Your chemistry believed that it reached the limits of analysis, in discovering the molecules that it counts and weighs. But it is evident that a ponderable point can be cut into two points equally ponderable, and so on to infinity, and so on without limit of space or of time. There would be, then, two infinites: one above us, since every number can be increased; the other below us, since every number can be diminished. However, since space must be considered as an absolute void, as a perfect nothingness, as nothing, it is possible that each of these two infinites would abut sharply on this void, on this nothing. The world is perhaps limited. This tissue is, perhaps, a sphere isolated in the midst of the nothingness. As one does not well see how something can come out of the nothingness, or how something can become nothingness, we shall conclude that the eternity of matter coincides with the eternity of this nothingness. In this way we shall have being and not-being. But, as not-being is perfectly inconceivable though necessary to the existence of being, we shall leave it aside; what else should we do with it?
I am aware that one of your learned men has lately been able to speak with a certain logic of the final annulment of matter; I do not think that this idea has a really perceptible meaning, either for men or for gods. What is, is. Disintegration, moreover, does not signify destruction, but change. The face of things has changed and will change again, but the very essence of things is as eternal as chance. This universe is only one of the innumerable tricks of chance, one of the fortuitous moments in the eternal movement ... You find this tedious?
I
What is more interesting, next to our personal life, than the personal life of the world?
HE
You will die, and the world as you see it will die also. The movement that created it by accident will destroy it by its own continuity. The vulgar eternity that you conceive is only a moment. Have you seen a top spinning? There is a moment, about the middle of its gyration, when the circles described by one of the points on its circumference are all described with a sensibly equal speed. The solar system, by its precision, should make us admit that the top of which we form some of the atoms is pretty nearly half way through its spin. Motion is not perpetual, as you know; so the gyration will go on with necessarily slackening speed, until the top lies down on its side and dies.
I
Oh! our dreams of eternity!
HE
Do I touch them? A man dies, a man is born. A world dies, a world is born.
I
Renewal is not eternity.
HE
It is not of eternity you dream, but of immobility. The eternity you have conceived is only a stoppage of movement. What should be conceived is the perpetuity of movement. Men, gods, and worlds; eternal movement walks us for a moment among the infinities of chance.
I
And so all human effort, our philosophies, our sciences, the dolorous and superb edifice of our civilisations....
HE
Destiny is more beautiful than all civilisations.
I
But, if they must perish, let their memory at least remain in the intelligence of the gods!
HE
Can the gods survive the world that gave them birth? We are your brothers in mortality. Epicurus knew it. He never considered the gods as other than provisional immortals. Nor had he the singular idea of a unique god, infinite, eternal, &c. That belief had already been imported from Asia into Greece, but the Greeks, not understanding it, presented their whole pantheon in a body with an ironic immortality. Plato and Aristotle took it up, and tried to make it reasonable, but only succeeded in showing more clearly its philosophical inanity. I did not let Epicurus, whom I loved, lose his way in this metaphysic. God is a dream, charming or cruel, useful or dangerous according to the heads in which it reigns, but no more than a dream. Need I explain to you the impossibility of God? God for men is a matter not of reasoning but of sentiment. Your better philosophers have understood him so well that after denying him in their intellects they have hurried to affirm him in their hearts. That is what I should do, perhaps, if we had to remain on the level of humanity; but I am come to raise you above men,—for an instant, before letting you fall back again.
I
Master, have I displeased you?
HE
Almost all those whom I have raised above the earth have fallen again. The happiest died, some moments before their perjury; the others denied me. But listen. Have you ever reflected on the incontestable mathematical truths? In any case, you know that one is one, and that nothing in the world can make one two, or two one. In the human brain, every impression, every sensation, every image, every idea, must find for lodging a separate habitation. Who then has imagined a central cell to replace the soul? A useless imagination, since this cell could only be a reduction of the brain, as the brain is a reduction of the world. A unique centre of knowledge is an absurd conception; this unique centre is necessarily composed of as many receptive as there are knowable elements. In the same way, God cannot be conceived as a simple being. If he existed, he could exist only in complexity; he would be much like a man, he would be much like me, who am a superman. Multiply yourself to infinity and you have the only really conceivable Almighty. The religions and modest philosophies that have imagined God in the form of a perfect man have at least remained within the limits of a reasonable analogy. I, the one of the gods whom men adore, I tell it you in all divine humility: I am a man and God is a man. You will never transcend this respectable conception without going into the absurd. What is the God of your metaphysicians? An abstraction whose reality is no more possible than that of heat, good, penetrability, truth, beauty, or weight.
The religion of the Greeks was charming, above all in later times; your own has now and then given me some gratification. The Ancients knew the religion of beauty and pleasure, you know that of grace and tenderness. I scorn your philosophies, which are only adroit intellectual structures; I have never been able to scorn your legends and your superstitions, the traditional obeisance that your mind makes to your sensibility. But this is the field reserved for the exercises of the populace, children and timorous women. There are no noble human creatures but those who are in love with themselves and study to extract from their natures all the vain happiness contained in them. Vain but real, and only reality. To know that one has but one life, and that it is limited! There is one hour and only one for gathering the grapes from the vine; in the morning the grape is sour; in the evening it is too sweet. Lose your days neither in weeping for the past nor in weeping for the future. Live your hours, live your minutes. Joys are flowers that the rain will tarnish, or that will throw their petals to the wind.
I
Epicurus! Epicurus!
HE
Yes, I wish you to be a new Epicurus, and to teach the men of to-day what my friend taught long ago to the Athenians. Apostles have spoken in my name who have succeeded in spreading over the earth a doctrine of despair. They taught the scorn of all that is human, of all that is genial, of all that is luminous. Unfitted for natural pleasures, they sought pleasure in their own misery and in the misery in which they plunged their brothers. They called the earth a valley of tears, but the tears were those whose abundant flow was caused by their own malignity. Baleful to themselves, they were baleful to the men who became the slaves of their sombre dreams. After promising their faithful an eternity of chimerical joys in return for the true and simple joys they stole from them, they took even hope from the heart of man, they imagined hell. Sons of the ancient priests of Baal, they set up in my name the cruel idol of their fathers, and made of me the hideous and prescient creator of those whose destiny was damnation. These monsters, however, did not discourage me, and I sustained by my inspiration every effort of natural wisdom that I saw among all these horrors.
Alas! They hold you yet, and those who combat them, different priests, are sometimes priests more baleful still. Your morality is to-day the lowest and the saddest that has ever reigned. The external hell, in which you now scarcely believe, has entered into your hearts, where it devours all your joys.
