresses the desire to retire,
But in the middle of the forest I never meet anybody.”
However this may be, it is certain that a number of people do caress this dream of a rural life, and do finally put it into execution.
“O rus quando te aspiciam,” is true in every age, and in every land; on the banks of the blue river, as well as in the severe landscapes of ancient Rome, or on the sunny landscapes of modern France.
The poet Tou-Fou himself, when his functions at Court allowed him a few moments of leisure, took great delight in donning gardener’s clothes, as is shown by the following lines:
“I met Tou-Fou at the foot of the Fan-Kou mountain, wearing a straw hat in the full heat of the sun.
‘Why are you so thin?’ I asked him.
‘Because,’ he answered, ‘I have been making too many verses of late.’”