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so many more things
betwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy,
why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It is
no strain on one to admit the Credo quia absurdum of Saint Augustine
and Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible it
would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the
faculties of man it is divine.
"And--oh, to hell with it! What's it all about, anyway?"
And again, as so often when he had found himself before this
unbridgeable gulf between reason and belief, he recoiled from the leap.
Well, his thoughts had strayed far from the subject of that naturalism so
reviled by Des Hermies. He returned to Grünewald and said to himself
that the great Crucifixion was the masterpiece of an art driven out of
bounds. One need not go far in search of the extra-terrestrial as to fall

into perfervid Catholicism. Perhaps spiritualism would give one all one
required to formulate a supernaturalistic method.
He rose and went into his tiny workroom. His pile of manuscript notes
about the Marshal de Rais, surnamed Bluebeard, looked at him
derisively from the table where they were piled.
"All the same," he said, "it's good to be here, in out of the world and
above the limits of time. To live in another age, never read a newspaper,
not even know that the theatres exist--ah, what a dream! To dwell with
Bluebeard and forget the grocer on the corner and all the other petty
little criminals of an age perfectly typified by the café waiter who
ravishes the boss's daughter--the goose who lays the golden egg, as he
calls her--so that she will have to marry him!"
Bed was a good place, he added, smiling, for he saw his cat, a creature
with a perfect time sense, regarding him uneasily as if to remind him of
their common convenience and to reproach him for not having prepared
the couch. Durtal arranged the pillows and pulled back the coverlet, and
the cat jumped to the foot of the bed but remained humped up, tail
coiled beneath him, waiting till his master was stretched out at length
before burrowing a little hollow to curl up in.
CHAPTER II
Nearly two years ago Durtal had ceased to associate with men of letters.
They were represented in books and in the book-chat columns of
magazines as forming an aristocracy which had a monopoly on
intelligence. Their conversation, if one believed what one read,
sparkled with effervescent and stimulating wit. Durtal had difficulty
accounting to himself for the persistence of this illusion. His sad
experience led him to believe that every literary man belonged to one
of two classes, the thoroughly commercial or the utterly impossible.
The first consisted of writers spoiled by the public, and drained dry in
consequence, but "successful." Ravenous for notice they aped the ways
of the world of big business, delighted in gala dinners, gave formal
evening parties, spoke of copyrights, sales, and long run plays, and

made great display of wealth.
The second consisted of café loafers, "bohemians." Rolling on the
benches, gorged with beer they feigned an exaggerated modesty and at
the same time cried their wares, aired their genius, and abused their
betters.
There was now no place where one could meet a few artists and
privately, intimately, discuss ideas at ease. One was at the mercy of the
café crowd or the drawing-room company. One's interlocutor was
listening avidly to steal one's ideas, and behind one's back one was
being vituperated. And the women were always intruding.
In this indiscriminate world there was no illuminating criticism,
nothing but small talk, elegant or inelegant.
Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate with
thieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he broke
off relations with his confrères.
He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation
with them. Formerly when he accepted naturalism--airtight and
unsatisfactory as it was--he had been able to argue esthetics with them,
but now!
"The point is," Des Hermies was always telling him, "that there is a
basic difference between you and the other realists, and no patched-up
alliance could possibly be of long duration. You execrate the age and
they worship it. There is the whole matter. You were fated some day to
get away from this Americanized art and attempt to create something
less vulgar, less miserably commonplace, and infuse a little spirituality
into it.
"In all your books you have fallen on our fin de siècle--our queue du
siècle--tooth and nail. But, Lord! a man soon gets tired of whacking
something that doesn't fight back but merely goes its own way
repeating its offences. You needed to escape into