“Here is what I have created,” he said thoughtfully.

His friends looked, and immediately the shadow of deep sorrow covered their faces.  It was a thing monstrous, possessing none of the forms familiar to the eye, yet not devoid of a hint of some new unknown form.  On a thin tortuous little branch, or rather an ugly likeness of one, lay crooked, strange, unsightly, shapeless heaps of something turned outside in, or something turned inside out—­wild fragments which seemed to be feebly trying to get away from themselves.  And, accidentally, under one of the wild projections, they noticed a wonderfully sculptured butterfly, with transparent wings, trembling as though with a weak longing to fly.

“Why that wonderful butterfly, Aurelius?” timidly asked some one.

“I do not know,” answered the sculptor.

The truth had to be told, and one of his friends, the one who loved Aurelius best, said:  “This is ugly, my poor friend.  It must be destroyed.  Give me the hammer.”  And with two blows he destroyed the monstrous mass, leaving only the wonderfully sculptured butterfly.

After that Aurelius created nothing.  He looked with absolute indifference at marble and at bronze and at his own divine creations, in which dwelt immortal beauty.  In the hope of breathing into him once again the old flame of inspiration, with the idea of awakening his dead soul, his friends led him to see the beautiful creations of others, but he remained indifferent and no smile warmed his closed lips.  And only after they spoke to him much and long of beauty, he would reply wearily: 

“But all this is—­a lie.”

And in the daytime, when the sun was shining, he would go into his rich and beautifully laid-out garden, and finding a place where there was no shadow, would expose his bare head and his dull eyes to the glitter and burning heat of the sun.  Red and white butterflies fluttered around; down into the marble cistern ran splashing water from the crooked mouth of a blissfully drunken Satyr; but he sat motionless, like a pale shadow of that other one who, in a far land, at the very gates of the stony desert, also sat motionless under the fiery sun.

V

And it came about finally that Lazarus was summoned to Rome by the great Augustus.

They dressed him in gorgeous garments as though it had been ordained that he was to remain a bridegroom to an unknown bride until the very day of his death.  It was as if an old coffin, rotten and falling apart, were regilded over and over, and gay tassels were hung on it.  And solemnly they conducted him in gala attire, as though in truth it were a bridal procession, the runners loudly sounding the trumpet that the way be made for the ambassadors of the Emperor.  But the roads along which he passed were deserted.  His entire native land cursed the execrable name of Lazarus, the man miraculously brought to life, and the people scattered at the mere report of his horrible approach.  The trumpeters blew lonely blasts, and only the desert answered with a dying echo.