nts with their mistresses were coming back to their
rooms. Afraid of being recognised, he rose and leant over the parapet;
and while the party passed close to him without seeing him, he reflected
with bitterness that he had never amused himself, never allowed himself
such a fine night's holiday of song beneath the starlight. His ambition
had always been fixed unbendingly on the approach to yonder dome, the
dome, as it were, of a temple, whose beliefs and whose ritual he had
respected in anticipation.

And what had yonder dome given him in return? Nothing, absolutely
nothing. Even on the day of his admission, when the speeches were over
and the double-edged compliments at an end, he had felt the sensation of
emptiness and deluded hope. He had said to himself as he drove home
to change his green coat, 'Have I really got in? Why, it can't be like
this.' Since then, by dint of constant lying to himself and echoing,
with his colleagues, that it was delightful, delicious, he had ended by
believing so. But now the veil had fallen away, and he saw the truth;
and he would have liked to proclaim with a thousand tongues to the youth
of France, 'The Academie is a snare and a delusion. Go your way and
do your work. Sacrifice nothing to the Academie, for it has nothing
to offer you, neither gift, nor glory, nor the best thing of all,
self-contentment. It is neither a retreat nor a refuge; it is a hollow
idol, a religion that offers no consolations. The great troubles of
life come upon you there as elsewhere; under that dome men have killed
themselves, men have gone mad there! Those who in their agony have
turned to the Academie, and weary of loving, or weary of cursing, have
stretched forth their arms to her, have clasped but a shadow.'

The old schoolmaster was speaking aloud, bareheaded, grasping the
parapet with both hands as in old days he used to hold the edge of his
desk at lessons. The river rolled on below, tinged with hues of night,
between its rows of winking lamps. An uncanny thing is the speechless
life of light, moving, and looking, and never saying what it means. On
the quay the song of a drunken man died quavering away in the distance,
'When Cupid... in the morn... awakes.' The accent showed that the
merry singer was an Auvergnat making his way back to his coal-barge. It
reminded him of Teyssedre, the polisher, and his glass of good wine. He
saw him wiping his mouth on his shirt-sleeve. 'It's the only real good
in lif