Do you know that those touching traditions of the Good Shepherd and the
Divine Mother, so happily employed in our Christian religions, are the
creations of the oldest symbolism? The Greeks derived them from their
own spiritual ancestors; with them the good shepherd was called Hermes,
the god of the migration of souls. In the same way, the type of our
Madonna is the great Demeter, the mother who bears an infant in her
arms.

One feels that all religions, as they succeeded each other, transmitted
the same body of symbols, renewed each time by humanity's
perpetually-young spirit of poetry.


_December 23_ (in the dark).

I had begun this letter yesterday, when I was forced to leave off. It
was then splendid weather, which has lasted fairly well. But we are now
back again in our first lines. This time we are occupying the village
itself, our pretty Corot village of two months ago. But our outpost is
situated in a house where we are obliged to show no sign of life, so as
to conceal our presence from the enemy. And so here we are at nine
o'clock in the morning, in a darkness that would make it seem to be late
on Christmas eve.

Your dear letter lately received has given me great joy. It is true that
Grace and Inspiration are two names for the same thing.

If you are going to see the pictures of the great poet Gustave Moreau,
you will see a panel called _La vie de l'humanité_ (I believe). It
consists of nine sections in three divisions, called _l'Age d'or, l'Age