the soul of man, such rage of passion, such fainting fever, such cerebral erethism.  The roar and dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence.  In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of all men.

Cabaner, I see you now entering the “Nouvelle Athenes;” you are a little tired after your long weary walk, but you lament not and you never cry out against the public that will accept neither your music nor your poetry.  But though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticise till the cafe closes; for you the homeless ones are waiting:  there they are, some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished with the American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have; and, when clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a glass of milk yourself, you will find a few sous to give them lager to cool their thirsty throats.  So you have ever lived—­a blameless life is yours, no base thought has ever entered there, not even a woman’s love; art and friends, that is all.

Reader, do you know of anything more angelic?  If you do you are more fortunate than I have been.

CHAPTER VII

THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHENES

Two dominant notes in my character—­an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in.  All the aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation akin to nausea.  These feelings are inherent and inveterate in me.  I am instinctively averse to my own countrymen; they are at once remote and repulsive; but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of nearness; I am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy.  Shall I explain this by atavism?  Was there a French man or woman in my family some half dozen generations ago?  I have not inquired.  The English I love, and with a love that is foolish—­mad, limitless; I love them better than the French, but I am not so near to them.  Dear, sweet Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned with spreading trees, and the weald and the wold, the very words are passionately beautiful ... southern