Sleep is truly a thief who ravishes our greatest treasures; a thief, too, we cannot entirely chase away, but we can run him off the ground and hinder his encroachments on our actual life. "We live but the half of our lives," said Pliny the elder; "the other half is consumed in a state similar to death,.... and still we do not count the infancy which knows nothing, or the old age of imbecility." Then have the courage to take something each day from this brother of death, who thus divides our life in two, and for himself would reserve the better part; let us give to nature what is necessary, but make no concession to indolence.
The most favorable time to commit this robbery is during the first hours of the morning. "The quality of time is different at this hour," said Madame Swetchine.
One hour of the morning is worth two at night, because the mind in its freshness is naturally more collected, its strength is not yet dispersed, and it is not exhausted by the fatigue of the day. The morning hours resemble, in the agility of the mind and the rejuvenated forces of the soul, the first hour of the courser just placed in the carriage. So the same author we love to cite advised early rising, cost what it might, "in order to reserve some hours of the morning for entire solitude." "It is not only," said one of her friends, "to consecrate to God the first hours of the day that she commenced it so early, but to have also considerable time to give to study." She said to me on that day, that the pleasure it gave her only increased with years. "I am come to this," she said, "when I approach my table to resume my labors, my heart beats with joy." [Footnote 271]
[Footnote 271: Lettres, t. ii. p. 443.]
She avowed, besides, that, deprived of these her accustomed hours, all the rest of the day seemed pillaged. If you would not be pillaged, rise in the morning; then you can do as you please, no one will come to disturb you, you will consecrate the closest and best of your strength to the most serious and truest duties of your existence; and, when the hour of pillage comes, that is, the hour when you must cut your life in little pieces, to dispense it in a thousand nothings more or less necessary, you will, at least, have secured its better and most precious part. If you rise late, your life will be a perpetual pillage, and whoever pleases will tear it in shreds from you.
Plato—if you will not consider pagan morality severe—Plato said somewhere: "It is a shame for the mistress of a household to be awakened by her servants; she should awaken them." [Footnote 272]
[Footnote 272: Les Lois, 1-7, p. 808.]
Such words may seem an exaggeration; but, if such were here the case, would not everything go better in the interior of the family? Woman, as we have said with the holy Scripture, is the sun of her household; but it should be the sun which everywhere announces the awakening of nature. It mounts first on the horizon, and soon everything rises in the universe, plants, animals, and men. The sun is never awakened by his satellites; he himself gives the signal. Let the strong woman do the same. Sicut sol oriens in altissimis Dei, sic mulieris bonae species in ornamentum domus ejus.[Footnote 273]
[Footnote 273: Eccl. xxvi. 21.]