I
Yes, we are sad. In us, the fear of sin has survived the belief in sin. We dare not enjoy anything. We scorn the man who sits down in the sunlight to drink the first rays of the Spring, but while we scorn him we envy him his baseness, for we call all unproductive leisure base. When we can no longer work, we go and wratch those who are working.
HE
Your social state is an exhibition of madness. The Roman slaves had a life less hard than that of many of your work-people. After the Semitic fashion, you make even the women work! Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure. You give to work all the hours of your days, some to get bread, others to achieve a pleasure that fatigue prevents them from enjoying, and others again, the maddest of all, to increase their wealth. You have reached that degree of imbecility in which labour is looked upon as not only honourable but sacred, when, actually, it is but a sad necessity. You have lifted this necessity to the rank of the virtues, when it is, without doubt, no more than the vice of a perverted being for whom life, short as it is, is only a lengthy tedium.
I
And of this work, which at least allows us to breathe and to eat, there is not enough for all. Thousands of beings in the most civilised towns die every day of hunger, and with a slow death. They are in agony for ten, for twenty years ...
HE
Increase and multiply. That is the work of my father. He was seized with a sort of jealous and mischievous love for the Jews, a sufficiently restless little people, and showed himself curious to encourage their natural pride so far as to make it immoderate. The result was comic and sad. These ignorant Bedouins believed themselves destined to dominate the world, and then disappeared as a nation at the very moment when this domination was accomplished. A singular fate for the Jews, to have given mankind a religion in which they do not believe themselves!
Alas! At the request of my ageing father, who began to find these prolific barbarians tedious, after having tried to enlighten Jesus, who had too many disciples, I interested myself in Saint Paul. I came to him as I have come to you; he was dazzled, and believed that the vision had given him a divine mission. I followed him in his journeys. His energy amused me; but at Athens, I ranged myself with his opponents, whose laughter I excited. Later on, I let him die without consolations; his pride sufficed him.
I thought this man less mad than the other thaumaturgists who, like him, amused the crowds, but the idea of God went to his head, and he began to believe in me, supposing me omnipotent. It was then that I ceased to visit him, for I do not care to make myself the facile accomplice of religious divagations. Left to himself, he went on hearing me; my voice sounded like a buzzing in his deaf ears. His faith grew measureless, and he accepted martyrdom. How different from the charming Epicurus, for whom our conversations were never more than a lofty diversion! But this Paul, although hallucinated, was not incapable of a certain imposture, and it was assuredly to magnify himself in the eyes of fools that he pretended to have been ravished to heaven. It is true that he believed in my resurrection. What tales! One would say that men only give words a precise meaning in order to have the pleasure of using them in an opposite sense. Your brain plays very singular tricks. The dead are dead. The dead are not dead. The dead are living. The dead alone are alive. What jugglers you are!
I ceased to do anything but amuse myself with the developments of the new religion. It produced very charming feminine souls. What a priceless creature was Saint Cecilia, what an ingenuous lover. Perhaps no other woman has known nights so delicious as those that Cecilia passed with the angel who came to visit her....
I
Valerian found Cecilia praying in her bed with an angel.
HE
Poor Valerian! He never suspected the purity of his betrothed. He loved her too well to be disturbed even by the evidence. And so he well deserved the eternal crown that the Church decreed him. If women were better cognisant of the story of that excellent young man, with what favour would they not decorate his memory and his image! Cecilia never ceased to love him. An enchantment enveloped these simple hearts. I completed their happiness by letting them die in ecstasy with the certainty of finding beyond death their interrupted kisses, and of finding them eternal.
I learnt, my friend, to understand the peculiar beauty that the new religion concealed within itself; it held more grace than the purest paganism, and I know not what of simplicity and tenderness that I had not met before. Stoic insensibility became ridiculous; suffering was the fashion; the crowns of roses were changed to crowns of thorns. There were long centuries of stupor, and when the human soul awoke again and wished to smile, its smile was half of melancholy. Perhaps men will never recover from the wound that Christianity has given them. Sometimes it has seemed to heal over; at the slightest shock, at the slightest fever, it opens again and bleeds. Happy are those who suffer! That insensate saying still haunts your enfeebled hearts, and you fear joy, from vanity. You accepted the anathema hurled at the happiness of living by a few despairing Jews, and when you have laughed you ask pardon from your brothers, because it is written: "Happy are those who suffer."
Man, who is always making a pretence of revolt, is the most obedient of domesticated animals. He has accepted the most infamous prescriptions of all the moralities in turn, and among you it has always been a title to honour to kneel before a decalogue and receive blows from a rope on the back. The great hypocrites have always been your chosen masters, and one still hears you neigh at the idea of sacrifice. Your sensibility has flowered ill; your intelligence is inadequate. It has always shown itself the dupe of the directors of conscience who have succeeded each other on your shoulders. The preachers of virtue rarely practise it. You have always had to deal with thirsty throats whose only care has been to make you believe that the fountain has been poisoned.
The moralist is the eternal old man who makes a terrible picture of love to the young girl of whom he is amorous. Advice that fetters the development of energy is always hypocritical, that is to say interested, advice. There is also the naïve imitation of hypocrisy; there are the fools, the vain, the subaltern rogues: but these are the masters whom it is necessary to unmask.
I
What! Have there never been sincere great minds, true friends of mankind?
HE
What I have just said to you must not be taken tragically. The greatest hypocrites are never perfect hypocrites. There is in them always one part of sincerity. The exercise of sincerity is the most natural thing in man. It needs a strong will to create a fictitious character for oneself; it also needs much talent, perhaps even genius. The hypocrite, in showing himself under a fictitious aspect, diminishes his pleasure in living; he will recover it in its entirety only when he has moulded to his pattern a great number of disciples; hence the proselytism of all the great creators of social lies. But hypocrisy ceases when the new environment has been created, itself the creator of new characters. The early Protestants feigned a certain rigidity of manners in order to depreciate the Papists. This hypocrisy became traditional, then hereditary, and it is with veritable good faith that the Calvinists banish from life all that might make its beauty and its sweetness. The Catholics, for strategical purposes, have set, in their sermons at least, a still higher value on the scorn of pleasure, and it is in all naïveté and good faith, like the Calvinists, that they prescribe several virtues whose practice would fling humanity back beyond the state of savagery. The philosophers, moreover, do not to-day hold views different from these, and they would be much astonished, from what they say, to see civilisation, with its delicious complications, fall into ruin, and make the earth like the fields where once was Troy, and the deserts where rises still the phantom of Timgad.
