ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who
has received a violent blow on the head.

Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying
marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader
who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word
"Shelley" had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a
train of feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many
years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the
reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of
the word "France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final
ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led
to the creation of a mental existence.

And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and
inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the
new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled,
and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile
eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any
semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.

I had read a few chapters of the "Assommoir," as it appeared in _La
République des Lettres_; I had cried, "ridiculous, abominable," only
because it is characteristic of me to instantly form an opinion and
assume at once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back numbers
of the _Voltaire_, and I looked forward to the weekly exposition of the
new faith with febrile eagerness. The great zeal with which the new
master continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which
subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, social, religious,
were caught up and turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of