these heads, common enough, many of them, and these physiognomies, often
ugly but powerfully evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute anguish,
spiritual calm or turmoil. The effect was of matter transformed, by
being distended or compressed, to afford an escape from the senses into
remote infinity.

Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation the
year before, although he had not then been so weary as now of _fin de
siècle_ silliness. In Germany, before a Crucifixion by Matthæus
Grünewald, he had found what he was seeking.

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With
extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of
admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the
Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the
Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the
arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body.

This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from
our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the
enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their
sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of
the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready
to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture
in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The
trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or
like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with
flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the
rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had
penetrated.