The moral theories of humanity and the form that they give to its daily life must be separately considered.
I have spoken to you of the great hypocrites. There have also been men of great simplicity. Neither have had on the general march of events the influence you might suppose. The world of ideas and of words is one world, and the world of facts and of action is another. They doubtless react on each other, but so slightly, so gently, and with so much delay, that their reciprocal influences are very hard to establish. Hardly before the last fifty or sixty years have the social ideas of Christianity seemed occasionally to take an active form, and then with what timidity! Perhaps Christianity will one day be realised in practice, but it will then have long disappeared as religion, philosophy, or system of ethics. And a new discord between thought and life will be apparent.
Even this much post-dated realisation of the great social doctrines is, perhaps, only an allusion. The field of thought and the parallel field of action are finite; and so the same thoughts must return after a turn of the wheel, and the same acts. Their coincidence, near or distant, is perhaps fortuitous. It is in vain that you think and speak; action enrolls itself upon another plane, and the two planes are perhaps eternally incapable of intersection.
At most it is admissible that the vague spectacle of things inspires in man a chirruping like that which takes the birds at sunrise. But would you say that it was this chirruping that made the sun rise? Your reasonings on the power of ideas, which would make them the creators of action, resemble that supposition. The ideas of man can never be other than ideas after the fact. The future? Do you even know what sort of weather we shall have to-morrow? The future that you pretend to forsee is only a past arranged by your imagination and your sensibility. You believe that what you wish to happen will happen. Children!
The exercise of thought is a game, but this game must be free and harmonious. The more useless you conceive it, the more beautiful you should wish it to be. Beauty; that is, perhaps, its only possible merit. In any case you must not permit in it those little creeping ideas that haunt corrupted brains, as wood-lice haunt rotten wood.
I
Our thoughts, then, are freer than our actions?
HE
One can more easily retain in them the illusion of liberty. We are all of us, men and gods, in the power of destiny, and nothing happens that is not the logical and necessary consequence of previous movements of eternal matter. We are vessels fitfully carried by winds and currents towards an unknown end; but it is one thing to descend the unconquerable stream steering between the rocks, and another to spin rudderless and derelict. Thought is a rudder that must never be loosed nor entrusted to unworthy hands.
But these ideas are very general, and can scarcely, I think, bring you much consolation. I am like the apocalyptic preachers who replace reasoning by personifications of abstract things. I have not come to you to offer you models of eloquence or stimulating enigmas. If I make yet one more effort in favour of men, I wish it to be unambiguous and clear. But, alas! there are questions where the very gods lose themselves like children in a forest. The reason of things escapes us as it escapes yourselves. We too are dust of infinity, a little more brilliant, that is all.
Our assemblies, however, consider some problems as solved. They trouble you still. We have enslaved them, and our intelligence is their master. I will put their solutions in your hands, and then we will go for a walk in this springtime that perhaps you will never see again....
I
Never? Never?
HE
So beautiful, so tender, so limpid, so perfumed. I have no power over your human destiny and do not know it. Before descending....
I
And how, master, did you descend among us?
HE
What a little girl's question! I come on earth as easily and as naturally as you go to America. How? The knowledge would be very useless to you, and could only tempt you to puerile and dangerous experiments. But there is another question that you dare not ask me, and to which I shall reply, for it is in your head if not upon your lips. Dearest children, bring us more flowers, bring us fruits, give us your smiles.
The three young women awoke, and came to present their brows to us. My friend offered me her lips by mistake; I took advantage of this, which made her blush. She fled, rejoining her companions.
It was clear and hot, though the sun was not visible. The light seemed to come from everywhere, and objects threw no shadows. This phenomenon, instead of frightening me, increased my sensation of happiness. It seemed to me that I had reached at last a state of beatitude long desired. Love sang in my heart. I observed with tenderness the folds of my friend's white dress, which floated behind her as she ran. Her garland of flowers fell, and, as she stooped to pick it up, her candid breasts showed at the edge of her corsage. I could not prevent myself from rushing towards her, in a frenzy, my mouth full of kisses and troubled words.
I
You have not hurt yourself?
ELISE
But I have not fallen.
And she laughed, while she was fastening her hair. I had taken the garland, meanwhile, and was inhaling it like a bouquet. That made her laugh still more.
I
Flowers, Elise, have no longer their own odour when they have slept in your hair or on your neck; it is as if they had become you. It is your fragrance that I breathe....
ELISE
As you like....
Elise also no longer knew very well what she was saying. Or was she, perhaps, reading my heart! Like my master, she had just replied to a prayer that I dared not formulate.
I stretched out both arms to take with open hands the flower that I desired, the flower that was being given me, but Elise was already in flight. I caught her up in the middle of a thicket of lilacs. It was there that she gave me my happiness.
Her dress, which was only a tunic, fell slowly, unveiling the loveliness of my divinity, who seemed to me to be Beauty herself. She was so beautiful that my admiration, for an instant, was stronger than my desire. My transport had carried me to the summit of a mountain so high that I became dizzy and my head spun. When I came to myself, it seemed to me that I had put on a new dignity, and that the resurrection that had snatched me from a delicious death was my entry into a more precious life.
My friend, once more dressed in her robe, her garland of flowers on her refastened hair, was picking branches of lilac. I rose to help her, for an enormous sheaf was already filling her white arms; she gave it me, and then she made a harvest of pinks and roses, and we returned to my master.
He did not seem to have noticed our absence. He praised the flowers and breathed their scents, thanking my friend, who was blushing a little, for her graciousness. The two other young women came back with cherries and early peaches, less soft than their rosy cheeks. I followed the example of my master, who kissed the hands of the young fruit-bearers, and congratulated them on being the picture of pleasure, of abundance, and of generosity.
Instead of sitting down, they crouched at the feet of their master, and offered him the finest of the fruits, looking in his face for signs of content. There was a divine charm in this simple, pastoral picture, and, for a long time, I observed it with joy. These three beings seemed in such perfect communion that the sweetest aroma of peace surrounded their bodies. Satisfied, he touched their cheeks and their hair.
HE
Children, I love you.
They took again their places round the table. My friend, who had leaned her head on my shoulder, sat up to welcome them. They spoke in a whisper.
