"Ah! I mount very high, I go very far. Like a bomb my head is filled with explosives and the lucidity of my mind grows extremely bright.... Then the novel will be vanquished: a new form of analysis will have been demonstrated. The identity of character will be affirmed by its very contradictions and something Hegelian will relieve the gloomy simplicity of ordinary creatures clothed in the rigidity of a material style. The novel of hearts, the novel of souls, the novel of bodies, the novel of all the sensibilities: after this must come the novel of minds. As I understand it, the word 'soul' represents the quintessence of heart; mind, that is to say pure intelligence in conflict with carnal inconveniences, was disdained, without doubt, as uninteresting. Always, and nothing but this, conjunctions of sexes and joy. Oh! well! quite natural! 'to possess the woman one loves.' But at last there are modern Antonies who have proposed other pur-poses to themselves, who have reduced all duties to a single duty--to conform one's life to one's dream. Passersby who jostle you proceed dreaming of the universal idealism as seriously as you of the surprises of perfected corsets. And some of them, if the beast asks for oats will answer: 'Death's white horse did not eat any of it.' And do you not suppose that if humiliating forces curve their refractory knees before a woman, they will not have, very often, recourse to the consolation of inward irony? In fine, I affirm the cerebral life--and all the rest was written in manuals of psychology. "Irony is but a momentary protest, a mental destruction and a pledge against the excess of sensual satisfaction; it is not a certain way of liberation. From this halting-place one gradually mounts to a dominating position by pride or by contemplation, by art or by mysticism. These methods, known in their principle, are denied, like fairy-like childishness: in the novel they must be given the importance they have in daily life: As an animal, man thought only of perfecting his animalism; and Christianity was, one thinks, a notable spiritual advance. It endowed simple humanity with a complex soul. When Flaubert wrote _Salammbô_, he instinctively made the young priestess a Carmelite rather than a Vestal, for the Vestal obeys an order and the Carmelite a love; one is attached to her position through habit, the other through love. The idyl, the satire of customs, the picaresque romance, the tragic and fatal passion, the patriotic epic, the amorous plaint,--the ancients had no other literature: the first histories of a soul, the first analytical novel was spontaneously born in the new genius of a Christianized mind and it was Saint Augustine who wrote it. Modern literature commences with the _Confessions_.