strange as _le Desservant de l'office des Morts_, a church function which never existed unless at the monastery of Saint Apollodora; or _l'Homme-qui-marche-sous-terre_, a name no Indian carried outside of the scenes of the _Nouveau-Monde_. In a very old rough draft of a page belonging perhaps to _l'Ève future_ he has thus defined the _real_: "Now I say that the Real has its degrees of being. A thing is so much more or less real for us as it interests us more or less, since a thing that interested us not at all would for us be as if it were not--that is to say, much less, though physical, than an unreal thing that interested us. "The Real for us, then, is only what touches the senses or the mind; and according to the degree of intensity with which this sole _real_, which we can judge and name, affects us, we class in our mind the degree of being more or less rich in content as it seems to strike us, and it is consequentlyy legitimate to say that it is realized. "The _idea_ is the only control we have of _reality._" Again: "And on the top of a distant pine, solitary in the midst of a far-off glade, I heard the nightingale--unique voice of that silence.... "'Poetic' landscapes almost invariably leave me quite cold, seeing that for every serious man the most suggestive medium for ideas really poetic is no other than four walls, a table and silence. Those who do not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them, will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it and reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion, and faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that which it recognizes much better in itself...." Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as Berkeley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life, on the same plan, the Interior and the Exterior, Spirit and Matter, with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over the second. For him the idea of _progress_ was never anything but a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope if we place it in the future. On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment of an old manuscript of _l'Ève future_: "We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all I Soon will come the senility and decrepitude of this strange polyp, and the evolution accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace of _some unquestionable necessity_."