"We must return to it. Zola and others may continue to catalogue their inferior animals, they have no interest for us: they are crude creatures about to acquire light, chrysalid intelligences: we are little concerned with the quality of the food with which they gorge themselves, or with their pruriencies. Whatever is not intellectual is foreign to us. "What a disconcerting irony that in this century which drinks the blue democratic wine from the Chalice, no original prose writer was revealed who was not Christian by instinct or belief, desire or necessity, love or disgust,--from Chateaubriand to Villiers and Huysmans, and no true poet, from Vigny to Baudelaire and Verlaine! "Comte has not touched, with his heavy stones, the souls he wanted to overwhelm,--no more than an infant who hurls tiny pebbles from the strand at the inaccessible flight of gulls! And this very age, which claims to admit only the force that is mathematically proved, will be extinguished by verbal idealism. People will no longer believe in things, but in the mere ideas we have of them; and, as the obscurity of the idea is clarified only by speech, nothing more of things will exist than the words describing them and the final destruction of matter will end with the judgment of this axiom: The universe is the sign of the word...." "But," reflected Hubert again, as he left the _café_, "this, and my scorn of a derisive reality and illusive truth, does not imply laziness in art, or cowardice, or the approximate. Nor has the idealism I profess anything in common with the vague intuitions of those spinners of psychological ribbons,--it is a documented idealism, solidly erected, like the ornamented portal of a cathedral, upon the foundations of accuracy...." CHAPTER XXXIII AN EVENING IN SOCIETY "En résumé, la fête me paraissait un bal de fantômes." Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, _l'Amour suprême_. Hubert gladly mingled in the conversations, dances, scandals, the many (rather charming) frivolities which took place from eleven o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning at the home of the Countess Aubry. Flowers, music, vocal screeches and caresses, shoulders, diamonds, bedizened uniforms, for the countess had connections with foreign diplomacy. Sixtine, an augural apparition, appeared through the clinking Japanese portiere; one of her hands played with her multicolored pearls. She advanced, Moscowitch behind her, his eyes fixed on her pure shoulders. His huge stature dominated the young woman by a whole head; he walked after her and Sixtine, faltering, seemed a very little girl kept in leading-strings by a giant. Hubert, with a bow of impertinent familiarity, passed between them and offered Sixtine his arm towards a chair. The Russian, resigned, joined a group of men and watched the talkers. "You looked as though you were under the guardianship of that strong man, and I wanted to deliver you."