This is the way that I wrote my Panegyric, and I did more: I put in it not only what was missing of the saint herself, but also things that had nothing to do with her. You have seen the sonnet, the stockings, the garters, the seminarist Escobar and several others. Now you will see what more came out of the yellowed pages of the little book.
Dear little book, you were of no use at all, but then what use is an old pair of slippers? However, often in such slippers there is, as it were, the aroma and the warmth of two feet. Worn out and tattered, nonetheless they still remind us that someone put them on in the morning, when they got up, or took them off at night, when they went to bed again. And if this is not an apt comparison, because slippers are a part of the person, and had contact with the feet, here are other memories, like the stone in the street, the door to the house, a particular whistle, a street-seller’s refrain, like the one for coconut sweets that I told you of in Chapter XVIII. In fact, at the moment when I reproduced that cry, I was so overcome with nostalgia that I had the idea of having it written out by a friend of mine, a music teacher, and stuck on at the bottom of the chapter. If afterwards I deprived the chapter of this privilege, it was because another musician I showed it to naively confessed to me that he could find nothing in the transcription that made him feel nostalgic. So that the same thing doesn’t happen to other professionals who might read me, it’s best to save the book’s publisher the work and expense of the illustration. You’ve seen that I didn’t put anything in, nor will I. Now I believe that it is not enough for street cries, or pamphlets written in seminaries, to contain within them circumstances, people, and sensations; people must have known them and suffered them in reality: without that everything is silent and colorless.
But let’s go on to what else came out of these faded pages.