Antoine de Saint-Exupery — Wind, Sand and Stars

Ah, I owe you a page, Mademoisellle! When I came home from my first journeyings I found you needle in hand, up to the knees in your white surplices, each year a little more wrinkled, a little more round-shouldered, still preparing for our slumbers those sheets without creases, for our dinners those cloths without seams, those feasts of crystal and of snow. I would go up to see you in your sewing-room, would sit down beside you and tell you of the dangers I had run in order that I might thrill you, open your eyes to the world, corrupt you. You would say that I hadn’t changed a whit. Already as a child I had torn my shirts—“How terrible!”—and skinned my knees, coming home as day fell to be bandaged. No, Mademoiselle, no! I have not come back from the other end of the park but from the other end of the world! I have brought back with me the acrid smell of solitude, the tumult of sand-storms, the blazing moonlight of the tropics! “Of course!” you would say. “Boys will run about, break their bones and think themselves great fellows.” No, Mademoiselle, no! I have seen a good deal more than the shadows in our park. If you knew how insignificant these shadows are, how little they mean beside the sands, the granite, the virgin forests, the vast swamplands of the earth! Do you realize that there are lands on the globe where, when men meet you, they bring up their rifles to their cheeks? Do you know that there are deserts on earth where men lie down on freezing night to sleep without roof or bed or snowy sheet? “What a wild lad!” you would say. I could no more shake her faith than I could have shaken the faith of a candle-woman in a church. I pitied her humble destiny, which had made her blind and deaf. But that night in the Sahara, naked between the stars and the sand, I did her justice.