HE
I would tell you, my friend, in answer to your secret desire, that our life, up there, or rather yonder, is very different from the life of men. To begin with, the gods are very few in number, two or three thousand at most, men and women. I say, men and women, because that is all we are, with superior faculties. Raise by many powers the genius of your geniuses, and you have the measure of those among us who dominate the others. The lesser among us are also gods, that is to say that their sensibility, their intelligence, their force and their beauty attain a degree that you can with difficulty conceive. Your arts, your sciences, your noblest passions are instincts in us; indeed, we attach but small importance to them. The length of our life has ended by teaching us the uselessness of all that is not pure sensation, and our principal care is the cultivation of our senses, which are, in fact, highly developed. We deliver ourselves to every pleasure with a divine frankness, and it would be difficult for those of us who have not associated with men to understand the meanings you have given to the words lust, gluttony, and idleness. On the other hand, the pleasures of relativity are unknown to us, and we are ignorant of vanity, deceit, envy, or anger. Our pride is only the consciousness of the force that we feel is living in ourselves.
Our women differ little from yours, that is to say that they bear the same relation to us as yours to you. We do not consider them inferior but different, and this difference makes our common happiness. They are admirable creatures of pleasure, but the pride that is natural to them makes them selfish. My friend, even for a god, above all for a god, perhaps, your women equal ours. They know how to forget themselves in love; they know how to find their happiness in the happiness that they give. If their senses are less delicate, their flesh less odorous, their arts of pleasure more rudimentary, their hearts are more sensitive. Ah! to read in their eyes their gratitude for the pleasure they have given.
The three young women, who had listened attentively, lowered their heads, smiling at each other out of the corners of their eyes. My friend, however, dared to speak.
ELISE
But we are also grateful for the pleasure that is given us. Our sensibility is not only in our hearts.
I
Women do seem to have no other pleasure than the pleasure they give.
ELISE
I do not believe that.
HE
Dear creature of pleasure, it is none the less true.
ELISE
It is true, since you say it, but these women are not true women.
HE
They are different from you, my friend; that is all. But I agree with you; true women both give and receive.
ELISE
That is true indeed!
I
Divine friend, how I love you!
ELISE
And I, I detest you.
I stretched out my arms to draw to me those lips that I desired, but she took my hands in hers, and kissed them passionately.
HE
And you envy the gods!
I
I envy neither the gods nor any man, and I desire no other woman, since I have known Elise.
HE
My coming upon earth, this time, will at least have given happiness to one human being.
ELISE
Or two.
I
What a dream! Do not awake us!
HE
You shall not be awakened.
The two young women looked at me curiously. I even thought that I discerned some sort of pity in their eyes. My master divined my thought.
HE
Yes, my friend, they are immortals. They came as I have come. Is it more surprising to see goddesses on earth than to see a god?
I turned towards Elise, paling with emotion.
HE
She too. But do not be afraid, for she loves you, and love has given her a heart exactly like your man's heart. She has become a woman in giving herself to you, and she will never leave you.
ELISE
Never. Never so long as you live, my mortal lover. Never, and your memory shall share my immortality.
I
Now I understand the superhuman happiness I found in your arms, O queen! But is that possible? Have the times of mythology returned?
HE
You see it. They have never been abolished, moreover, unless in your beliefs, unless in what you believe that you believe. For is not Christianity, just like the religions it thought it destroyed, the story of the relations between gods and men? Does the visit of a dove to the loveliest of the Jewish women differ so much from the visit of the swan to the voluptuous Leda? The spirit in which you consider these divine anecdotes, changes with the centuries, but the anecdotes are always the same, because love is always the same. If your priests were to hear me, they would say that I blasphemed, I who was that swan, I who was that dove. But when they say that I was the son of the dove, they think they are stating a great truth, and perhaps they are right, since that fable has changed the colour of heaven. But the colour of heaven will change again, and they will not perceive it.
All your science hitherto has consisted in giving different names to different appearances. Some day, perhaps, you will learn that the same thing happens always, that is to say nothing, and you will leave the illegible romance of the infinite, and live your own lives. It is worth the trouble. Some day you will learn this, and you will be much astonished at having lost centuries upon centuries in vainly observing phenomena of which you perceive only the broken reflections in a sea that is shaken by the storms of your imagination.
The life of the gods, my friend, differs from yours in this above all, that it is for them without finality. Our acts are sufficient to themselves, and we do not look for their justification in immediate or distant consequences. The wretchedness of your activity is, that it foresees repose. Our end is in the act; yours in the effects of the act. But, since happiness is in the act, you pass it by, and when you rest it is in weariness and boredom. For us, to live is to act, and to act is to be happy. Perhaps, rather than supermen, we are superior animals: intuition serves us as instinct, and if sometimes we know regret we are always ignorant of remorse. Passion, which may mislead us for a moment, leaves us satisfied, as soon as we have obeyed it, even if our desire has been unable to realise itself in its entirety, even if our curiosity has had to stop half-way. There remains to us then the having exercised against an obstacle our faculties of action; we bear no malice against the obstacle. We are like children who have lost in a game, and are, all the same, very happy to have played.
I
True, man wishes to win, always to win, and, beaten, if he does not suffer in his vanity, he suffers in his pride.
HE
Which is not a genuine pride. Pride worthy of the name does not rebel against superior forces. It yields as quickly as possible and retires into itself, proud of what it is and disdainful of what it is not. Your human pride is often no more than a blind folly. The pride of the gods is clear-sighted. But what need have you of knowing us, since you have no power over us? Your prayers move us, as the songs of the birds move you, according to our mood; we find them painful or agreeable, and in either case pass on, thinking of serious matters, that is to say of the living of our lives. The gods, my friend, are selfish, and, if they busy themselves with men, it is from caprice, in order to vary their pleasures. Your joys, to tell you the truth, touch us more nearly than your sorrows, and, if we had the power, we would more willingly send new happinesses to the happy than joys to the doleful. For we hold in great scorn intellectual disorder, and unbalanced sensibility: now unhappiness is produced by one of these two troubles, or by both. He who is master of neither his nerves nor his thought does not seem to us very worthy of pity. Help, moreover, would be useless to him. Help would be for him no more than the brief sunbeam that passes between two storm-clouds that the wind has separated for a moment. And then, we have no power. Ruled, like you, by destiny, we contemplate the eternal movement of things, with a more perspicacious eye, but as powerless to alter their course.
