He began to think that Des Hermies was right.  In the present disorganized state of letters there was but one tendency which seemed to promise better things.  The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the occult.

Now his thoughts carried him away from his dissatisfaction with literature to the satisfaction he had found in another art, in painting.  His ideal was completely realized by the Primitives.  These men, in Italy, Germany, and especially in Flanders, had manifested the amplitude and purity of vision which are the property of saintliness.  In authentic and patiently accurate settings they pictured beings whose postures were caught from life itself, and the illusion was compelling and sure.  From these heads, common enough, many of them, and these physiognomies, often ugly but powerfully evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute anguish, spiritual calm or turmoil.  The effect was of matter transformed, by being distended or compressed, to afford an escape from the senses into remote infinity.

Durtal’s introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation the year before, although he had not then been so weary as now of fin de siecle silliness.  In Germany, before a Crucifixion by Matthaeus Gruenewald, he had found what he was seeking.

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain.  With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body.

This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet.  Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles.  The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap.  The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction.  The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat.  The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated.

Purulence was at hand.  The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice.  Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth.  The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart,