The other day, at the Exposition, tired and irritated by all the hard knocks I had got in the Rue de Paris, I turned aside, and dragged the friend who was with me away toward the one garden within the limits of the immense fair:-the oasis of the Trocadero.

It is really a cool corner. Under every plane-tree there is a little lake, and about the lake there are little shrubs, and hard by the shrubs there are little kiosks hung with Chinese lanterns, and in every kiosk there are pretty women with little bits of hands who serve you in gaily-painted little cups a kind of wine that smells of the precious wood off which it has been drawn. It is not precisely the free air of heaven which breathes through these kiosks and over these lakes and shrubs, but a kind of heavily perfumed imitation thereof, amid whose mingled odors you distinguish those of saké, sandal-wood and roses. It all seems to emanate from the figure of a gigantic bonze, the waving of whose fan would suffice to freshen the entire air of the Trocadero. It is the best place in all the show for snatching a bit of rest and refreshment.

"Ah, here's a spot to dream in!" said my friend. "Let us sit down."

He is an old pupil of the School of Oriental Languages-a graduated dragoman. He knows Arabic and Chinese, but he contents himself with knowing them, and he lives in Paris.

We settled ourselves in the shade of an elm-tree-the uttermost leaves of one of whose drooping branches waved over us like a hand-and gazed at the spectacle of a landscape dotted with kiosks, incessantly visited and quitted by an idle crowd amused by the sham foreignness of the whole arrangement.

Translated for The Living Age.
VOL. VIII.

LIVING AGE.

433

"We may cultivate them to the bitter end," murmured my friend; "but the Chinese will never understand the French. To begin, they have no conception of the meaning of one word which is forever upon our lips. Our broad expression Fraternity, represents with them an unfathomable abyss. We are the 'River of Europe' which broadens out into smooth shallow pools, while China is a bottomless well. Woe to the man who peeps over the Great Wall and thinks he will have a drink out of that well. He is done for-or he soon will be. 'Tis precisely what is happening in China at this moment."

"Do you mean this revolt of the Boxers?"

"Over there," my friend went on dreamily, "there are 450,000,000 people thoroughly imbued with their own traditional beliefs-a horde of fanatics prepared to suffer all things for the reward of eternal life. Drunk with hatred, they are snuffing out our steamboats, tearing up our railways, and, in a word, rejecting our civilization."

"And do you approve their doings?" "As a student of the languages and poetry of the East, I should answer, "The modern man sees and judges these things differently.' The whole province of Pe-Chi-Li is up in arms, crying 'Death to the foreigner!' And you will see that the contagion will spread, and that other provinces will follow suit. Meanwhile the Chinese populace everywhere applauds with enthusiasm the revolt of the secret societies-the Pure Tea League, and the League of the Golden Bell, and the League of the Red Lantern. The ranks of the Boxers are swollen at every step, by the accession of organized

multitude against which nothing can stand. But, hold," added my comrade suddenly, "There's Ly-Pé making signs to me. Let's go and 'interview' him!" We saluted a small yellow gentleman with the face of a wooden doll, wearing a long overcoat and a tall hat several sizes too large for him, who was twirling an umbrella between thin and rather tremulous fingers. He was on the terrace of one of the kiosks, and had ordered a glass of saké wine which he seemed greatly to relish.

He smiled when my friend introduced me and immediately began talking about the Annales and another periodical called the Neapolitan Ice, with the zest of a true Parisian. My companion looked amused.

"Ly-Pé," he whispered to me, "is a dealer in curios; but he can tell you a capital Chinese story while selling you a statuette!"

We spoke of the Boxers of course, and Ly-Pé said with a slight contraction of his pencilled brows: "It is a most unjust war. We are patriots as well as you and you are crowding our country."

"But for the good of China"-I rashly began. Ly-Pé became a shade yellower. It was perhaps his way of turning pale.

"You mean by that the happiness of China? And if so, do you think you have chosen the best way to secure it?" He paused a moment and then resumed with energy:

"You talk of civilization, why should you wish to destroy ours and impose a new code of morals? Are there not a good many Frenchmen, men whose only desire is to live as we Chinese have always lived, beside the graves of their ancestors, rooted in the soil, and drawing their nutriment from it?” "Have you any chance of winning in the struggle?"

tend its sphere, but it may be following a deceitful mirage which will nullify all the power of its cannon. It may stumble over a pebble; a mere act of weakness in a day of conflagration may place it in the power of the barbarian. Unfortunately Europe believes in death."

"Atheistical Europe?"

"Dangerously atheistical, I grant you, in its new political formulas."

"Ah," cried the Chinaman with a visionary look, "how admirable are the religions which altogether suppress death!"

"Listen!" whispered my friend, "he's going to tell us a story!"

"Permit me," continued M. Ly-Pé, "to relate the legend of the philosopher Tu-Phu. There are a good many TuPhus in China and I leave you to judge what may be expected of an incalculable number of men who care absolutely nothing for the thing about which you are most anxious-I mean death. You smile, but let me tell you that those who fight without hope will end one day by fighting badly; and on that day it will be all over with the Western world. Your locomotives will be useless then, your military power broken, but our descendants will still believe in the Paradise of Buddha. Happiness is not for the nations who know how to live, but for the race that do not expect to die. I drink to your very good health," added M. Ly-Pé with a French gesture.

