* * *
"Our two French guests have just left," said a French monk who had been the prior of Crepentois. "I could not hold them here: the companion of my nephew was just singing in the garden in his pretty soprano voice. He almost fainted at hearing some one in the convent sing the close of the song. They left just now and took the train, for their automobile was not ready. We shall send it on to them by rail. They did not impart to me the destination of their journey, but I think that the pious children are bound for Marseilles. At least, I think I heard them talk of that town."
Croniamantal, pale as a sheet, rose, then:
"Excuse me, good fathers," he said, "but it was wrong of me to accept your hospitality. I must go away, do not ask me the reason. But I shall keep a fond memory of the simplicity, the gaiety, the liberty that reign here. All that is dear to me to the highest degree, why, why, alas, can I not profit of it?"
[XVI. PERSECUTION]
At this time prizes for poetry were being awarded every day. Thousands of societies had been founded for this purpose and their members lived on the fat of the land, while making upon fixed dates large benefices to poets. But the 26th of January was the day upon which the largest associations, companies, boards of directors, academies, committees, juries, etc., of the whole world bestowed their awards. Upon this day 8,019 prizes for poetry were distributed, the total of which aggregated 50,005,225 francs.[14] On the other hand, since the taste for poetry had never spread among any class of the population of any country, public opinion had risen powerfully against the poets who were called parasites, lazy, useless, and so forth. The 26th of January of this year passed without incident, but on the following day the great newspaper, La Voix, published at Adelaide (Australia) in the French language, contained an article by the distinguished agricultural chemist Horace Tograth (a German born at Leipzig), whose discoveries and inventions had frequently seemed to border on the miraculous. The article, entitled The Laurel, contained a sort of chronology of the culture of the laurel in Judea, in Greece, in Italy, in Africa and in Provence. The author gave counsel to those who had laurel trees in their gardens, indicating the multiple usage of the laurel, as a food, in art, in poetry, and its rôle as a symbol of poetic glory. He then began to talk of mythology, making allusions to Apollo and the fable of Daphné. Finally, Horace Tograth changed his tone brusquely and concluded his article as follows:
"And furthermore, I say candidly, this useless tree is still too common, and we have less glorious symbolisms to which people attribute the famous savour of the laurel. The laurel holds too large a place upon our overpopulated earth, the laurels are unworthy of living. Each one of them takes the place of two in the sun. Let them be chopped down, and let their leaves be feared as a poison. Hitherto symbols of poetry and literary science, they are nothing more today than that death-glory which is to glory as death is to life, and as the hand of glory is to the key.
"True glory has abandoned poetry for science, philosophy, acrobatics, philanthropy, sociology, etc. ...Poets are good for nothing more nowadays than to receive money which they do not earn, since they scarcely ever work and most of them (except for the minstrels) have no talent and no excuse whatsoever. As to those who have some gifts, they are even more obnoxious, for if they receive nothing they make more noise than a regiment and din our ears with their being persecuted. None of these people have any raison d'être. The prizes which are awarded them are stolen from workers, inventors, scientists, philosophers, acrobats, philanthropists, sociologists, and so forth. The poets must disappear. Lycurgus would have banished them from the Republic, we too must banish them. Otherwise, the poets, lazy fiefs, will become our princes and while doing nothing, live off our work, oppressing us, and mocking us. In short, we must rid ourselves immediately of the poets' tyranny.
"If the republics and the kings, if the nations do not take care, the race of poets, too privileged, will increase in such proportions and so rapidly that in a short time no one will want to work, invent, teach, do dangerous feats, heal the sick and improve the lot of unfortunate men."