vault which springs from the vast nave seemed to look upon me with a gloomy knowledge of me, and of the heart within me; and at about four in the afternoon of the second day, after pacing the church for hours, I fell down at one of the two altars near that carved door of the screen, praying God to have mercy upon my soul; and in the very midst of my praying, I was up and away, the devil in me, and I got into the motor, and did not come back to Vauclaire for another month, and came leaving great tracts of burned desolation behind me, towns and forests, Bordeaux burned, Lebourne burned, Bergerac burned.

* * * * *

I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there I experienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before my Maker.  And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of the monastery-gate, something said to me:  ’You will never be a good man, nor permanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life, devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exact all your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modern things, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand:  otherwise you are bound to succumb.  Do this, therefore, beginning, not to-morrow nor this afternoon, but now:  for though no man will see your work, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in His way:  and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan:  and perhaps, seeing, He may have mercy upon you.’

* * * * *

In this way arose the idea of the Palace—­an idea, indeed, which had entered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcome of my raving moods:  now, however, in a very different way, soberly, and soon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations, and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which, one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, over-borne by the vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessed me.  After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes:  and I said:  I will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple:  the first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace worthy the King of Earth.

* * * * *

After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a very different man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble, making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole, drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and the rule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at a little over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weight and bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the sort, deciding as to the size and structure of the crane, forge, and work-shop, and the necessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list of over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.