He turned his bead-like eyes toward the garden and surveyed the little lake and the little kiosks with their gay lanterns and their airy bells, then deposited his wine-cup upon the stand beside him, clasped his hands about his umbrella and went on softly:

"The Chinese are a very religious people and they have organized secret societies for the express purpose of

most important of these organizations is that of the Fists of Patriotismwhat you call the Boxers. The philosopher Tu-Phu was a very good man and he belonged to one of the societies in question.

"He lived to be very old, and one night he believed himself to have died. He lay motionless in a ditch and the peasants from a neighboring farm had already wrapped him in a shroud.

"Then a bonze who happened to be passing called out to him: 'Have you no pluck? Don't lie there and rot, but get up!'

"Can one conquer death?'
"A sage can do anything!'

"The bonze then gathered some herbs, which he first crushed in the hollow of his hand and then laid them upon the lips of Tu-Phu.

"The philosopher had a sensation as of a lamp lighted within him. Was it the lamp of wisdom? At all events he rose to his feet.

"I make you a present of the shroud,' said the peasant, and Tu-Phu departed humming the air of The Sundered Willow-branch-the sad refrain of the parting hymn which is regularly sung by my compatriots when they take leave of their families.

"It so happens," went on M. Ly-Pé, in yet more mellifluous tones, "that I myself saw the philosopher once when I was a child. He turned up at harvest-time, wearing the shroud in which he had so nearly been buried, as a cloak. 'Take a seat,' said the farmer, whereupon Tu-Phu folded his windingsheet eight times and sat down upon it. His cloak had become a cushion.

"He stayed with us a number of days. He gave the laborers a great deal of good advice, told them all about the phases of the moon, predicted storms and told stories. When asked if he was hungry, Tu-Phu replied by plunging his hand between the folds of his shroud and pulling out a golden ap

ple which he impaled upon a little stick, and so sucked its juice. His cushion was also a cupboard.

"Sometime afterward I asked what had become of him and was told that he was seen from time to time accompanied by a troop of children to whom he was relating his adventures in the under-world, where he professed to have seen Daïkok-Ru, the god of riches. 'An ugly little dwarf,' so Tu-Phu described him, 'sitting on two bags of rice, both of which were tied up with strings of pearls, and shaking a wallet full of golden balls! Like this!"'

"Then he would fling his folded cloth among the children; for his cupboard was also a toy.

"When Tu-Phu desired to sleep he did not stand at house-doors and whine for admittance, but merely looked him out a cedar-tree, hooked his shroud to one of the lower limbs and mounted by its aid into a fork of the tree. Then he pulled up after him the shroud which had also served him for a ladder, settled himself thereon, and dreamed of the glory of Buddha.

"The philosopher was welcomed with smiles wherever he appeared. He had no need to beg. His wants were supplied by the gods, and he could fold his hands. When it rained he planted four stakes in the earth, stretched his shroud over them, and smoked the pipe of peace under the tent thus constructed.

"Was he not a philosopher?" exclaimed M. Ly-Pé. "On those days of blinding heat, when you seem to hear the earth cooking in the sun, Tu-Phu would manufacture a slender frame out of a willow-wand cut into lengths, hang the shroud over it and sit chaffing the merchants under his parasol.

"After this manner he lived exactly one hundred and one years. I should need," said M. Ly-Pé, "the memory of three men, if I were to tell you of all he did with that shroud of his. But

he had been so much revered that after his actual departure he was canonized. The bonzes decided that he had been a god undergoing a miserable incarnation among us. He became, in short, what you call in France, a symbol.

"One night when the huntsmen were out on the hills and the paw of the Great Bear pointed to the north star the philosopher heard himself called by a hollow voice,-the voice of the One who speaks but once.

"There stood the Shadow on the opposite bank of a stream. It was late autumn, the gardens were all deflowered and the wild swans wailed over the gray water, as they parted the long green rushes. Tu-Phu felt that he was very old, but he pulled himself up once more and uttered a brave defiance:

"Oh, Death,' he cried, 'silly old scare-crow that you are. I have outwitted you! I have lived my life in spite of you and I do not fear you now. Begone! I surrender only to my Creator!'

"So saying, the philosopher gathered up the four corners of his shroud, inflated his lungs, and violently expelled into the bag thus formed his mighty genius and his tranquil wisdom. It was a supreme effort.

"The bag slipped into the stream, and

Les Aunales.

once more the soul was free. When Death came up with Tu-Phu he found nothing upon the river-bank save a small heap of bones enclosed in a skin which peeled off like paper from the sticks of a fan, while far away, wrapped in the shroud which had served the philosopher as cloak, cushion, cupboard, plaything, ladder and parasol, sailed the immortal soul on its way to the Paradise of Buddha. "Now, then," said M. Ly-Pé, observing us attentively, "does it seem to you that a people who can imagine such legends as this is likely strongly to object to quitting the present life? At a time when Europe is beginning to fear death excessively, as putting a stop to its pleasures, the Oriental regards it with unaffected unconcern, because he sees God beyond it. Let us wait the event."

That was all!

I do not think I have done the story justice. It needs for a fitting framework that breezy nook in the great Exposition, our three chairs in front of the little kiosk hung with lanterns, the small hands that poured our fragrant wine and M. Ly-Pé in his overcoat and ill-fitting hat, rehearsing the history of Tu-Phu with hands clasped softly about his umbrella.

George d' Esparliés.