148 PURIFICATION. 



on my window-sliutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a 

 noisy bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before 

 the Ramadan, when the ceremonies of marriage fill the city day and 

 night with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the 

 usual promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are 

 in like manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in 

 confidence on the balconies of the minarets." 



Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness, 

 this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in 

 Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often 

 outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his 

 ancient reverence. A Cambyses slew the sacred cow ; a Roman the 

 ibis or cat which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the 

 cow ? The fecundity of the country. And the ibis ? Its salubrity. 

 Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That 

 which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes, and 

 preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges ; it is 

 respect for animal life, the mildness and the gentle heart of man. 



Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Sais to the 

 Greek Herodotus : "You shall be children ever." 



We shall always be so — we, men of the West — subtle and gi-aceful 

 reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple 

 and more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to 

 seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully con- 

 scious of all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters, 

 and spurns ; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its 

 childhood does the same ; it cannot study unless it kills ; the sole use 

 which it makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it. 

 None of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for 

 life which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries. 



Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the 

 rude monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition ; visit the treasure- 

 stores of India and Egypt ; at each step you meet with naive but not 

 the less profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death. 



