would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the
faculties of man it is divine.

"And--oh, to hell with it! What's it all about, anyway?"

And again, as so often when he had found himself before this
unbridgeable gulf between reason and belief, he recoiled from the leap.

Well, his thoughts had strayed far from the subject of that naturalism
so reviled by Des Hermies. He returned to Grünewald and said to himself
that the great Crucifixion was the masterpiece of an art driven out of
bounds. One need not go far in search of the extra-terrestrial as to
fall into perfervid Catholicism. Perhaps spiritualism would give one all
one required to formulate a supernaturalistic method.

He rose and went into his tiny workroom. His pile of manuscript notes
about the Marshal de Rais, surnamed Bluebeard, looked at him derisively
from the table where they were piled.

"All the same," he said, "it's good to be here, in out of the world and
above the limits of time. To live in another age, never read a
newspaper, not even know that the theatres exist--ah, what a dream! To
dwell with Bluebeard and forget the grocer on the corner and all the
other petty little criminals of an age perfectly typified by the café
waiter who ravishes the boss's daughter--the goose who lays the golden
egg, as he calls her--so that she will have to marry him!"

Bed was a good place, he added, smiling, for he saw his cat, a creature
with a perfect time sense, regarding him uneasily as if to remind him of
their common convenience and to reproach him for not having prepared the