“As well as I can judge from the photograph I have seen,” answered M. Bergeret, “this African mosaic seems the copy of an original full of character. This portrait might quite stand for Virgil, and it is by no means impossible that it is an authentic portrait of him. Your Renaissance scholars, Monsieur Aspertini, always depicted the author of the _Æneid_ with the features of a sage. The old Venetian editions of Dante that I have turned over in our library are full of wood engravings in which Virgil wears the beard of a philosopher. The next age made him as beautiful as a young god. Now we have him with a square jaw and wearing a fringe of hair across his forehead in the Roman style. The mental effect produced by his work has varied just as much. Every literary age creates pictures from it which are entirely different according to the period. And without recalling the legends of the Middle Ages about Virgil the necromancer, it is a fact that the Mantuan is admired for reasons that change according to the period. In him Macrobius hailed the Sibyl of the Empire. It was his philosophy that Dante and Petrarch seized upon, while Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo discovered in him the forerunner of Christianity. For my part, being but a juggler with words, I only use his works as a philological pastime. You, Monsieur Aspertini, see him in the guise of a great storehouse of Roman antiquities, and that is perhaps the most solidly valuable part of the _Æneid_. The truth is that we are in the habit of hanging our ideas upon the letter of these ancient texts. Each generation forms a new conception of these masterpieces of antiquity and thus endows them with a kind of progressive immortality. My colleague Paul Stapfer has said many good things on this head.” “Very noteworthy things indeed,” answered Captain Aspertini. “But he does not entertain such hopeless views as yours as to the ebb and flow of human opinions.” Thus did these two good fellows toss from one to the other those glorious and beautiful ideas by which life is embellished. “Do tell me what has become,” asked Captain Aspertini, “of that soldierly Latinist whom I met here, that charming M. Roux, who seemed to value military glory at its true worth, for he disdained to be a corporal.” M. Bergeret replied curtly that M. Roux had returned to his regiment.