bove on the Port Royal, two steps away.

The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply
enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the
dream reality for the reality itself.

Artifice, besides, seemed to Des Esseintes the final distinctive mark
of man's genius.

Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of
her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate
patience of aesthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of the
specialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners of
the tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of all
others. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal
agency of mountains and seas!

There is not one of her inventions, no matter how subtle or imposing
it may be, which human genius cannot create; no Fontainebleau forest,
no moonlight which a scenic setting flooded with electricity cannot
produce; no waterfall which hydraulics cannot imitate to perfection;
no rock which pasteboard cannot be made to resemble; no flower which
taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot simulate.

There can be no doubt about it: this eternal, driveling, old woman is
no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace
her by artifice.

Closely observe that work of hers which is considered the most
exquisite, that creation of hers whose beauty is everywhere conceded
the most perfect and original--woman. Has not man made, for his own
use, an animated and artificial being which easily equals woman, from
the point of view of plastic beauty? Is there a woman, whose form is
more dazzling, more splendid than the two locomotives that pass over
the Northern Railroad lines?

One, the Crampton, is an adorable, shrill-voiced blonde, a trim,
gilded blonde, with a large, fragile body imprisoned in a glittering
corset of copper, and having the long, sinewy lines of a cat. Her
extraordinary grace is frightening, as, with the sweat of her hot
sides rising upwards and her steel muscles stiffening, she puts in
motion the immense rose-window of her fine wheels and darts forward,
mettlesome, along rapids and floods.

The other, the Engerth, is a nobly proportioned dusky brunette
emitting raucous, muffled cries. Her heavy loins are strangled in a
cast-iron breast-plate. A monstrous beast with a disheveled mane of
black smoke and with six low, coupled wheels! What irresistible powe