I really make a sad abuse of the adjective little, I am quite aware of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little, finical, affected,—all Japan is contained, both physically and morally, in these three words.
My purchases are accumulating up there, in my little wood and paper house; but how much more Japanese it really was, in its bare emptiness, such as M. Sucre and Madame Prune had conceived it. There are now many lamps of a religious shape hanging from the ceiling; many stools and many vases, as many gods and goddesses as in a pagoda.
There is even a little Shintoist altar, before which Madame Prune has not been able to restrain her feelings, and before which she has fallen down and chanted her prayers in her bleating old nanny-goat voice:
"Wash me clean from all my impurity, oh Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami, as one washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."
Alas for poor Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami to
have to wash away the impurities of Madame Prune! What a tedious and ungrateful task!!
Chrysanthème, who is a Buddhist, prays sometimes in the evening before lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish disrespect for her Buddha, directly her prayer is ended. I know that she has also a certain veneration for her Ottokés (the Spirits of her ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at her mother's, Madame Renoncule's. She asks for their blessings, for fortune and wisdom.
Who can make out her ideas about the gods, or about death? Does she possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of a sleepy mousmé?
Two very insignificant episodes have somewhat attached me to her—(bonds of this kind
seldom fail to draw closer in the end). The first occasion was as follows:—