None the less, I am not pitiless. Physical evil breaks my heart, and it is precisely that which is altogether beyond my power, that which is without a remedy. Life eternally devours itself. Every organism is a prey. The living is eaten alive. Every animal is a feast, and every animal is a guest. The healthy state is to be a feast. The gods do not escape this dilemma; they are so organised as to be a durable feast, that is all. They resist the attacks of the infinitely little, as a mountain resists a colony of ants. But let time pass, and century after century go by, and the ants will have got the better of the mountain, though they are, nevertheless, destined themselves to perish under invisible bites.
We shall see, as I have already told you, and it pains me to think of it, humanity disappear, and with it all the? animal species that people the earth to-day. Other forms are elaborating in the mysteries of eternal matter. The water of the oceans ferments and swells with life round the magnetic poles. That which is born rises tirelessly against that which has been born. The sorrow of living is the obscure consciousness of feeling oneself dying.
But when I see humanity disappear, it is at first in the manner of the ants and the bees, and of all the other animalities, once intelligent and creative, now reduced to mechanical existence. You will come to resemble marvellous clocks. Your mathematical complexity will be the admiration of the intelligences which have succeeded your own.
Their multiple and contradictory activity will stop sometimes, struck by surprise, to observe the sureness of your movements, and you will still be one of the terms, though no longer the same, in the disturbing problem of intelligence and instinct.
I have also sometimes thought that on your earth there would be a slow return towards primordial unity. Every organism would be re-absorbed into that formless yet living jelly, which has been differentiated, little by little, in the course of time, into myriads of dissimilar beings. The movement, after reaching its climax, would retrace its steps. Evolution would continue in retrogression. The vertebrate would become once more the annelid, the annelid the nothing that creeps like a spot of oil on the surface of water.
As for the destruction of our solar world by a cataclysm, it is a theatrical idea, but though theatrical, not impossible. It is at once dramatic and vulgar, within the reach of everybody, and without philosophical or scientific interest. Anybody can conceive a shock, and a bursting in pieces, as he conceives a fire, a wreck, or an explosion. If it is the truth, it is without interest. The truth is a bridge that must be crossed to gain the other side of the stream.
He rose. The young women, enchanted, shook their dresses, and arranged the folds of them. Elise threw me a tender look and joined her companions, who were already moving away.
HE
Just so. Let us walk a little. Besides, my discourse is nearing its end. We have stirred up many ideas. In putting them in their places in your head, you will consider them with care. Order is almost the whole of knowledge.
Come. The morning is about to be born, the real morning, and I do not wish to disturb that to which men are accustomed. I have never done so. The duty of the gods is to respect logic.
We took a long walk through the fresh, flowering paths. It seemed to me that the familiar garden became an immense and magical forest. The perspectives stretched out under tall trees to a stream that flowed slowly under the poplars that edged it. Then the stream disappeared; it was a glade where roebuck passed in troops. We went on and the appearances changed continually. At certain moments I found again the garden of my summer mornings, with its lawns, its flower-beds, its trees, from which doves kept falling, its paths, its seats; I seemed to hear the laughter of the children, the disputes of the players, the murmur of the couples. All this went on in my head, accompanied by my friend's words, and I was drunk, with love, with ideas, and with loveliness.
HE
We have settled several great questions with the logical intrepidity of our minds....
I
As for me, I hear and I believe.
HE
An understanding auditor is half of the discourse. The solitary sinks and loses himself in the whirlwind of his reasonings. A word, even a look, is enough to give him back his equilibrium.
I was saying, then, that we have done like the philosophers. We have solved the great questions of metaphysic, by attacking them at the head, that is to say at the part that is unattackable. To their affirmation of an absolute and at the same time conscious god, we have opposed, as we have a right to do, a simple and categorical denial. We could take up the attack at the other end, begin from ourselves, seek our cause, find God, seek the cause of God, and so on to infinity. However large a number one conceives, a larger is always possible. And so this terrible God recoils as one draws near him into the depths of the abysses, and the tired intelligence, like a huntsman who yields to the ruses of his quarry, turns round, goes home and thinks of supper, that is to say of practical life.
These subtle games give the mind a juggler's skill. They are neither without attraction nor without utility, but they are games. Drunkenness is to be found in them, but not happiness. Now, happiness is the important matter. One must be happy. Let us, then, limit ourselves to the affirmation that the world is not governed by an intelligence at once infinite and conscious. For lack of another word, let us stop at the idea of chance, as in the time of my dear Epicurus. Nothing has been found more beautiful, more clear, nothing that better satisfies the mind of a man or the mind of a god. It comes to the same thing as saying: that which is, is. This simple proposition admits of no objection; it defies every sophism and every artifice.
The idea of God is only the shadow of man projected in the infinite. Make use of this sentence as supreme refutation and you will find few minds capable of disentangling its meaning or even of relishing its irony.
I do not speak to you of the gods of the nurses, of the little naughty children, and of the good labourers. People sometimes amuse themselves in narrating my appearance on earth, and I am to be seen, in these poor tales, drinking thin wine, gossiping with housekeepers, encouraging strikes, singing theinternationale, denouncing silk dresses, furs, and white gloves. I appear to the astonished populace as a half-tipsy dolt and a good fellow, and yet at sight of me civilised men fly for their lives and give place to the mob. The divine ideal of the priests does not much differ from this, and, after all, if I had to choose, I should perhaps prefer the company of labourers to that of seminarists. But I have never been accessible to such humble desires, and, moreover, I am not God, I am only a god. That is why I laugh at the confusion of the catechisms, of the pious dreams and of the revolutionary dreams alike. I have no power, but I have never desired either the reign of equality or that of sanctity. I would rather breathe your flowers than your souls, your women than your intellects. Your flowers! Shall I tell you? We have no flowers; we have only those that grow wild in our uncultivated fields, our pathless forests! The gods do not work....
My master plucked a magnificent pearly rose, a rose as lovely as a woman's face, and remained for a long time silent. I understood that he was meditating. He murmured—
"Work: this rose is a work...."
He compared it in his mind to the frail graces of the eglantine.
HE
All is contradiction. I would say no more. Those who created this rose are not those who enjoy it. No payment is the equivalent of the pleasure I feel in breathing its scent; and I, I have done nothing but pass by, and pluck it. Men rebel. How will you prevent them from rebellion? They are right....
He stopped, observing, but without seeing it, the delicious landscape that surrounded us. The emotional silence was only disturbed by the murmur of the bees, the shrill cries of the little birds, or the light falling of the doves who dropped from the trees with a noise of silk dresses.
I was chewing bits of grass, with an air, like his, of preoccupation, but I was thinking of next to nothing.
