The story is one of violent pageantry, of Alexandria crimson, purple and gold, of Alexandria dancing on the rosy wharves where great ships with brown sails unloaded silks and spices, Alexandria offering up to the old gods, Hermes of the secret smile and Aphrodite of the cup-like breasts, not the smoking holocausts of Jehovah, but honey and garlands of flowers.... And on the other side, quite near the sceptical, cynical, gay, intellectual Greeks, who for a pastime and as in a Chelsea drawing-room discussed man and God, the horrid state of the Christian anchorites, self-starved, self-flogged, verminous, sour, contemptuous of the beauty of the body, of learning. There is a bitter irony in the efforts of Paphnutius, the stylite, for as he sits upon his column as far as he can from man and as near as possible to God, his reputation as a saint waxes; round him there grows a town, Stylopolis, an ancestor of Lourdes; first of all come shrines and convents, then traders, then a government, then banks, theatres ... the rich, the sons of the rich ... courtesans. He does not hate Paphnutius nor love him, for the monk was unfortunate, not guilty; gladly would he have torn out his heart and burnt it as an offering to God the Christ. His was a white, burning soul, but he had beyond a soul a body needing lightness, satisfaction. His flesh was weak, and it is pitiful rather than rejoicing that Anatole France sorrows for his error, when the monk sees Lucifer as “the serpent with golden wings which twisted round the tree of knowledge its azure coils formed of light and love,” when he sees Jehovah, the brutish tyrant, the power of ignorance and superstition, the power of darkness, Jehovah, understanding nothing, a mere dream. It is a terrible day for Paphnutius when he understands that “the Serpent began to speak to Adam and Eve and to teach them the highest truths, those which do not demonstrate themselves.”