scover
in any way how the details of his life given here were supposed to help
a person aiming at success. One anecdote described how Napoleon always
wiped his pen on his knee-breeches. I suppose the moral is: always wipe
your pen on your knee-breeches, and you will win the battle of Wagram.
Another story told that he let loose a gazelle among the ladies of his
Court. Clearly the brutal practical inference is--loose a gazelle among
the ladies of your acquaintance, and you will be Emperor of the French.
Get on with a gazelle or get out. The book entirely reconciled me to
the soft twilight of the station. Then I suddenly saw that there was a
symbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are
vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness
in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their
hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside. But the
softness is there; everything in this twilight temple is soft.

XXXIV. The Diabolist

Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of
truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned, such as meeting
President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab. What I have now to relate
really happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics or
of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with
another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible
thing that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long ago
that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue, only of its
main questions and answers; but there is one sentence in it for which I
can answer absolutely and word for word. It was a sentence so awful that
I could not forget it if I would. It was the last sentence spoken; and
it was not spoken to me.

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An art
school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this
respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline,
it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the
idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or
do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the
latter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who were
very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I was