of
Nature, sublime, indifferent, lovely, and cruel. It gave you
an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the endlessness
of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every
day, the cocoa-nuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the
alligator-pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as
though there were in them a spirit and a mystery which I am
ever on the point of seizing and which forever escapes me.
The colours were the colours familiar to me, and yet they
were different. They had a significance which was all their own.
And those nude men and women. They were of the earth, and yet
apart from it. They seemed to possess something of the clay
of which they were created, and at the same time something divine.
You saw man in the nakedness of his primeval instincts,
and you were afraid, for you saw yourself."

Dr. Coutras shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"You will laugh at me. I am a materialist, and I am a gross,
fat man -- Falstaff, eh? -- the lyrical mode does not become me.
I make myself ridiculous. But I have never seen painting
which made so deep an impression upon me. <i Tenez>, I had just
the same feeling as when I went to the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
There too I was awed by the greatness of the man who
had painted that ceiling. It was genius, and it was
stupendous and overwhelming. I felt small and insignificant.
But you are prepared for the greatness of Michael Angelo.
Nothing had prepared me for the immense surprise of these
pictures in a native hut, far away from civilisation, in a
fold of the mountain above Taravao. And Michael Angelo is
sane and healthy. Those great works of his have the calm of
the sublime; but here, notwithstanding beauty, was something
troubling. I do not know what it was. It made me uneasy.
It gave me the impression you get when you are sitting next door
to a room that you know is empty, but in which, you know not
why, you have a dreadful consciousness that notwithstanding
there is someone. You scold yourself; you know it is only
your nerves -- and yet, and yet... In a little while it is
impossible to resist the terror that seizes you, and you are
helpless in the clutch of an unseen horror. Yes; I confess I
was not altogether sorry when I heard that those strange
masterpieces had been destroyed."

"Destroyed?" I cried.

"<i Mais oui>; did you not know?"

"How should I know? It is true I had never heard of this work;
but I thought perhaps it ha