Of Alfred de Musset I had heard a great deal.  Marshall and the Marquise were in the habit of reading him in moments of relaxation, they had marked their favourite passages, so he came to me highly recommended.  Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry.  His modernisms were out of tune with the present strain of my aspirations, and I did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me.  I am not a purist; an error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure even the opening lines of “Rolla,” that splendid lyrical outburst.  What I remember of it now are those two odious chevilles—­marchait et respirait, and Astarte fille de l’onde amere; nor does the fact that amere rhymes with mere condone the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable.  And it is to my credit that the Spanish love songs moved me not at all; and it was not until I read that magnificently grotesque poem “La Ballade a la Lune,” that I could be induced to bend the knee and acknowledge Musset a poet.

I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy,—­he was still my soul.  But this craft, fashioned of mother o’ pearl, with starlight at the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life.  The reef was Gautier; I read “Mdlle. de Maupin.”  The reaction was as violent as it was sudden.  I was weary of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation of the body above the soul at once conquered and led me captive; this plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up to me illimitable prospects of fresh beliefs, and therefore new joys in things and new revolts against all that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind.  Till now I had not even remotely suspected that a deification of flesh and fleshly desire was possible, Shelley’s teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal; but now suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with intoxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place and within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in.  The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder gods:  not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude,—­a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount Calvary “ne m’a jamais baigne dans ses flots.”