In one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of his apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison. All his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by a never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose essence is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like a poem and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_[11] was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most vistas in M. de Gourmont’s work. A god walks in the gardens behind the Odéon, and a winter’s night is a summer’s morning, on which the young journalist who has dared to say “My friend” to the luminous unknown in the church of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth that in one age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and the new truth that the gods are not immortal though their lives are long. Flowers are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls greet them with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue, and in this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts are born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while the sun shines, flowers are sweet, and girls’ lips soft to kiss. Where there is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he finds the most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas not new but gathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic rather than a scientific value, and are used like the tints on a palette. Indeed, the book is a balanced composition in which each colour has its complement. Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity, the replenishment of the earth by the Jews; it is impossible to close the book at any page without finding the mind as it were upon a springboard and ready to launch itself in delightful flight. There are many books that give a specious sensation of intellectual business while we read them. There are very few that leave, long after they are laid aside, stimuli to independent activity. VI