"Go on, little one; I am not asleep. I can listen better so. I hear your voice better. And your voice is charming."
Sometimes it was he who interrupted me. After concentrating his thoughts, he slowly recited, with a prolongation of the rhythms, the lines that had excited in him the greatest enthusiasm, and he tried—oh! how I loved him for that!—to make me understand them, to make me feel their beauty. One day he said to me,—and I have kept these words as a relic:
"The sublimity of poetry, you see, lies in the fact that it does not take an educated person to understand it and to love it. On the contrary. The educated do not understand it, and generally they despise it, because they have too much pride. To love poetry it is enough to have a soul,—a little soul, naked, like a flower. Poets speak to the souls of the simple, of the sad, of the sick. And that is why they are eternal. Do you know that, when one has sensibility, one is always something of a poet? And you yourself, little Célestine, have often said to me things that are as beautiful as poetry."
"Oh! Monsieur Georges, you are making fun of me."
"Not in the least. And you are unaware that you have said these beautiful things. And that is the delightful part of it."
For me those were unique hours; whatever destiny may bring me, they will sing in my heart as long as I may live. I felt that indescribably sweet sensation of becoming a new being, of witnessing, so to speak, from minute to minute, the revelation of something unknown in me, and which yet was I. And to-day, in spite of worse falls, thoroughly reconquered as I am by all that is bad and embittered in me, if I have kept this passionate fondness for reading, and sometimes that impulse toward things superior to my social environment and to myself; if, trying to regain confidence in the spontaneity of my nature, I have dared—I who am so ignorant—to write this diary,—it is to M. Georges that I owe it.
Oh! yes, I was happy,—happy especially at seeing the pretty patient gradually reborn, his flesh swelling out and his face blooming again, through the flow of a new sap; happy at the joy, and the hopes, and the certainties, that the rapidity of this resurrection gave to the entire house, of which I was now the queen and the fairy. They attributed to me, they attributed to the intelligence of my care, to the vigilance of my devotion, and, more still perhaps, to my constant gaiety, to my youth so full of charm, to my surprising influence over Georges, this incomparable miracle. And the poor grandmother thanked me, overwhelmed me with gratitude and blessings, and also with presents, like a nurse to whom has been confided a baby almost dead, and who, with her pure and healthy milk, reconstructs his organs, brings back his smile, and restores him to life.
Sometimes, forgetful of her station, she took my hands, caressed them, kissed them, and, with tears of joy, said to me:
"I knew very well ... I ... when I saw you ... I knew very well!"
And already projects were being formed,—journeys to the land of sunshine, fields full of roses!