bearings while waiting for a congenial subject to present itself. That
explains your spiritual disarray of the last few months and your
immediate recovery as soon as you stumbled onto Giles de Rais."

Des Hermies had diagnosed him accurately. The day on which Durtal had
plunged into the frightful and delightful latter mediæval age had been
the dawn of a new existence. The flouting of his actual surroundings
brought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely reorganized his
life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of contemporary
letters, in the château de Tiffauges with the monster Bluebeard, with
whom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous amity.

Thus history had for Durtal supplanted the novel, whose forced banality,
conventionality, and tidy structure of plot simply griped him. Yet
history, too, was only a peg for a man of talent to hang style and
ideas on, for events could not fail to be coloured by the temperament
and distorted by the bias of the historian.

As for the documents and sources! Well attested as they might be, they
were all subject to revision, even to contradiction by others exhumed
later which were no less authentic than the first and which also but
waited their turn to be refuted by newer discoveries.

In the present rage for grubbing around in dusty archives writing of
history served as an outlet for the pedantry of the moles who reworked
their mouldy findings and were duly rewarded by the Institute with
medals and diplomas.

For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most
infantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with a