games, love, all delights. Leisure is indeed the greatest and the most beautiful of man's conquests. But, though you have known how to conquer, though you have known how to create, you have scarcely ever known how to use your conquests or your creations. After conquering leisure, you disdained it, and slaves, ashamed of the inactivity of their domesticated hands, set themselves to preach among you the sanctity of labour. Poor madmen! And are you not already on the way to spoil woman? Have you not already succeeded in insinuating into her heart the shameful principles of Jewish morality? Have you not resolved, in your narrow masculine pride, to undo the work of your ancestors and to reduce to the position of mean and lesser men these creatures who used to dominate you with all their beauty and with all their tenderness? You educate them; you teach them the useless stupidities that make your own brains ugly; soon you will forbid them ornament, you will forbid them love, you will forbid them to make you happy! But I will take up this discourse later. It is a digression due to your curiosity. We were speaking of Micromegas. Well, I am, if you will, Micromegas, reduced to our human proportions. No more than he have I absolute power over men; I cannot even crush them, like that Titan, in absent-mindedness or in pleasure. I have scarcely any power over men: I can, when I strongly wish it, insinuate into them some few of my ideas. It is this that men have called my incarnations. I have never become incarnate. My own flesh, almost immortal, and almost incorruptible, suffices me.

I

Almost....

HE

The gods are born and die, so my father has told me. I have not seen one die, I have not seen one born. But I was born, since I have a father and a mother.

I

Your mother Mary....

HE

Credulous and inattentive child! What matter the successive names that are given us by men? The Greeks called my mother Latona; they knew me under the name of Apollo. Their religion was full of fables, but they were not ignorant of the essence of things. I know nothing of how the elementary truths were revealed to them. Perhaps my father, in primitive ages.... I did not begin to busy myself with men until about the time of Pythagoras. I inspired him with some happy ideas; he passed for divine, and is one of the rare disciples for whom I have never had to blush. Pythagoras civilised the shores of the Mediterranean. His thought, sustained by me, hovered like a light white cloud over the blue waves of that maternal sea.

But Epicurus was perhaps still nearer to my heart. His natural and more genial sensibility produced, under my breath, a more beautiful intellectual flower. He knew one part of wisdom, and was not the dupe of analogies. Intelligent, he did not go and suppose a universal intelligence, inventing systems, poems, and useful practices for the happiness of man; he did not go and suppose a supreme creator. He understood that the temperaments of men are diverse, and did not advise a uniform pleasure. He taught pleasure, that is to say the art of being happy according to one's nature. I loved Epicurus. I showed myself to him in the form of an older friend, a traveller who wandered over the world in search of wisdom. Once or twice a year, he saw me arrive with joy, put his slaves at my orders, did not hide from me his wife, who for a long time was pretty, and for whom I felt a tender friendship. She was only jealous of her husband's tenderness, and never prevented him from enjoying the caresses of a beautiful stranger. She herself was insensible neither to Ionian nor to Asiatic beauty, and this pure and charming couple often partook of pleasures that they did not give to each other. I accepted these voluptuous customs; the indulgent night more than once heard our sighs mingle with those of the sea which came to break its perfumed waves at our feet.

These things occurred at the hour when the young slaves came, before going to sleep, to wash away on the beach the stains of the day's work. They played, they laughed, and we loved to join them in the water, still warm from the fires of the afternoon. Tired by a long philosophical talk, we found a singular refreshment in the caresses of the waves, and a strength that we willingly abandoned in the arms of the young women. Then they came and sat beside us on the sand, and sang, while we dreamed of nature increate. These songs did not fail to attract an ardent youth; we knew it, and when we were rested and refreshed, we went and stretched ourselves upon our mats, letting new pleasures be born, new flowers, in place of those we had plucked.

My friend, the teachers who poison your sensibility and stifle your intelligence have made you believe for some centuries past that the pleasure of Epicurus was a pleasure wholly spiritual. Epicurus had too much wisdom to disdain any kind of pleasure. He wished to know, and he knew, all enjoyments that may become human enjoyments; he abused nothing but made use of everything in his harmonious life.

It was during the early hours of one of those happy evenings that we found, a result of long meditations, of long discussions, the atomic system. It was a great intellectual achievement, the greatest that has ever been produced among you or outside your sphere. To conceive the world as the product of a series of accidents, that is to say of a series of facts rebounding to infinity one on another, is a conclusion at which the noblest minds of your time dare hardly stop, although it attracts them. Twenty centuries of Platonism have so deranged man's understanding that the simple truths no longer find a footing in it. And yet, all the systems that you have imagined can be disproved, and that of Epicurus cannot. Would you like me to explain it to you, not as your professors of philosophy have defaced it, but as we established it in our Ionian evenings?

I

We scarcely know the system of Epicurus but by Lucretius' poem....

HE

The most beautiful, perhaps, of the works of men.... Ah! if men had chosen for Bible that admirable book!

I

Ought we to recognise in it a little of your thought?

HE

Much, my friend, much. It was I who guided the young Lucretius towards Zeno, from whose mouth he learnt to love and understand our Epicurus. I found again in this sombre Roman genius something of the voluptuous habit of mind that ennobled Epicurus, a similar desire of knowledge, and at the same time a respect for the secret movements of life. His existence would have been that of a dreamer, if the future had not tormented him with his passions. He was loved, and was persecuted by jealousy, he, who asked nothing from his mistress but peace for his flesh and peace for his thought. He loved. Love made an observer of the dreamer. He wished to learn the cause of love, and learnt that love was life itself; he wished to learn the cause of life, and learnt that life, that is to say eternal movement, was its own cause. The great adventures of ambition that he witnessed also did much to detach him from social pleasures. The actions of animals, so simple, so precise, seemed to him more interesting than the bloody combats of a few madmen who bought by a crime the certainty of dying by a crime. At the time when he wrote his poem, I was almost his only guest at his villa Lucretia, not far from Albanum. It was a farm rather than a pleasure-house, and often, returning from a walk, we lent a hand in the harvest or the vintage. Memmius, if he was there, watched us or played with the girls. Memmius was a mundane sage and rather libertine. In the evening we took up our talk again. I revealed to him in their entirety the mysteries that Zeno, very jealous, had half hidden from him. On my next visit he read me the last pages of the poem, and I recognised with joy in this language, less supple but more solid than the Greek, the ideas and the genius of the noble Epicurus: "Ancestress of the Romans, O joy