Chapter 1

This eBook was produced by David Widger

CHRYSANTHEME

By Pierre Loti

Ah! the natural perversity of inanimate things

Contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions and the cause of them

Dull hours spent in idle and diffuse conversation

Efforts to arrange matters we succeed often only in disarranging

Found nothing that answered to my indefinable expectations

Habit turns into a makeshift of attachment

I know not what lost home that I have failed to find

Irritating laugh which is peculiar to Japan

Japanese habit of expressing myself with excessive politeness

Ordinary, trivial, every-day objects

Prayers swallowed like pills by invalids at a distance

Seeking for a change which can no longer be found

Trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process

When the inattentive spirits are not listening

Which I should find amusing in any one else,--any one I loved

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