ignorance. The honest man is blind; he does not see the thief. The thief

is blind; he does not see God. God is blind; the day that he created the

world He did not see the devil manage to creep into it. I myself am

blind; I speak, and do not see that you are deaf. This blind girl who

accompanies us is a mysterious priestess. Vesta has confided to her her

torch. She has in her character depths as soft as a division in the wool

of a sheep. I believe her to be a king's daughter, though I do not

assert it as a fact. A laudable distrust is the attribute of wisdom. For

my own part, I reason and I doctor, I think and I heal. Chirurgus sum.

I cure fevers, miasmas, and plagues. Almost all our melancholy and

sufferings are issues, which if carefully treated relieve us quietly

from other evils which might be worse. All the same I do not recommend

you to have an anthrax, otherwise called carbuncle. It is a stupid

malady, and serves no good end. One dies of it--that is all. I am

neither uncultivated nor rustic. I honour eloquence and poetry, and live

in an innocent union with these goddesses. I conclude by a piece of

advice. Ladies and gentlemen, on the sunny side of your dispositions,

cultivate virtue, modesty, honesty, probity, justice, and love. Each one

here below may thus have his little pot of flowers on his window-sill.

My lords and gentlemen, I have spoken. The play is about to begin."

The man who was apparently a sailor, and who had been listening outside,

entered the lower room of the inn, crossed it, paid the necessary

entrance money, reached the courtyard which was full of people, saw at

the bottom of it a caravan on wheels, wide open, and on the platform an

old man dressed in a bearskin, a young man looking like a mask, a blind

girl, and a wolf.

485

The Man Who Laughs