“My poor friend,” said Laura, with a touch of sadness, “it’s quite clear that you’ll never write this novel of yours.” “Well, let me tell you,” cried Edouard impetuously, “that I don’t care. Yes, if I don’t succeed in writing the book, it’ll be because the history of the book will have interested me more than the book itself--taken the book’s place; and it’ll be a very good thing.” “Aren’t you afraid, when you abandon reality in this way, of losing yourself in regions of deadly abstraction and of making a novel about ideas instead of about human beings?” asked Sophroniska kindly. “And even so!” cried Edouard with redoubled energy. “Must we condemn the novel of ideas because of the groping and stumbling of the incapable people who have tried their hands at it? Up till now we have been given nothing but novels with a purpose parading as novels of ideas. But that’s not it at all, as you may imagine. Ideas ... ideas, I must confess, interest me more than men--interest me more than anything. They live; they fight; they perish like men. Of course it may be said that our only knowledge of them is through men, just as our only knowledge of the wind is through the reeds that it bends; but all the same the wind is of more importance than the reeds.” “The wind exists independently of the reed,” ventured Bernard. His intervention made Edouard, who had long been waiting for it, start afresh with renewed spirit: “Yes, I know; ideas exist only because of men; but that’s what’s so pathetic; they live at their expense.” Bernard had listened to all this with great attention; he was full of scepticism and very near taking Edouard for a mere dreamer; but during the last few moments he had been touched by his eloquence and had felt his mind waver in its breath; “But,” thought Bernard, “the reed lifts its head again as soon as the wind has passed.” He remembered what he had been taught at school--that man is swayed by his passions and not by ideas. In the mean time Edouard was going on: “What I should like to do is something like the art of fugue writing. And I can’t see why what was possible in music should be impossible in literature....” To which Sophroniska rejoined that music is a mathematical art, and moreover that Bach, by dealing only with figures and by banishing all pathos and all humanity, had achieved an abstract _chef d’œuvre_ of boredom, a kind of astronomical temple, open only to the few rare initiated. Edouard at once protested that, for his part, he thought the temple admirable, and considered it the apex and crowning point of all Bach’s career. “After which,” added Laura, “people were cured of the fugue for a long time to come. Human emotion, when it could no longer inhabit it, sought a dwelling place elsewhere.”