HE
They are right. And yet rebellion is useless. It is ugly. Happiness is not in revolt. You should find a balance. You do not know how to rest. I did not scorn work just now, but praised idleness. Take these two ideas and plait them harmoniously together. Your life, short as it is, would be as good as ours, if you were to succeed in uniting these two alternatives. The same people should turn by turn rest and work. But, to make oneself worthy of leisure! Perhaps more intelligence is needed to know how to do nothing than to know how to work.
The present state of things cannot last. But can one ever tell? And if, by chance, it should last? Then, there would be formed two castes among men. They exist already in sketch, they would come to exist in precise drawings with violent contours. It would be almost impossible for a slave to become a master. But a master would always be able to become a slave. Your masters of the day are only slaves who, freed for a moment, will necessarily fall back into the servitude that is their destiny.
You see, I am amusing myself with prophecy. None the less, what I know of the order of things is what is apparent to the eyes of all. Do not take my words too seriously. On the whole, since men have had laws, these laws have not varied. No doubt, from that moment, your evolution was complete. Perhaps you will never be able further to modify yourselves, if not by external means. Hence the need of material progress, which is only grandiose vanity. At the end of the swiftest journeys, the man and the woman meet face to face, seeking in each other's eyes the motive of living, that is to say happiness.
Earth has become a narrow cage for you. However, birds that you are, it is your cage, and you are forbidden to leave it. You can paint it in the tenderest colours; it is a cage, and it is your cage. You will no longer go to heaven, the stars have fallen. If this heaven of which the childhood of humanity dreamed is a paradise, all the seats in it are taken. We have no need of you, and are happy where we are; we shall never give place to you. Besides, at what moment would you undertake the journey? At your death? When one is dead, it is a little late for travelling. The immortality of the soul was without doubt the masterpiece of the ecclesiastical imagination. With this truth in his pocket, a man may wander through all countries, and always find servants. The woman who has lost her lover kisses the feet of the impostor who promises her the renewal in the beyond of her temporal felicities. The priest offers his slipper with indifference. They are the happiest of men, for they have ended by believing in a fable so productive. How should they deny the truth and beauty of this marvellous tree whose fruits are gold and love together?
Those who promise a terrestrial paradise are no less baleful to human energy. They too teach sacrifice, the scorn of the present hour, and walking and working with eyes fixed on the future. Priests of religion, priests of politics, all sell very dearly the tickets of a lottery that will never be drawn. Do they know it? Tile merchants of perhaps are not necessarily merchants of lies. Some of them are the first to be duped by the secrets they have inherited, and they make victims of themselves for the vanity of leading a more numerous troop of victims to the sacrifice.
A tradition encourages you to honour the martyr for his faith. The martyr is only an obstinate man. He is in the wrong, since he is conquered. The death that menaces him should have enlightened his understanding.
The wise man has but one belief: himself; the wise man has but one fatherland: life.
Do not imagine that I am teaching you the vulgar selfishness of the comedies and the drinking songs. Oneself may cover a world. The brutes are the only solitaries. A man's sensibility is a surface whose extent he alone is capable of measuring. One being often includes many beings. If it does not include at least two, it is not human, perhaps not animal; it is one of the stones in the road under the feet of other men. True selfishness is a harmony.
But this harmony must be composed by oneself, and woven with one's own hands. To receive happiness ready-made would be offering one's neck to the rope. Christianity found a very beautiful formula:—to work out one's salvation. Now that is a personal work. If some one should propose a method to you, examine it. If you are being offered salvation already prepared, turn away your head: the food is poisoned.
Also, I bring you no commandment. I submit a system to you: the living of one's life. What do those movements of the world matter to you that do not touch your sensibility? Keep your tears for your own pains, and for those that scratch you like brambles as you pass. There is no other ethic than this: the conquest of pain. If it wounds you, be silent, and think of your revenge. Words are snares. Joint responsibility? Have you felt the prick? No? Then you have no share in the responsibility. Do not judge by the intellect the affairs of sensibility, and, when your business is to understand, be insensible to all that is not reason.
I
But how conquer pain?
HE
Physical pain is the business of your doctors.... The remedy for moral pain is confidence in oneself. To yield to pain is to accept the worst of humiliations. To suffer because of a woman is to make oneself the slave of a woman. But there are moments when it must be pleasant not to deny one's pain. One makes a pleasure of it.
1
I have known such moments.
HE
There are unconquerable evils. Then the idea that life has an end will help to support the weight of it. Finally, my friend, there is the supreme act that your resigned morality blames, the act the vision of which gave so much energy to the careless life of the ancients: there is suicide.
Suicide is a monster that one would have to train oneself to observe with calm. Compared to certain physical evils, to certain pains, to certain forfeitures, it would soon appear as a friend, very ugly, but cordial. Does it not deserve the gentlest names? Is it not the consoler? Is it not deliverance?
But one must not play with suicide. Amorous children have made of it a gesture as puerile as their souls. This supreme refuge from great pains should not be the remedy for little deceptions. If your morality had chosen, instead of the teasing rôle of a jealous old maid, that of an amiable and prudent friend, it would have taught you the art of wrestling with Destiny, and, when her grip is invincible and cruel, the supreme feint, which is to vanish in smoke. To have made a cowardice of suicide is a singular idea. It is explicable in the order of religious beliefs; it is mad for the man who believes neither in the survival of the soul nor, above all, in future compensations.
Since, whether you will or no, my friend, death is your destiny, at least live. Do not always look at your feet, but do not look too far before you. To be born, to appear, to disappear: forget the last term. Human wisdom is to live as if one were never to die, and to gather the present minute as if it were to be eternal.
I
If the present minute could but last for ever!
HE
Why not? How long have you spent with me? Do you know? Two hours or an eternity?
I
It seems to me that I have always known you, always seen you, always heard you.
HE
Very well! That is how to live.
I
Do you, who deny blessed eternity to men, give it them by your presence and your words? Who are you then?
HE
Have I not told you? See, he doubts already.
I
It is that I am too happy.
HE
Poor men, divine sensations are too strong for the fragility of your nerves. What would you do with an eternity? You would spend it in trembling lest you should lose it. Happiness, for you, is not possession but desire. When you no longer have anything to desire, boredom comes, sits down on your knees, and slowly crushes you. You find the woman who has made you drunk heavier than a mountain when the drunkenness passes away, and you groan if the head that is still wet with your kisses leans too lovingly on your arm or on your shoulder.
