SWEET NOTE
Dear Yvette,
19-7 25

Here we are at vacation time. What joy can be seen in the eyes of those leaving? What commotion in the train stations! It's a whole rebirth of life in bodies, a whole scattering of beings towards the countryside or the coast. The cities are temporarily emptying.
Where will you spend your vacation, dear Yvette? You ask me: should I go to the seaside or the mountains? You're asking me a question that is given to students taking the Certificate of Studies or the Brevet. To tell the truth, it's very complex. Everyone can answer it according to their own tastes. They don't reason with themselves... A thing, a person, an object pleases us or displeases us without us really knowing why... It's sometimes useful to try to understand the reasons for our choice.
The sea and the mountains. Two irreconcilable entities! Going to both would, in my opinion, be the best way to judge their pros and cons. Only the rich can afford this luxury. But we can afford it in turn.
The sea has been sung by poets, described in novels, transposed onto canvas; the mountain has also had its servants. Both have been right to make us love these two faces of the earth.
The sea makes us small in the face of its immensity. It's a billowing sky at our feet. The beach is a desert for children who imagine themselves in the Sahara. The parasol incites us to a certain languor, the relentless rays of the sun crush and burn us, the delicious bath is merely a dessert given to the body as it regains its original form. All beaches resemble each other, repeat themselves, or copy each other uniformly. Sometimes their scenery changes, and they reflect their originality... The high-society life that fills them with cries and noises is merely an extension of the great cities... Will these not one day be the signs of their suicide? Yes, I love the sea, when it is not sullied by a cosmopolitan world that swells with pride in front of it, parades on the piers, gyrates in the evenings in the casinos, and seems to believe it belongs to them because they dip their ruined limbs and their withered consciences in it. The sea teaches them nothing, for vanity blinds them. Let us love it, if you wish, in the manner of Pierre Loti, Charles Le Goffic, Claude Farrère. With such initiators, we will be in good company.

The mountain is not loved as it deserves. Its aspects are diverse and numerous. At every moment the landscape changes, widens or shrinks. The light is magical when it bathes a mountain panorama, or plays beneath the undergrowth. What freshness in the fir trees, along the streams, in the vicinity of the waterfalls! What poetry emanates from an old abandoned mill, from a house adorned with ivy, from a rocky path that leads to the village clinging to the rocks of the hill? And this old manor surrounded by brambles that marks the entrance to the valley, does it not also have a particular charm? The herds that graze at the edge of a wood, the fields that make a noise of frills when the wind stirs their ears of corn, the thousand sounds of the countryside, are they not worth the lapping of the waves? And aren't the silences of the evenings, when all is silent in nature, restful for our nerves, overexcited by the tumult of cities, which wear us down more than we think? It's easy to go on leisurely excursions. The trek to the summits is an incomparable spiritual ascent. We thus learn to better appreciate this life of the simple, which they don't appreciate as we do, for we can compare the hell of the cities to the immense paradise of true nature, so decried by those who were born there and fled towards false mirages. Choose your vacation spot wisely. Become a child again there. Perhaps that's the secret of happiness.

See you soon, dear Yvette. I give you the kiss of the peaks faded to sea blue.

Ali Héritier.