when, having paid her wages, he departs for his ship. Returning unexpectedly, he finds her busy with a little hammer testing the lapful of coins he has left.
"An impious hymen," says Anatole France, and suggests that the sadness of Loti is due to his perpetual quest of little thrills and to the impassable racial and cultural abyss which yawns between the Parisian and the Japanese. Yes, Père Anatole, perhaps. A more or less flattering unction to the Occidental soul. But is this spectacle quite so inhuman after all? What about the unfathomable abyss between any two wedded mortals, surveying each other across the coffee cups—between Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who have washed their faces and brushed their hair in considerable intimacy these many years? Have Mr. and Mrs. Jones many more words than Loti and Mme. Chrysanthème, which really pass from heart to heart and make their spirits one? Suppose Jones departs for his ship—dies—to-morrow, as he may, easily enough. Won't there be three good days of mixed grief and mourning show—till Jones is safely out of sight? And then, even in this Western world, won't they pretty calmly go over the will, with the relict, and open the lockbox and tap the securities with their "little hammer" to see if they are sound, and say cheerfully enough, if all is as it should be: "Well, Jones didn't do badly by her." And life will go on much as before, and all the more tolerably because Jones and Mrs. Jones were never so close together as they pretended to be. Loti is sad because he knows that human life is like that, and he can't forget it, even in Nagasaki.
He can't forget it, but by intensifying and varying his sensations he can make almost a rapture out of his consciousness of it. In "The Iceland Fisherman" and