You find happiness only in closing your eyes; on opening them again you find boredom. Since you do not know how to live, dream, believe. You would be glad, would you not, if you were able to doubt my words? Well! I give you leave. Do like so many other men. Accept the practice of a belief that makes you laugh, and of an ethic that you scorn ...
I
No, no, I am free! You have loosed my hands, you have taught me to breathe.
HE
Ah! So the method I propose to you is not so bad! I believe, indeed, that, of all those that can rule the life of a wise man, it is the most voluptuous. If doubt has no longer a place in your intelligence, put it into your actions. Knowing the vanity of everything, of religions, of philosophies and of ethics, submit outwardly to customs, to prejudices, and to tradition. Time your step to the rhythm of the popular mind.
I
What! Submission?
HE
Do you prefer revolt?
I
I am not a slave.
HE
Very true. But liberty is an internal joy. One is the more free the less one seeks to appear so. A woman is less beautiful when she has divulged her beauty. A man is less free when he makes a parade of his liberty. One must hide one's good fortunes.
My friend, I have shown you the philosophy of the gods. Accept its method if you feel yourself strong enough to follow it without despair. We are, and that suffices us. Can you say as much? you who cannot take a step towards happiness without taking one towards death? Hope, if you have need of hope. Drink, if you are thirsty. Do you think that I am jeering, and that, after having treated you as a god, I am treating you first as a man and then as a child? No. The truth is that every question immediately receives in my mind all the different and even contradictory solutions that can answer it. I see, would you believe it, the six sides of the cube at one glance. I know that the least reasonable of things is reason; I know that nothing is more cruel than sentiment. There is not one of your systems of which I cannot make a circuit in two or three thoughts. They are curious ruins; some of them still attract such a concourse of people that one forgets that they are ruins. Travel, and make pilgrimages. I have favoured the materialism of Epicurus, Saint Paul's Christianity, Spinoza's pantheism. Have I spoken to you of Spinoza? I loved him much also. We used to drink milk while we were discovering the identity of reality and perfection. He was one of the two completely happy men I have known; the other was Epicurus. Spinoza found happiness in asceticism; Epicurus, in pleasure. They both lived smiling. I regretted them equally. There are two masters for mankind, and nearer to mankind than myself.
I remember one of Spinoza's propositions: "Each man necessarily desires or repulses, according to the laws of his nature, what he considers good or bad." That means: every one naturally desires to be happy. Great commonplace, and great truth: there is no other philosophy, there is no other method. Virtue is, to be happy.
They are, then, very wicked, those among you, who, keeping power, that is to say force, in their own hands, use it to forbid men access to the road that displeases themselves. What! I should have used my power to undeceive Cecilia, whose innocent kisses were prayers, whose life was a happy walk towards martyrdom and heaven! What infatuation, to believe oneself in possession of the truth, and, then, what childishness, to believe that the truth is necessarily useful! My friend, what is true is true, and what is beautiful is beautiful, and between these terms, and between all that could be inserted, there is no necessary relation. I smile at human illusions, but I would not make them one in a single and compulsory illusion.
You love Elise; obey your desires even if they seem absurd to you. She will do the same for you, and you will both taste great joys.
We had returned, little by little, to our starting point. The young women joined us near the rose-garden. A different light had replaced the springtime brilliance that surrounded us. The real morning had just been born, a clear, cold winter morning. I wished to pluck a rose, but they disappeared as I stretched out my hand. Elise took my arm and pressed close to me.
ELISE
I am cold.
I doubted her divinity, I doubted myself, and the enchanted, luminous night I had just lived. My master's last words were disturbing the certainty that he had at first established in my mind. I, who had believed myself a god, became again a man.
HE
That is the effect of doubt. Then you no longer believe in me?
I
I believe in you.
Instantly, things recovered their magical appearance, and I was happy again. I gently pressed Elise's arm, and she looked at me with tenderness.
Meanwhile, the two young friends, who were walking before us, had come upon the steps of the Museum. We followed them. They examined in silence the cold nudity of all those women of stone, but sometimes I heard them laugh.
ELISE
And so these are your women.
I
They are not our women. These figures represent our ideal of the goddesses.
ELISE
Truly, this one is like me.
I
There are women as beautiful as that among us, but one does not know them. Each one of us thinks he has held in his arms the most beautiful woman in the world; when he reflects, he is no longer very sure of it, for, in the depths of his desire, an image ceaselessly forms, and ceaselessly vanishes, whose beauty no created thing could equal.
ELISE
So reality always deceives you. How do you manage to be happy?
I
We have desire.
I had spoken like a man, and not like one whose mistress is an immortal. Elise seemed indifferent to the obscure sorrow that darkened my words.
My nature now was double. When I thought of my master, of Elise, of the hours passed in the garden, I felt that I was caressed and upheld by warm waves of joy; when I considered the things of earth, I was cold, and I was sorrowful.
Elise left me once more to go and join her companions. My master called me. He was seated at the entrance to the hall, and was looking at nothing.
HE
I have still a few words to say to you, and these are the most important. You must forget our conversation.
I
Master, it is impossible. It is part of myself, it has entered into my flesh, into my blood, into my bones.
HE
Ah, well, you shall know then that I could have told you the exact opposite, and that that also would have been the truth. Another god may descend and speak to you and give you other teaching. In which will you put your trust?
I
Master, you disturb me. Can such a miracle be repeated?
HE
When one believes in a miracle, it may become a daily occurrence. You see, you would do better to forget.
I
I shall not forget.
HE
And what if I were to prove to you that I do not exist, that I am only a part of yourself, that responds to another part of yourself?
I
Master, I believe in you, and not in myself.
HE
Behold man with a true Christian nature, man after the fall! You will never wash away sin, or, rather, you will never wash away penitence. Why do you not hold your own against me? What a domestic animal has man become! Have you not at the bottom of your heart a secret desire? Does the god that I appear to you satisfy fully your need of worship and humiliation? Speak, my friend, I am what you desire that I should be. Choose. The phantasmagorias are at your command.
I
Well, yes, I should have wished you to be He, to perfect in my eyes the legends of my childhood.... But you have spoken, and I no longer believe but in you, in you alone.
HE
Choose. There is yet time. Choose.
I
I have chosen.
At that very instant, all pleasure vanished, and I felt ill, with that overwhelming illness that follows nights of debauch. Nothing, however, had changed around me, and I was standing among the same marbles, though they were frozen and made me almost ashamed and almost afraid. I heard the laughter of the young women in the neighbouring hall, but it seemed to me to come from a bevy of hoydens. My master, still seated there, was looking at me, but with eyes in which I thought I saw I know not what cruel mockery, I know not what mournful reproaches. I was seized with anguish, I breathed with difficulty, I was cold, the memory of my nocturnal lusts disgusted my heart. I was about to faint, perhaps, when my master spoke.
