In the same raiment that he had worn during the journey without change he went to work, and the marble obediently responded to the resounding blows of his hammer. He worked long and eagerly, refusing to admit any one; at last one morning he announced that his work was ready, and summoned all his friends, the severe critics and experts in art. He attired himself into sumptuous and festive garments that sparkled with gold and shone with the purple of Bysson.
“Behold what I have created”, he said musingly.
His friends gazed on the work and the shadow of a deep sorrow clouded their faces. The group was simply hideous to look upon: it possessed none of the forms familiar to the eye, though it was not devoid of a dim suggestion of some novel and fanciful image. Upon a twisted thin little twig, or rather upon the misshapen likeness of one, crouched an unsightly, distorted mass of crude fragments that seemed to be weakly striving to flee in all directions. And casually, under a crude ridge they observed a wondrously wrought butterfly, with diaphanous wings that was all aquiver with the futile longing to soar skyward.
“Why this wondrously wrought butterfly, Aurelius?” someone dubiously inquired.
“I don’t know”, replied the sculptor.
But the truth has to be told, and one of his friends (the one who loved him best) interposed: “My poor friend, this is a monstrosity. It must be destroyed. Give me the hammer.”
And with two blows of the hammer he destroyed the hideous heap, sparing only the wondrous butterfly.
From that time on Aurelius created nothing. He gazed with profound indifference upon marble and bronze and upon his former godlike creations wherein beauty immortal dwelt. In the hope of inspiring him once more with his old zeal for work and of reviving his moribund soul, his friends led him to view the beautiful work of others, but he maintained the same lack of interest, and no warming smile ever parted again his tightly drawn lips. Only when they ventured to hold lengthy speeches on love and beauty he wearily and listlessly replied:
“But all this is a lie.”
And in the daytime when the sun was shining he strolled into his luxurious garden, and seeking out some spot undimmed by the shade he yielded up his uncovered head and lacklustre eyes to radiance and warmth. Red and white butterflies flitted about the garden, from the contorted lips of a blissfully drunken Satyr the water splashed coursing down into the marble cistern, but he sat unmoved like a faint shadow of him who in a distant land sat as immobile at the very gates of the desert beneath the arid rays of the midday sun.