of men and gods, noble Venus, it is thou who, under the vault of heaven where the stars revolve, dost people the ship-carrying sea and the fruit-bearing earth; to thee all that has life owes its birth and its sight of the light of the sun....

I

"At thy coming, O goddess, the winds take flight, and the clouds retire....

HE

"For thee the earth scatters the scent of her flowers, for thee laugh the waves of the deep...."

I

Lucretius is now but lightly valued among men. He is held immoral, having spoken of love without hypocrisy and of death without illusions.

HE

Yes, he knew too many things wounding to your childish sensibility.

I

I remember a sentence of Bossuet, a sentence that implies a scorn of antiquity: "As soon as the cross began to appear in this world, all that men used to adore on the earth was buried in oblivion. The world opened its eyes and was astonished at its ignorance...."

HE

And it is I! It is I! So many absurdities in my name!... But our young women have fallen asleep, their hair mingled with the flowers they were arranging. Let them be. Take away these lilacs which would give them headaches. O divine creatures, you know all, knowing love, and you have no need of our vain philosophies.

He rose, and, walking round the table, kissed all three upon the cheek. Then he sat down again beside me, and spoke:

HE

I shall not tell you what matter is; I do not know. Matter is that which is, that which has always been, that which will always be. With Epicurus, I conceived it as an infinity of atoms, or of points, meeting at hazard, and forming groups here and there; it appears to me now more like a tissue, but that comes to the same thing, since there must always be space between the continuous elements of this tissue. Otherwise we should have a mass, immobile, and consequently inert. One cannot suppress space, whose reality, however, it is impossible to conceive; for if space is empty it is nothing, and yet without this nothingness nothing could exist.