HE
So you have chosen. It is well. Good-bye.
I
Oh! No! Not yet!
HE
Would you care to salute those charming young women? Here they are.
I saw them advancing towards me, naked, and smiling from head to foot, with a docile smile. They held each other by their necks, their arms entwined, like the three graces, but their hips swayed to an evil rhythm.
I
How ugly they are! Sorceresses!
HE
They are your sins.
I
I detest them.
They turned and fled. Their buttocks, joined like three curious faces, made an obscene and singular diagram.
HE
Women belong to metaphysics.
I was too disturbed to understand this saying. I was thinking of Elise, whom I had loved so passionately, and I wept at seeing her thus. I wept also over myself and my lust.
HE
Women are creations of sensibility, of intelligence, or of faith; that depends on the moment, it depends on the man. The difference between the goddess and the girl of the public harem is made by the idea of sin. As a sinner, you see courtesans where, as a god, I see divinities. The world is what you make it, creator without knowing it. Since you have chosen, good-bye, good-bye!
I
Elise.
She whom I had loved, she whom I loved still, ran towards me, in the form of the young woman who had so moved my heart. She offered me her hands and her lips, as if she had returned from a journey, and she pressed me passionately in her arms.
HE
Then you have not chosen?
I
I cannot separate from her I love.
ELISE
I remain among men.
I
For ever?
ELISE
I remain.
HE
I will come back for you. Good-bye then, my friend, and this time really good-bye. You sought truth and you have found love. Good-bye.
Elise drew me along. By the door, I turned. My master had disappeared.
This separation, which I was expecting, caused me but a brief sorrow. I was holding Elise by the hand, I was holding a certainty.
We were now going silently along the deserted street. The joy that filled my heart lit up the sky, the trees, the houses and everything else.
Soon, like any other couple after a morning walk, we went home. Elise had not at any moment the air of a stranger.
Our day was short, that of two lovers mindful of living. My friend complied with all our customs. But for the memory of the night of magic that had placed her in my arms, I should not have distinguished her divine grace from that of a Parisian.
We made with profound joy the discovery of our souls and of our bodies. It seemed to us that we had known each other always, and always belonged to each other; it seemed also, at every kiss, that we touched each other for the first time: these feelings, no more contradictory than delightful, increased our intoxication, our heads turned, we could no longer find words for our ideas, and we said a great many childish things.
I did not, however, so far lose my reason as to forget that, alone among all men, without doubt, I held in my arms an immortal. Much pride was mingled with my love, and also much curiosity.
My goddess much resembles Giorgione's Venus. While I write this, she is sleeping in the same pose, her right arm folded under her head. The body is tapering, the breasts are two upturned cups; the face, of a pure oval, has great charm, with its very red mouth, and its large lowered eyelids that hide from me beautiful eyes of a glaucous and changeful blue. From head to foot she has the complexion of a blonde, but this whiteness is as if melted in gilded rose, because she is accustomed to wear only light and almost transparent veils. Her hair is of that rare chestnut colour, a colour which we scarcely know but by its name; but her eyelashes are much darker, of a very sombre brown.
I have kissed with piety the miracle of her feet, fresh as a spring, and with nails that shone like drops of dew under my lamp.
She accepts homage like caresses, and caresses as a flower accepts the evening rain. She is more feminine than the most sensitive of women, more trembling than the tenderest violins. The kiss that her mouth gives has first passed like a wave of harmony along her whole body, and the kiss that she receives makes her melt voluptuously like snow that has lingered in the sunlight.
O snow with the odour of violets, O flesh with the taste of figs!
1 have eaten and I have drunken, and now I write the praise of my delight, among some metaphysical memories. Of the life that goes on up there, or yonder, she has told me something more than my master. She has told me that perfect pleasure is a gift too common among the gods much to excite their gratitude. They walk under the trees of the orchard, and pluck the gilded fruit whose weight bends them within reach of their hands. More lively and more sensitive, the divine females feel now and then some vexation at being unable to knot their arms about the conquered male; there is sometimes melancholy in their eyes, at seeing light shoulders moving away that happiness has not crushed, and knees that gratitude has not bowed.
We speak.
ELISE
Tell me, you whom I love, are all men like you?
I
Men are not gods during love, but they are gods afterwards.
ELISE
That is to say that they become indifferent.
I
No, satisfied, and surfeited.
ELISE
Then they are not always hungry?
I
Alas! No.
ELISE
But, at least, they do not disdain the mouth whose moisture has made them drunk?
I
They forget even the taste of it.
ELISE
They too? I feel like crying.
I
There are some who love tears.
ELISE
You love tears?
I
How do I know? When one is happy, one no longer loves anything but one's own happiness.
Thereupon she dreamed for a long time, perhaps without very well understanding, for there came no more words to her mouth, but only kisses.
With the details I could get from her, in our clearer moments, on the life of the immortals, I pictured their dwelling-place as an earthly paradise of the kind described to us in the Jewish legends. It is probable that ancient indiscretions had long ago informed some Asiatic poet. The popular mind, friendly to confusions, placed at the beginning of our world a paradisiac state which is parallel to our world, and otherwise closed to men. The Greeks, with their adventures of the gods among us, also divined a little of the truth that had just been revealed to me in these two mythological nights. I understood that men do not invent, but remember. How I rejoiced at sharing in these mysteries! What moments! how express their odour, how paint their brilliance and their beauty?
I shall continue every morning to keep the journal of the happiness of my heart and the satisfactions of my intellect. Lover of an immortal, I see the Arcana open at last before my one-time sorrowful desire. The Arcana! For I feel that I am about to enter into the Unity.
But I have been writing for a long time, I am tired. My mistress is waiting for me. She sleeps, she is still sleeping. Perhaps, with them, there is no sleep. She tastes for the first time the happiness of not living....
M. JAMES SANDY ROSEwas found sitting at his work-table, his head laid on his desk. He seemed asleep, and he was dead. The pen had escaped from his fingers, and rolled to the ground, leaving a large blot of ink on the paper. After the word "vivre "[1]comes the first letter of a word that ends in a serpentine scrawl. This letter is doubtless a V, and perhaps, as would have been fairly characteristic of his style, he was going to begin a new phrase with this same word,Vivre, when death struck him down.