Little Poems in Prose

XXIV PLANS HE used to say to himself as he walked in a vast and lonely park, “How beautiful she would be in a Court dress, complicated and luxurious in the lovely evening air, coming down the marble steps of a palace opposite the broad lawns and the fountains; for she has naturally the air of a princess.” Passing by a little later in a city street, he stopped in front of a print-seller’s shop, and finding a print representing a tropical land- scape, he said to himself, “Ni, it is not in a pal- ace that I should like to possess her dear exis- tence; we should not be at home there; be- sides, those walls are so cumbered with gold that there would be no place to hang her pic- ture. In those solemn galleries there would be no corner for intimacy; decidedly it is there, in that landscape, that one ought to dwell, to dream one’s life-dream with due worship.” And, analysing the details of the engraving, he continued in himself, “At the edge of the sea a beautiful pleasure-house of wood, sur-