On Herr Doktor Friedrich Asmus the land of Lorraine exercises this sort of transformation the more readily that he adores Colette; and she is touched by his loyalty and strength. Nature pushes her into his arms; and old Madame Baudoche can only sigh and say, ‘C’est bien dommage qu’il soit Allemand!’ The excellent young man sets out on his summer holidays almost sure of Colette’s accord. But she is a young maid of the lineage of Corneille, accustomed to poise her feelings, and to decide less by a passion of the heart than by a free consent of the mind. For the whole world, she would not forfeit her sense of honour! And Asmus returns on Commemoration Day, when all that is French in Metz is met together to attend a service in memory of the soldiers of France fallen during the siege. During that service something larger than herself takes possession of the heart and soul of the little dressmaker. ‘Elle se sent chargée d’une grande dignité, soulevée vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut et de plus constant que sa modeste personne.’ Coming out of church she turns to the kind and fervent young Prussian who accompanies her: ‘Monsieur le docteur, dit la jeune fille, je ne peux vous épouser.’ Maurice Barrès also is like his heroic Colette. ‘Il se sent chargé d’une grande dignité, soulevé vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut, et de plus constant que sa personne.’ He has gone far since first we met him, half-mystical, half-quizzical, rapt in the cult of the Ego. Now, as we have said, freed from the service of Self, ‘La Terre et les Morts’ is his watchword. III Or rather ‘La Terre et les Morts’ _was_ his watchword, for of late years the Dead have revealed to him something wider and deeper than the Land. Let us compare with the perverse charm and insidious nihilism of his earlier book on Toledo, _Du Sang, de la Volupté et de la Mort_ (1895), his treatment of the same theme in his recent essay on Il Greco, and we shall catch the difference. In either volume the landscape is the same. The scene is arid; the red, steep banks of the ravine through which the Tagus rolls its tawny floods lead to a city set in ruin upon its lofty rocks; no site suggests a more ardent melancholy. In his young days, Maurice Barrès declared that the traveller entering Toledo tasted the same harsh and acrid pleasure that he derived from reading Pascal’s _Pensées_ or from contemplating Michael-Angelo’s _Penseroso_: in three gulps, it is the same rough and heroic draught. The melancholy splendour of the scene exaggerates the stranger’s sense of loneliness. There is an implacable indifference to his needs in these magnificent ruins, and the yellow rocks repeat the strange device inscribed upon a brass let into the floor of the Cathedral. Twenty years ago, this device appeared, in the eyes of Barrès, to declare the secret of the city. They are singular words to adorn a Christian tomb: _Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil_.