busy with all the things that were too far beneath him for him to think about. All these chimæras finished by taking shape, and led her to a strange act which cannot be explained except by the state of madness in which she decidedly had been for some time.’

What follows, in fact, will be incomprehensible if one does not keep in one’s mind certain traits of the Breton character. What is most peculiar among the peoples of Brittany is their attitude to love. Love among them is a tender, deep, affectionate sentiment, much more than a passion. It is an inner voluptuousness which wears out and kills. Nothing is more unlike the fire of the southern peoples. The paradise they dream of is fresh, green, without transports. No race can count so many deaths from love: suicide is rare: what predominates is slow consumption. The case occurs frequently among the young Breton conscripts. Incapable of finding distraction in vulgar, venal attachments, they succumb to a sort of indeterminate languor. Homesickness is only the outward manifestation: the truth is that love with them is associated in an indissoluble way with the village, the church steeple, the evening angelus-bell, the cherished countryside. The passionate southerner kills his rival, kills the object of his passion. The sentiment we are speaking of kills only him who feels it, and that is why the Breton race is a race that has no difficulty in being chaste: through its fine lively imagination it creates for itself an aerial world which suffices. The true poetry of such a love is the Spring song of the Song of Songs, an admirable poem, much more voluptuous than passionate. ‘Hiems transiit: imber abiit et recessit; vox turturis audita est in terra nostra. Surge, amica mea, et veni!’ ‘For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

My mother continued thus:

‘Everything is at bottom only a great illusion, and what proves it, is that, in many cases, nothing is easier than to dupe nature by mimicry which it cannot distinguish from reality. I shall never forget how the daughter of Marzin, the miller of the Grande Rue, insane too through suppression of the maternal feeling, took a faggot, swaddled it in rags, put a kind of baby’s bonnet on it, and then spent days cuddling it in her arms, this fictitious doll, rocking it to sleep, pressing it to her heart, covering it with kisses. When it was put in the evening in a cradle beside her, she rested quietly till next morning. There are instincts for which the outward appearance is sufficient, and which can be lulled by fictions. Thus the poor Kermelle girl succeeded in realizing her dreams, by doing what she dreamed of. What she dreamed of was life in common with the man she loved, and the life that she shared in spirit was naturally not the life of the priest, it was the life of the house. The poor girl was made for the marriage state. Her madness was a sort of domestic madness, a thwarted housewife’s instinct. She imagined her paradise realized, in seeing herself keeping the house of the man she loved, and since now she did not distinguish very clearly her dreams from reality, she was led to an unbelievable aberration. What of it? These poor madwomen prove by their disorders the holy laws of nature and their inevitability.

‘Her days were spent in hemming linen, and marking it. Now, in her thoughts, this linen was destined for the house she imagined, for this common nest where she would have passed her life at the feet of the man she adored. The hallucination went so far that she marked those sheets, those napkins, with the vicar’s initials: nay, often the vicar’s initials were mingled with her own. She was clever at these pretty woman’s tasks. Her needle went in and out, in and out ceaselessly and for delicious hours she sat spinning, wrapped in her heart’s dreams, believing that he and she were but one. Thus she duped her passion, and found moments of voluptuousness which satisfied her for days on end.

‘The weeks flowed by in this way, in tracing stitch by stitch the letters of the name she loved, marrying it with her own; and this pastime was for her a great consolation. Her hands were always busy for him; these linens sewed by her seemed to be her own self. They would be near him, would touch him, would serve his needs; they would be herself beside him. What joy there was in such a thought! She would be always without him, it is true; but the impossible is the impossible. She would get as near him as was permitted. For a year she savoured thus in imagination her poor little happiness. Alone, her eyes fixed on her work, she was a creature of another world, believing herself his wife in the feeble compass of probability. Hours glided by with a motion slow as her needle: her poor imagination was comforted. And then, she had