Repository path: workshop/translations/voyage-jardin/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-voyage-jardin-R06-v1 — Karr, «Voyage autour de mon jardin», Lettre I (first pass)

Source. Alphonse Karr, Voyage autour de mon jardin (Paris: Curmer, 1851), Lettre I; copy-text Project Gutenberg #38385, span from «Chemin faisant, je commençai à penser» to «…captivés par ce magnifique spectacle.» — 431 French words. SHA-256 of the extracted span in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json.

Regime. R06 — lead single pass, source only. The frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a; the revision is T-voyage-jardin-R04-v1. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none, measured on the R04 revision. An English rendering exists (A Tour Round My Garden, tr. J. G. Wood, 1855) and was not read before this draft and its log were frozen. The measured figure is in the experiment's materials/contamination.json and the declaration on the R04 artifact is the measured one.

On the way home I began to think rather ill of you. I had found your manner almost disdainful; you seemed flattered by the stir your departure was causing, and still more by your equipage; you seemed to be leaving your street, your house and your old friend behind you the way one leaves things that are worn out and of no further use.

Little by little I let feelings that came close to hatred take root in my heart on your account; but happily I smothered them soon enough, when I discovered that they were nothing else in the world but envy.

Every happiness stirs up a little hatred. We ask nothing better than to persuade ourselves that those who enjoy it have done us some grave wrong, which allows us to give a slightly nobler name to that low and shameful feeling whose true name is envy, and to call it just resentment, legitimate pride, wounded dignity.

Once I had recognised the monster I got the better of it quickly enough, and I had you acquitted on the spot. Acquitting myself before my own tribunal was not so easy.

Certainly the devil would have little hold on us if he offered us the baits he holds out under their true names.

Home again, I still envied your happiness; but I no longer envied it in you, and you had become for me an excellent and dependable friend again as soon as I had reasonably given up looking in you for those chimerical proportions which we impose upon some poor Pylades, never troubling to examine whether we are ourselves to another what we require another to be to us: in a word, everybody wants to have a friend, and hardly anybody troubles to be one.

Only, since you had escaped my ill humour, I turned on fate instead, and complained bitterly of the bad fortune that would not let me set off as you had, to go and see other countries, other men, other climates; and I noticed my poverty, to which until then I had paid hardly any attention.

And what! I said to myself, am I then always to be like that goat I see tethered to a stake in the middle of a field? She has already cropped all the grass inside the circle her rope allows her, and must begin again on lucerne already shortened to the likeness of velvet.

As I was saying this I was leaning on the rail of a low window that gives on my garden, and looking mechanically in front of me. The sun was setting; my eyes first, and then my soul, were soon held fast by that magnificent spectacle.