"The man is pretending," Entragues declared. "He is as incapable of feeling Verlaine's poetry as I of feeling Molière's."
"And then," Calixte interposed, "he is truly too destitute of principles. After some savage attack, he offers you, what? another article, 'this one serious, according to my real convictions.' As Goncourt says, there are 'droll vulgarians.' Ah! I see nothing since Hennequin, whose precision of method and sureness of deduction pardoned an absolutism of theory that was a little hard. I see nothing except those of to-morrow, those who still speak in the desert. It is, nevertheless, interesting to read the alleged opinion of an intelligence on works old or new...."
"There remains Fiction and Poetry," Entragues said, "and for me that suffices."
Dazin, who had only offered some inarticulations since his blue and red vowels had foundered under the gales of talk, declared:
"Nothing, nothing more, and besides, there was never anything; but one believed, and now one no longer believes. I love them. You will soon see the Abyssales which are now being printed: you will see. It is a chaplet of medals where, with a certain material force, I have restored the profiles of women. I believe they are in a tolerable style. Here are the first lines of the first one:
Basilisse, icon.—In the lecherous and parthenoide incognition, the abysmal gleam of the muliebrile future towards the flames and the chimerical burning ah (wings unfold for this flight and eyeballs glisten: silk rumples at the carnal rustling)! slumbers and blond the cruel senses are veiled!
She.
Here blond the gloom.
To smile at the growth of vernal grass and the gladioles died of ennui the blood returns to the heart.
Sharp already? The Arachnean dead in rents and the pungency the red and the buckler is resolved on the aureoles twinly surge the Breasts."