d to an English Catholic who had come with us,
that a certain holy woman had been the "victim" for his village, and that
another holy woman who had been "victim" for all France, had given him her
Crucifix, because he, too, was doomed to become a "victim."

French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical
proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to
Paul Claudel his _L'Annonce faite a Marie_, did really cure disease by
taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of
sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind
flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to
accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if
I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in
my Lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of
Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by the intellect his one
overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of
the saints, are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity with a
life beyond individual being; and so being all subjective he would take
upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender
myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled persons who had
never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often, too,
practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or
dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, in so
far as those persons are in themselves complementary or contrasting, that
I am convinced that it is precisely from the saint or potential saint that
he would gather this knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy,
pathetic girls, his horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all
the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the
phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair
shirt. I once said to him half seriously, "Beardsley, I was defending you
last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by
saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity," and he
answered, "If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different,"
meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of
motive could change the image.

I know that some turn of disease had begun to parade erotic images before