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another epoch and get
your bearings while waiting for a congenial subject to present itself.

That explains your spiritual disarray of the last few months and your
immediate recovery as soon as you stumbled onto Giles de Rais."
Des Hermies had diagnosed him accurately. The day on which Durtal
had plunged into the frightful and delightful latter mediæval age had
been the dawn of a new existence. The flouting of his actual
surroundings brought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely
reorganized his life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of
contemporary letters, in the château de Tiffauges with the monster
Bluebeard, with whom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous
amity.
Thus history had for Durtal supplanted the novel, whose forced
banality, conventionality, and tidy structure of plot simply griped him.
Yet history, too, was only a peg for a man of talent to hang style and
ideas on, for events could not fail to be coloured by the temperament
and distorted by the bias of the historian.
As for the documents and sources! Well attested as they might be, they
were all subject to revision, even to contradiction by others exhumed
later which were no less authentic than the first and which also but
waited their turn to be refuted by newer discoveries.
In the present rage for grubbing around in dusty archives writing of
history served as an outlet for the pedantry of the moles who reworked
their mouldy findings and were duly rewarded by the Institute with
medals and diplomas.
For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most
infantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with a sphinx's
head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets which
babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out when they
took a tumble.
Of course exactitude was impossible. Why should he dream of getting
at the whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able
to give a full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that
matter? The best he could do was to imagine himself in the midst of

creatures of that other epoch, wearing their antique garb, thinking their
thoughts, and then, having saturated himself with their spirit, to convey
his illusion by means of adroitly selected details.
That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old
gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and
ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded
beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism
sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was
nevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitation
of time and made another age live anew before our eyes.
Hysterical, garrulous, manneristic as he was, there was yet a truly epic
sweep in certain passages of his History of France. The personages
were raised from the oblivion into which the dry-as-dust professors had
sunk them, and became live human beings. What matter, then, if
Michelet was the least trustworthy of historians since he was the most
personal and the most evocative?
As for the others, they simply ferreted around among the old state
papers, clipped them, and, following M. Taine's example, arranged,
ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence,
rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they were
trying to make. They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm
and claimed that they did not invent. True enough, but they did none
the less distort history by the selection they employed. And how simply
and summarily they disposed of things! It was discovered that such and
such an event occurred in France in several communities, and
straightway it was decided that the whole country lived, acted, and
thought in a certain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a
certain year.
No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked his
vision. They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as far from
creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles of
modern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.
And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers. The depilators!

taking all the hair off a real man's chest. They wrote ponderous tomes
to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villon
and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but
an inn sign. Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as a
priggishly honest and judicious man. One would say that in writing
their monographs these historians feared to dishonour themselves by
treating of artists who had tasted somewhat fully and passionately of
life. Hence the expurgation of masterpieces that an artist might appear
as commonplace a bourgeois as his commentator.