‘Get married, old man,’ said Claude.  ’One should act according to one’s feelings.  And good-bye, for here’s your train.  Don’t forget your promise to come and see us again.’

Sandoz returned very often.  He dropped in at odd times whenever his newspaper work allowed him, for he was still free, as he was not to be married till the autumn.  Those were happy days, whole afternoons of mutual confidences when all their old determination to secure fame revived.

One day, while Sandoz was alone with Claude on an island of the Seine, both of them lying there with their eyes fixed on the sky, he told the painter of his vast ambition, confessed himself aloud.

’Journalism, let me tell you, is only a battle-ground.  A man must live, and he has to fight to do so.  Then, again, that wanton, the Press, despite the unpleasant phases of the profession, is after all a tremendous power, a resistless weapon in the hands of a fellow with convictions.  But if I am obliged to avail myself of journalism, I don’t mean to grow grey in it!  Oh, dear no!  And, besides, I’ve found what I wanted, a machine that’ll crush one with work, something I’m going to plunge into, perhaps never to come out of it.’

Silence reigned amid the foliage, motionless in the dense heat.  He resumed speaking more slowly and in jerky phrases: 

’To study man as he is, not man the metaphysical puppet but physiological man, whose nature is determined by his surroundings, and to show all his organism in full play.  That’s my idea!  Is it not farcical that some should constantly and exclusively study the functions of the brain on the pretext that the brain alone is the noble part of our organism?  Thought, thought, confound it all! thought is the product of the whole body.  Let them try to make a brain think by itself alone; see what becomes of the nobleness of the brain when the stomach is ailing!  No, no, it’s idiotic; there is no philosophy nor science in it!  We are positivists, evolutionists, and yet we are to stick to the literary lay-figures of classic times, and continue disentangling the tangled locks of pure reason!  He who says psychologist says traitor to truth.  Besides, psychology, physiology, it all signifies nothing.  The one has become blended with the other, and both are but one nowadays, the mechanism of man leading to the sum total of his functions.  Ah, the formula is there, our modern revolution has no other basis; it means the certain death of old society, the birth of a new one, and necessarily the upspringing of a new art in a new soil.  Yes, people will see what literature will sprout forth for the coming century of science and democracy.’

His cry uprose and was lost in the immense vault of heaven.  Not a breath stirred; there was nought but the silent ripple of the river past the willows.  And Sandoz turned abruptly towards his companion, and said to him, face to face: