CITY

I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you will fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last! The way these millions of people, who do not even need to know each other, manage their education, business, and old age is so identical that the course of their lives must be several times less long than that which a mad statistics calculates for the people of the continent. And from my window I see new specters rolling through the thich eternal smoke — our woodland shade, our summer night! — new Eumenides in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart since everything here resembles it, — Death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the mud in the street.