And in this last word, Villiers mocks his belief in God. Was he Christian? He became one towards the end of his life: thus he knew all the forms of intellectual intoxication. LAURENT TAILHADE Individualism, which in literature gives us such agreeable baskets of new flowers, often finds itself made sterile by the introduction of the evil weeds of arrogance. One sees young persons, quite puffed up with a monstrous infatuation, declare their intention, not only to produce their work, but at the same the Work, to produce the unique flower, after which the exhausted intelligence must cease being fecund and collect itself in the slow dim task of the reorganization of strength. Even in Paris there are two or three "machines of glory" which have arrogated to themselves alone the right to pronounce this word, which they have banished from the dictionary. That matters little, for the spirit blows where it lists, and when it blows under the skin of frogs and makes them huge, it is for its own amusement, for the world is sad. Tailhade has none of the grotesque defects of pride; no one has more simply pursued a more simple craft, that of the man of letters. The Romans used a word "rhetorician", and this signified he who speaks, subdues words and subjects them to the yoke of thought; he governs, prompts and stimulates them to the point of imposing, in the very hour of his imaginative work, the hardest, newest, and most dangerous of tasks. Latin by race and tastes, Tailhade has the right to this fine name of rhetorician at which the incompetence of pedants takes offence. He is a rhetorician like Petronius, master equally in prose and poetry. Here, taken from the rare _Domain de Sonnets_, is one of them: HÉLÈNE (Le laboratoire de Faust à Wittemberg) Des âges évolus j'ai remonté le fleuve, Et le coeur enivré de sublimes desseins, Déserté le Hadès et les ombrages saints, Où l'âme d'une paix ineffable s'abreuve. Le Temps n'a pu fléchir la courbe de mes seins. Je suis toujours debout et forte dans l'épreuve, Moi, l'éternelle vierge et l'éternelle veuve, Gloire d'Hellas, parmi la guerre aux noirs tocsins. O Faust, je viens à toi, quittant le sein des Mères! Pour toi, j'abandonnai, sur l'aile des chimères, L'ombre pâle où les dieux gisent, ensevelis. J'apporte à ton amour, de fond des deux antiques, Ma gorge dont le Temps n'a pas vaincu les lys Et ma voix assouplie aux rythmes prophétiques. (Tr. 35)