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FROM "A TRAVELLER'S JOURNAL" That year I travelled around Poland - there were two of us : the late W³adzio Wê¿yk and myself - we had with us dozens of books, namely accounts of chronicles and diaries. A certain country squire, a very worthy citizen, a good neighbour and a good patriot, seeing our little travelling library, shook his head and growled, "This won't buy bread !" However, one day he comes to us dressed in a yellow dressing-gown, a cap with a button on top, and carrying a pipe on a long, holed stick, and mumbles over his shoulder from the side of his mouth, "Well, give me any one of those books, I'm having a nap in the garden." So I would pick up a book within reach and hand it gingerly to the citizen, as you pass things from hand to hand under quarantine, avoiding touching the other person at all costs. And I would only see the back of a serious person in a yellew dressing-gown spattered with large peonies - this thing would leave with a book in its hand, and soon you would see the same shape on the lawn fast asleep. Then, many, many years later I met a descendant of that citizen at an exhibition in Paris. He offered me his various views regarding the arts... "I like music too! - he says to me - I like music too, and whenever I return from the fields and a man pulls off my shoes, I love to meditate and soak my feet and listen to my wife playing Chopin on the piano..." "I also used to like daubings (daubings!...) before I got married!" I couldn't grasp why he ceased to like painting after he got married I suppose it means that an embodied ideal replaced the daubings which previously the citizen found agreeable. A pity Frederick is not alive to hear about this ! ! 1867 |