THE LIFE that we led in Combourg, my sister and I, heightened the enthusiasms natural to our age and character. Our principal distraction consisted of walking side by side on the Grand Mall, on a carpet of primroses in spring, on a bed of dry leaves in autumn, and in winter on a sheet of snow embroidered with the tracks of birds, squirrels, and weasels. Young as the primroses, forlorn as the dry leaves, pure as the newfallen snow, we were always in harmony with our recreations.
It was during one of these walks that Lucile, hearing me speak rapturously of solitude, said to me, “You ought to put these things down in words.” This remark revealed the Muse to me: a divine breath passed through my frame. I began stammering verses as though poetry were my native tongue. Day and night, I sang of my pleasures, which is to say of my woods and my valleys. I composed a heap of little idylls and sketches of the natural world.*
I wrote in verse a long time before I wrote in prose: M. Fontanes used to claim that I had been equipped with both instruments.
But this talent that a friend foresaw, has it ever really come to me? How many things have I waited for in vain! In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a slave is posted as sentry on the roof of the palace of Argos; his eyes scan the horizon in search of the signal fire that will announce the fleet’s return; he sings, to solace himself in the tedium, but the hours go by, the stars go down, and the torch never shines. When, after many years, the signal’s belated light appears over the waters, the slave is bent beneath the weight of time. Nothing remains to him except to reap misfortune, and the chorus tells him that “an old man is but a shadow wandering in the light of day,” ὄναρ ἡμερόφαντον λαίνει [7]
*See my Complete Works (Paris, 1837)