I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy,--he was still
my soul. But this craft, fashioned of mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at
the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down,
not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was
Gautier; I read "Mdlle. de Maupin." The reaction was as violent as it
was sudden. I was weary of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation
of the body above the soul at once conquered and led me captive; this
plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated saints and a
crucified Redeemer opened up to me illimitable prospects of fresh
beliefs, and therefore new joys in things and new revolts against all
that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. Till
now I had not even remotely suspected that a deification of flesh and
fleshly desire was possible, Shelley's teaching had been, while
accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our
ideal; but now suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with
intoxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and accepting
with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place within as
divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an
aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the
elder gods: not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this
modern world, but the clean pagan nude,--a love of life and beauty, the
broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the
bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the
Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount
Calvary "_ne m'a jamais baigné dans ses flots_."

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime
vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so
inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin