delicate, perfect flowers clambering over the gravelike soul of Barres. He
stayed for a moment or two before the genius, part sublime, part silly, of
Maeterlinck: from that there issued a polite mysticism, monotonous, numbing
like some vague sorrow. He shook himself, and plunged into the heavy,
sluggish stream, the muddy romanticism of Zola, with whom he was already
acquainted, and when he emerged from that it was to sink back and drown in
a deluge of literature.

The submerged lands exhaled an _odor di femina_. The literature of the day
teemed with effeminate men and women. It is well that women should write if
they are sincere enough to describe what no man has yet seen: the depths
of the soul of a woman. But only very few dared do that: most of them only
wrote to attract the men: they were as untruthful in their books as in
their drawing-rooms: they jockeyed their facts and flirted with the reader.
Since they were no longer religious, and had no confessor to whom to tell
their little lapses, they told them to the public. There was a perfect
shower of novels, almost all scabrous, all affected, written in a sort of
lisping style, a style scented with flowers and fine perfumes--sometimes
too fine--sometimes not fine at all--and the eternal stale, warm, sweetish
smell. Their books reeked of it. Christophe thought, like Goethe: "Let
women do what they like with poetry and writing: but men must not write
like women! That I cannot stand." He could not help being disgusted by
their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to
expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest,
their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their
hotch-potch of subtlety and brutality.

But Christophe was ready to admit that he was not in a position to judge.
He was deafened by the row of this babel of words. It was impossible to
hear the little fluting sounds that were drowned in it all. For even among