There was now no place where one could meet a few artists and privately,
intimately, discuss ideas at ease. One was at the mercy of the café
crowd or the drawing-room company. One's interlocutor was listening
avidly to steal one's ideas, and behind one's back one was being
vituperated. And the women were always intruding.

In this indiscriminate world there was no illuminating criticism,
nothing but small talk, elegant or inelegant.

Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate with
thieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he broke
off relations with his confrères.

He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation with
them. Formerly when he accepted naturalism--airtight and unsatisfactory
as it was--he had been able to argue esthetics with them, but now!

"The point is," Des Hermies was always telling him, "that there is a
basic difference between you and the other realists, and no patched-up
alliance could possibly be of long duration. You execrate the age and
they worship it. There is the whole matter. You were fated some day to
get away from this Americanized art and attempt to create something less
vulgar, less miserably commonplace, and infuse a little spirituality
into it.

"In all your books you have fallen on our _fin de siècle_--our _queue du
siècle_--tooth and nail. But, Lord! a man soon gets tired of whacking
something that doesn't fight back but merely goes its own way repeating
its offences. You needed to escape into another epoch and get your