The Heavens lay open and the Moon was full.

 

The heavens lay open and the Moon was full, and the clock had just struck nine. With friends I'd spent the evening at Clamard, near Paris, where Monsieur de Guigy, seigneur of that place, generously regaled us, and now together we passed our journey in quiet contemplation of that saffron ball in the sky. 

We drowned our eyes in the great star before us, which looked to us our attic window opening into heaven, to another perhaps the shining dish in which Diana dressed Apollo's curls, to yet another as if the Sun, having taken off and put away its rays for the day, peered down at us through a window, to see what we are up to when it is not around. 

But I - say I - I who want to stir my fantasies into your own, I believe, and not frivolously as you believe, to tickle time along, I believe the Moon is a world like ours, and our world is a moon to theirs. 

Some of my company loosed great gales of laughter.

Quite so, but perhaps they look at us and make fun of the one who says ours here is a world like theirs. 

I assured them this was the opinion of many learned heads, but alas, this only moved them to further fits. 

However, this brave notion appealed to me, and its contradiction only strengthened my conviction. For the rest of the journey, then, I plunged deep down into it, so deep my belly swelled with a thousand ideas regarding the Moon to which I could not yet give birth. 

So earnestly did I entertain this burlesque that I almost accepted it myself, so persuasive was my reasoning. But, I don't know, call it miracle or happenstance, Providence or Fortune, vision, fiction, chimera or delusion, what you will; fact is, the opportunity presented itself for me to embark upon this Discourse you now read.