Little Poems in Prose

XIII WIDOWS VAUVENARGUES says that in public gardens there are alleys chiefly haunted by disap- pointed ambition, unfortunate inventors, abor- tive glories, broken hearts; by all those stormy and imprisoned souls in which still groan the last sighs of a tempest, and who recoil from the insolent gaze of the joyful and the idle: these shadowy retreats are the meeting-places of life’s cripples. It is above all to these places that the poet and the philosopher love to direct their eager guesses, which find there an assured pasture. For is there is a place which they disdain to visit, as I insinuated in the last story, it is above all the gaiety of the rich. That turbu- lence of emptiness has nothing to attract them. On the contrary, they feel themselves irresistibly drawn towards all that is weak, ru- ined, saddened, orphaned. An experienced eye never deceives itself. In those set or languid features; in those eyes, either hollow or dull or shining with the dying