Then Gerald remarked, to this one of his discarded personalities: “You move me, Messire François. You sound upon my heart-strings a resounding chord, through your employment of a figure of speech which is always effective. I do not know why, but any imaginable bit of verse conveying a statement manifestly untrue can be made edifying and sublime through ending it with the word ‘stars’. We poets have convinced everybody, including ourselves, that there is some occult virtue in the act of looking at the stars. So, when you said just now, ‘Although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars’, I was moved very mightily. I seemed to hear the yearning cry of all human aspirations, foiled but superb. Yet if you had asserted your eyes to have been habitually, or at least every clear night, upon the planets—or, for that matter, upon the comets or the asteroids,—I would not have been moved in the least.”
“It is sufficient that you were moved without knowing why,” observed Nero. “That is the magic of poetry. Very often when I recited some of my best poems, to commemorate the sorrows of Orestes or Canace or Œdipus, I myself could not quite understand the springs of that terrible misery which convulsed my hearers. They wept; they fainted; a number of the women entered prematurely into the labors of childbirth; and I was compelled to have the doors and windows guarded by my Praetorian soldiers because so many of the audience invariably attempted to escape from the well-nigh intolerable ecstasies which my art provoked. Such is the magic of great poetry, a thing not ever wholly to be explained even by the poet.”
Then Gerald said: “Yet, you two poets who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find when you have reached Antan, which is the goal of all the gods, some third truth?”
And it seemed to him that the faces of the two myths had now become evasive and more wary.
Nero replied, “For a poet, there exist always just as many truths as he cares to imagine.”
And Villon remarked: “I would phrase it somewhat differently. I would say there exist more truths than any poet cares to imagine. But it comes to the same thing.”
“Yes,” Gerald assented,—“for it comes to an evasion. Yet I, who also am a poet, I retain my faith in the rather beautiful idea of that third truth.”
And then Gerald told them that he himself had long dabbled in the art of poetry. “Indeed,” he added, generously, “I will now recite to you one of my sonnets which appears appropriate to the occasion.”
“Dog,” Villon replied, taking up his hat, “does not eat dog.”
And Nero very hastily stated that, howsoever unbounded their regret, they really must be hurrying on to the city of marvels.