He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and repeated: "I must love, since I suffer." But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care, respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words written in letters of gold: LITERATURE. He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! At first the idea was outrageous, then he grew accustomed to it; he mentally sketched a first chapter--that of the encounter. He transported the scene to Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, and the personages became pure symbols. The Man, a prisoner, typified the idea of the soul imprisoned in the jail of the flesh, quite ignorant of the external world, refashioning the vague vision transmitted by the senses. The Woman, a madonna, was a statue which the prisoner's love endowed with life and feeling, becoming as really existent to him as a creature of God. And on this theme could be developed all the divagations of love, dream and madness. On the morning of the next day, he commenced this story which was closely based upon his actual state of mind, and in which he would take delight in transposing, in a manner of logical extravagance, the drama he was naively playing with Sixtine. This madonna was the new woman, _la Madonna Novella_, and what name should be given to the prisoner, a prey to his own imagination, if not that of _Della Preda_, since we are in Italy. _Veltro_ fits the indispensable turnkey, and for title--_The Adorer_. CHAPTER XII THE ADORER "_Ave rosa speciosa!_" Innocent III. I. Blood Red Sainte Napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux, Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule, As-tu trouvé ta croix dans le désert des cieux? Gérard de Nerval, _les Chimères_. The night entered through the loophole--the end of a day of horror. He had been forgotten; he had not been given his daily walk. Perhaps he was going to perish here, without seeing the Novella again.