bustling, perfect anarchy, all the madness
of self-love at bay. Never have people quarrelled more and seen less
clearly than since it is pretended that one knows everything.'

Sandoz, who had grown pale, watched the large ruddy coils of smoke
rolling in the wind.

'It was fated,' he mused in an undertone. 'Our excessive activity and
pride of knowledge were bound to cast us back into doubt. This century,
which has already thrown so much light over the world, was bound to
finish amid the threat of a fresh flow of darkness--yes, our discomfort
comes from that! Too much has been promised, too much has been hoped
for; people have looked forward to the conquest and explanation of
everything, and now they growl impatiently. What! don't things go
quicker than that? What! hasn't science managed to bring us absolute
certainty, perfect happiness, in a hundred years? Then what is the use
of going on, since one will never know everything, and one's bread will
always be as bitter? It is as if the century had become bankrupt, as if
it had failed; pessimism twists people's bowels, mysticism fogs their
brains; for we have vainly swept phantoms away with the light of
analysis, the supernatural has resumed hostilities, the spirit of
the legends rebels and wants to conquer us, while we are halting with
fatigue and anguish. Ah! I certainly don't affirm anything; I myself
am tortured. Only it seems to me that this last convulsion of the old
religious terrors was to be foreseen. We are not the end, we are but a
transition, a beginning of something else. It calms me and does me good
to believe that we are marching towards reason, and the substantiality
of science.'

His voice had become husky with emotion, and he added:

'That is, unless madness plunges us, topsy-turvy, into night again, and
we all go off throttled by the ideal, like our old friend who sleeps
there between his four boards.'

The hearse was leaving transversal Avenue No. 2 to turn, on the right,
into lateral Avenue No. 3, and the painter, without speaking, called
the novelist's attention to a square plot of graves, beside which the
procession was now passing.

There was here a children's cemetery, nothing but children's tombs,
stretching far away in orderly fashion, separated at regular intervals
by narrow paths, and looking like some infantile city of death. There
were tiny little white crosses, tiny little white railings, disappearing
almost beneath an efflorescence of