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By Root 1535 0

others. Not that this kind of unconfessed self-esteem has anything to do with vanity or conceit. For what might satisfy one or other of those failings would give me no pleasure, and I have always refrained from indulging them. But with the people in whose company I have succeeded in concealing most effectively the minor assets a knowledge of which might have given them a less paltry idea of me, I have never been able to deny myself the pleasure of showing them that I take more trouble to avert the risk of death from their path than from my own. As my motive is then self-esteem and not virtue, I find it quite natural that in any crisis they should act differently. I am far from blaming them for it, as I should perhaps do if I had been moved by a sense of duty, a duty which would seem to me in that case to be as incumbent upon them as upon myself. On the contrary, I feel that it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives, while at the same time being unable to prevent myself from pushing my own safety into the background, which is particularly absurd and culpable of me since I have come to realise that the lives of many of the people in front of whom I plant myself when a bomb bursts are more valueless even than my own.

However, on the day of this first visit to Elstir, the time was still distant at which I was to become conscious of this difference in value, and there was no question of danger, but simply—a premonitory sign of that pernicious self-esteem—the question of my not appearing to attach to the pleasure which I so ardently desired more importance than to the work which the painter had still to finish. It was finished at last. And, once we were out of doors, I discovered that—so long were the days still at this season—it was not so late as I had supposed. We strolled down to the front. What stratagems I employed to keep Elstir standing at the spot where I thought that the girls might still come past! Pointing to the cliffs that towered beside us, I kept on asking him to tell me about them, so as to make him forget the time and stay there a little longer. I felt that we had a better chance of waylaying the little band if we moved towards the end of the beach.

“I should like to look at those cliffs with you from a little nearer,” I said to him, having noticed that one of the girls was in the habit of going in that direction. “And as we go, do tell me about Carquethuit. I should so like to see Carquethuit,” I went on, without thinking that the novel character which manifested itself with such force in Elstir’s Carquethuit Harbour might belong perhaps rather to the painter’s vision than to any special quality in the place itself. “Since I’ve seen your picture, I think that is where I should most like to go, there and to the Pointe du Raz, but of course that would be quite a journey from here.”

“Yes, and besides, even if it weren’t nearer, I should advise you perhaps all the same to visit Carquethuit,” he replied. “The Pointe du Raz is magnificent, but after all it’s simply another of those high cliffs of Normandy or Brittany which you know already. Carquethuit is quite different, with those rocks on a low shore. I know nothing in France like it, it reminds me rather of certain aspects of Florida. It’s very curious, and moreover extremely wild. It’s between Clitourps and Nehomme; you know how desolate those parts are; the sweep of the coast-line is exquisite. Here, the coast-line is pretty ordinary, but along there I can’t tell you what grace it has, what softness.”

Dusk was falling; it was time to be turning homewards. I was accompanying Elstir back to his villa when suddenly, as it were Mephistopheles springing up before Faust, there appeared at the end of the avenue—like a simple objectification, unreal and diabolical, of the temperament diametrically opposed to my own, of the semi-barbarous and cruel vitality of which I, in my weakness, my excess of tortured sensibility and intellectuality, was so destitute—a few spots of the essence impossible to mistake for anything else, a few spores of the zoophytic