His feet sketched a kind of pirouette; the handkerchief fell to the ground. Lafcadio hastened to pick it up and, as he was stooping, he felt Julius’s hand laid gently on his shoulder, just as once before he had felt Juste-Agénor’s. Lafcadio smiled and raised himself.
“I’ve known you such a short time,” said Julius, “and yet this evening I can’t help talking to you like a....”
He stopped.
“I’m listening like a brother, Monsieur de Baraglioul,” Lafcadio was emboldened to take up the words, “—since you allow me to.”
“You see, Lafcadio, in the set which I frequent in Paris—smart people, and literary people, and ecclesiastics and academicians—there is really nobody I can speak to—nobody, I mean, to whom I can confide the new preoccupations which beset me. For I must confess to you that, since our last meeting, my point of view has completely changed.”
“So much the better,” said Lafcadio impertinently.
“You can’t imagine, because you aren’t in the trade, how an erroneous system of ethics can hamper the free development of one’s creative faculties. So nothing is further from my old novels than the one I am planning now. I used to demand logic and consistency from my characters, and in order to make quite sure of getting them, I began by demanding them from myself. It wasn’t natural. We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.”
Lafcadio continued to smile as he waited for what was to come next, amused to recognise, at this remove, the effect of his first remarks.
“How shall I put it, Lafcadio? For the first time I see before me a free field.... Can you understand what that means? A free field!... I say to myself that it always has been, always will be free, and that up till now the only things to hinder me have been impure considerations—questions of a successful career, of public opinion—the poet’s continual vain hope of reward at the hands of ungrateful judges. Henceforth I hope for nothing—except from myself—henceforth I hope for everything from myself—I hope for everything from the man who is sincere—everything and anything! For now I feel in myself the strangest possibilities. And as it’s only on paper, I shall boldly let myself go. We shall see! We shall see!”
He took a deep breath, flung himself back sideways with one shoulder-blade raised, almost as if a wing were already beginning to sprout, and as if he were stifling with the weight of fresh perplexities. He went on incoherently in a lower voice: