In the early days of the year 1911, a young man who was very badly dressed went running up the rue Houdon. His extremely mobile countenance seemed to be filled with joy and anxiety by turns. His eyes devoured all that they saw and when his eyelids snapped shut quickly like jaws, they gulped in the universe, which renewed itself incessantly by the mere operation of him who ran. He imagined to the tiniest details the enormous worlds pastured in himself. The clamour and the thunder of Paris burst from afar and about the young man, who stopped, and panted like some criminal who has been too long pursued and is ready to surrender himself. This clamour, this noise indicated clearly that his enemies were about to track him like a thief. His mouth and his gaze expressed the ruse he was employing, and walking slowly now, he took refuge in his memory, and went forward, while all the forces of his destiny and of his consciousness retarded the time when the truth should appear of that which is, that which was, and of that which is to be. The young man entered a one story house. On the open door was a placard:
Entrance to the Studios
He followed a corridor where it was so dark and so cold that he had the feeling of having died, and with all his will, clenching his fists and gritting his teeth he began to take eternity to bits. Then suddenly he was conscious again of the motion of time whose seconds, hammered by a clock, fell like pieces of broken glass, while life flowed in him again with the renewed passage of time. But as he stopped to rap at a door, his heart beat more strongly again, for fear of finding no one home.
He rapped at the door and cried:
"It is I, Croniamantal!"
And behind the door the heavy steps of a man who seemed tired, or carried too weighty a burden, came slowly, and as the door opened there took place in the sudden light the creation of two beings and their instant marriage.
In the studio, which looked like a barn, an innumerable herd flowed in dispersion: they were the sleeping pictures, and the herdsman who tended them smiled at his friend. Upon a carpenter's table piles of yellow books could be likened to mounds of butter. And pushing back the ill-joined door, the wind brought in unknown beings who complained with little cries in the name of all the sorrows. All the wolves of distress howled behind the door ready to devour the flock, the herdsman and his friend, in order to prepare in their place the foundations for the NEW CITY. But in the studio there were joys of all colours. A great window opened the whole north side and nothing could be seen but the whole blue sky, the song of a woman. Croniamantal took off his coat which fell to the floor like the corpse of a drowned man, and sitting on the divan he gazed for a long time at the new canvas placed on the support. Dressed in a blue wrap, barefooted, the painter also regarded the picture in which two women remembered themselves in a glacial mist.
The studio contained another fatal object, a large piece of broken mirror hooked to the wall. It was a dead and soundless sea, standing on end, and at the bottom of which a false life animated what did not exist. Thus, confronting Art, there is the appearance of Art, against which men are not sufficiently on their guard, and which pulls them to earth when Art has raised them to the heights. Croniamantal bent over in a sitting posture, leaned his fore-arms on his knees, and turned his eyes from the painting to a placard thrown on the floor on which was painted the following announcement:
I AM AT THE BAR—The Bird of Benin
He read and re-read this sentence while the Bird of Benin contemplated his picture, approaching it and withdrawing from it, his head at all angles. Finally he turned towards Croniamantal and said:
"I saw the woman for you last night."
"Who is she?" asked Croniamantal.
"I do not know, I saw her but I do not know her. She is a really young girl, as you like them. She has the sombre and child-like face of those who are destined to cause suffering. And despite all the grace of her hands that straighten in order to repel, she lacks that nobility which poets could ............