"Ah, the universe—il n'y a que ça!" I laughed, to Vendemer, partly with a really amused sense of the exaggerated woe that looked out of his poetic eyes and that seemed an appeal to me not to forsake him, to throw myself into the scale of the associations he would have to stifle, and partly to encourage him, to express my conviction that two such fine minds couldn't in the long run be the worse for coming to an agreement. I might have been a more mocking Mephistopheles handing over his pure spirit to my literally German Faust.
When I came home at eleven o'clock I found him alone in my studio, where, evidently, for some time, he had been moving up and down in agitated thought. The air was thick with Bavarian fumes, with the reverberation of mighty music and great ideas, with the echoes of that "universe" to which I had so mercilessly consigned him. But I judged in a moment that Vendemer was in a very different phase of his evolution from the one in which I had left him. I had never seen his handsome, sensitive face so intensely illumined.
"Ça y est—ça y est!" he exclaimed, standing there with his hands in his pockets and looking at me.
"You've really agreed to do something together?"
"We've sworn a tremendous oath—we've taken a sacred engagement."
"My dear fellow, you're a hero."
"Wait and see! C'est un très-grand esprit."
"So much the better!"
"C'est un bien beau génie. Ah, we've risen—we soar; nous sommes dans les grandes espaces!" my friend continued with his dilated eyes.
"It's very interesting—because it will cost you something."