beneficent storm-god represented with his eye perpetually winking (like
sheet lightning), lest his concentrated look (the thunderbolt) should
reduce the universe to ashes.... His watery parentage, and the
storm-god's relationship with a swan-maiden of the Apsarasas (typifying
the mists and clouds), and with Freydis the fire queen, are equally
obvious: whereas Niafer is plainly a variant of Nephthys, Lady of the
House, whose personality Dr. Budge sums up as 'the goddess of the death
which is not eternal,' or Nerthus, the Subterranean Earth, which the
warm rainstorm quickens to life and fertility."

All this seems dull enough to be plausible. Yet no less an authority
than Charles Garnier has replied, in rather indignant rebuttal: "Qu'ont
étè en réalité Manuel et Siegfried, Achille et Rustem? Par quels
exploits ont-ils mérité l'éternelle admiration que leur ont vouée les
hommes de leur race? Nul ne répondra jamais à ces questions.... Mais
Poictesme croit à la réalité de cette figure que ses romans ont faite si
belle, car le pays n'a pas d'autre histoire. Cette figure du Comte
Manuel est réelle d'ailleurs, car elle est l'image purifiée de la race
qui l'a produite, et, si on peut s'exprimer ainsi, l'incarnation de son
génie."

--Which is quite just, and, when you come to think it over, proves Dom
Manuel to be nowadays, for practical purposes, at least as real as Dr.
Paul Vanderhoffen.


III


Between the two main epic cycles of Poictesme, as embodied in _Les