liness as a dilettante objects to the
mediocre in art. Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ugliness.
Having become aware of it, he was a potent rebel. He began to write in
French, spreading his revolutionary doctrine of facile spiritual
reward. He splintered purgatory into fragments; what he offered was an
earthly paradise--humanity given eternal absolution, freed of fear,
prejudice, hatred--above all, of fear--and certain of endless life.

Now that we have entered the cosmic era, we look back at him with
understanding. Then, he was a radical and an atheist.

Of course he had followers--seekers after eternity who drank his
promises like thirsty wanderers come upon a spring in the desert. To
some of them he was a god. To some, a mystic. To some, a healer. To
some--and they were the ones who finally controlled his destiny--he
was simply a dangerous lunatic.

Two women in Marseilles committed suicide--they were followers,
disciples, whatever you choose to call them. At any rate, they
believed that where it was so simple a matter to die, it was foolish
to stay on in a world that had treated them badly. One had lost a son,
the other a lover. One shot herself; the other drowned herself in the
canal. And both of them left letters addressed to Pilleux--enough to
damn him in the eyes of authority. He was told that he might leave
France, or take the consequences--a mild enough warning, but it
worked. He dared not provoke an inquiry into his past. So he shipped
on board a small Mediterranean steamer as fireman, and disappeared, no
one knew where.

Two years later he reappeared in Africa. Marie was with him. They were
living in a small town on the rim of the desert near Biskra. Grimshaw
occupied a native house--a mere hovel, flat-roofed, sun-baked, bare as
a hermit's cell. Marie had hired herself out as _femme de chambre_ in
the only hotel in the place. "I watched over him," she told me. "And
believe me, _monsieur_, he needed care! He was thin as a ghost. He had
starved more than once during those two years. He told me to go back
to France, to seek happiness for myself. But for me happiness was with
him. I laughed and stayed. I loved him--magnificently, _monsieur_."

Grimshaw was writing again--in French--and his work began to appear in
the Parisian journals, a strange poetic prose impregnated with
mysticism. It was Grimshaw, sublimated. I saw it myself, although at
that time I had not heard Waram's story. The French critic