Personal immortality is the most alluring hope ever dangled before humanity.  All of us secretly desire it.  None of us really believe in it.  As you say, all of us are afraid and some of us laugh to hide our fear.  Grimshaw wasn’t afraid.  Nor did he laugh.  He knew.  And you remember his eloquence—­seductive words, poignant, delicious, memorable words!  In his Chelsea days, he had made you sultry with hate.  Now, as Pierre Pilleux, he made you believe in the shining beauty of the indestructible, the unconquerable dead.  You saw them, a host of familiar figures, walking fearlessly away from you toward the brightness of a distant horizon.  You heard them, murmuring together, as they passed out of sight, going forward to share the common and ineffable experience.

Well....  The pagan had disappeared in the psychic!  Cecil Grimshaw’s melancholy and pessimism, his love of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished!  Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian.  Cecil Grimshaw never had been.  Grimshaw had revolted against ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art.  Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ugliness.  Having become aware of it, he was a potent rebel.  He began to write in French, spreading his revolutionary doctrine of facile spiritual reward.  He splintered purgatory into fragments; what he offered was an earthly paradise—­humanity given eternal absolution, freed of fear, prejudice, hatred—­above all, of fear—­and certain of endless life.

Now that we have entered the cosmic era, we look back at him with understanding.  Then, he was a radical and an atheist.

Of course he had followers—­seekers after eternity who drank his promises like thirsty wanderers come upon a spring in the desert.  To some of them he was a god.  To some, a mystic.  To some, a healer.  To some—­and they were the ones who finally controlled his destiny—­he was simply a dangerous lunatic.

Two women in Marseilles committed suicide—­they were followers, disciples, whatever you choose to call them.  At any rate, they believed that where it was so simple a matter to die, it was foolish to stay on in a world that had treated them badly.  One had lost a son, the other a lover.  One shot herself; the other drowned herself in the canal.  And both of them left letters addressed to Pilleux—­enough to damn him in the eyes of authority.  He was told that he might leave France, or take the consequences—­a mild enough warning, but it worked.  He dared not provoke an inquiry into his past.  So he shipped on board a small Mediterranean steamer as fireman, and disappeared, no one knew where.

Two years later he reappeared in Africa.  Marie was with him.  They were living in a small town on the rim of the desert near Biskra.  Grimshaw occupied a native house—­a mere hovel, flat-roofed, sun-baked, bare as a hermit’s cell.  Marie had hired herself out as femme de chambre in the only hotel in the place.  “I watched over him,” she told me.  “And believe me, monsieur, he needed care!  He was thin as a ghost.  He had starved more than once during those two years.  He told me to go back to France, to seek happiness for myself.  But for me happiness was with him.  I laughed and stayed.  I loved him—­magnificently, monsieur.”