The sun, his sovereign lord, alone told him that he had slept, by measuring the time he had been absent from his watery landscapes, his golden sands, his shells and pebbles.

Across a light as brilliant as that from heaven he saw the cities of which he read; he looked with amazement, but without envy, at courts and kings, battles, men, and buildings.

These daylight dreams made dearer to him his precious flowers, his clouds, his sun, his granite rocks.

To attach him the more to his solitary existence, an angel seemed to reveal to him the abysses of the moral world and the terrible shocks of civilization.

He felt that his soul, if torn by the throng of men, would perish like a pearl dropped from the crown of a princess into mud..