ded by understanding. The
fire was lighted at the edge of a large square patch of ground, which
had been dug up in broad parallel furrows, so as to remove the coffins
before allotting the soil to other corpses; just as the peasant turns
the stubble over before sowing afresh. The long empty furrows seemed
to yawn, the mounds of rich soil seemed to be purifying under the broad
grey sky; and the fire thus burning in that corner was formed of the
rotten wood of the coffins that had been removed--slit, broken boards,
eaten into by the earth, often reduced to a ruddy humus, and gathered
together in an enormous pile. They broke up with faint detonations, and
being damp with human mud, they refused to flame, and merely smoked with
growing intensity. Large columns of the smoke rose into the pale sky,
and were beaten down by the November wind, and torn into ruddy shreds,
which flew across the low tombs of quite one half of the cemetery.

Sandoz and Bongrand had looked at the scene without saying a word. Then,
having passed the fire, the former resumed:

'No, he did not prove to be the man of the formula he laid down. I mean
that his genius was not clear enough to enable him to set that formula
erect and impose it upon the world by a definite masterpiece. And now
see how other fellows scatter their efforts around him, after him! They
go no farther than roughing off, they give us mere hasty impressions,
and not one of them seems to have strength enough to become the master
who is awaited. Isn't it irritating, this new notion of light, this
passion for truth carried as far as scientific analysis, this evolution
begun with so much originality, and now loitering on the way, as it
were, falling into the hands of tricksters, and never coming to a head,
simply because the necessary man isn't born? But pooh! the man will be
born; nothing is ever lost, light must be.'

'Who knows? not always,' said Bongrand. 'Life miscarries, like
everything else. I listen to you, you know, but I'm a despairer. I am
dying of sadness, and I feel that everything else is dying. Ah! yes,
there is something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the times--this end of
a century is all demolition, a litter of broken monuments, and soil
that has been turned over and over a hundred times, the whole exhaling a
stench of death! Can anybody remain in good health amid all that?
One's nerves become unhinged, the great neurosis is there, art grows
unsettled, there is general