_La joie de vivre._ It has been translated _la alegría de vivir_. But it is only a translation. This _alegría de vivir_--let them say what they like--is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s greatest crime is that of having been born.[1] Indeed it is! And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them, naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds. Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of the body or blood of the soul, what is there else? Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know. But it is Spanish. Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it, for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious, obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism. And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is. Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the purple, the bleeding and exsanguious. THE SEPULCHRE OF DON QUIXOTE You ask me, my friend, if I know of any way of loosing a delirium, a vertigo, any kind of madness, upon these poor ordered and tranquil multitudes who are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no means, you ask me, of reproducing the epidemic of the Flagellants or of the Tarantists? And you talk of the millennium.