And the same passionate prolongation shows itself at another moment in a tender encroachment, a yearning monopoly, as though the father would engross and captivate the child and make him his, nay, make him _he_!--pour into this new vial the old wine of his own heart, fill the transparent and unsullied vase with the precious vintage which it shall carry safely for one more season, decanted, as it were, from one vessel into another. The child is a new lease of life; the child is a bath of renewal; new eyes wherewith to see things in the old forgotten glamour; new ears with which to hear delicate sounds that this long while have escaped the father’s thickening tissues; above all the child is an innocence, a freshness unspeakable:-- ‘Tu vis chacune de mes heures. Avec toi je repasserai par mon humble sentier. Ô ma jeunesse, ma plus bête et jeune jeunesse, qui refleurit! Quand j’étais rassasié, voilà que, par cet enfant, je me retrouve à jeune devant le vaste univers.’ This pater-familias had been the most passionate of pilgrims. Under the correctness and irony of his style there had trembled an exasperated sensibility. Impassioned and methodical, enthusiastic and circumspect, chimerical and positive, two natures had warred in Barrès; their conflict had been at once his torment and his delight; and the most romantic of European landscapes had long been the battlefield of their interior quarrel. On the red and sunburned hills of Toledo, Barrès had mused on the cruelty of sensual passion and on the imminence of death; he had meditated in the cathedral and had read the inscription on a pavement at his feet: ‘Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil.’ And Venice had dissolved in his veins her enervating beauty. But now it was towards Sparta that he took the road. The very title is a programme--_Le Voyage de Sparte_! (1906). Of all the glorious memories of Greece there is nothing that so much attracts our traveller as the memory of two foreign visitors--Chateaubriand and Lord Byron; the pathetic rather than the heroic remains his ideal still. Yet little by little Athena draws his soul towards her; first by Antigone, a figure at once pathetic and heroic, faithful to her dead, a holocaust to her race; and next by the tombs of Greece, sepulchres carved over with images of beauty and regret, yet without despair or anguish. They teach that calm acceptance of the inevitable which is more than resignation, which is serenity.