Bongrand smiled.  ‘Oh! as for romanticism,’ said he, ’I’m up to my ears in it.  It has fed my art, and, indeed, I’m impenitent.  If it be true that my final impotence is due to that, well, after all, what does it matter?  I can’t deny the religion of my artistic life.  However, your remark is quite correct; you other fellows, you are rebellious sons.  Claude, for instance, with his big nude woman amid the quays, that extravagant symbol—­’

‘Ah, that woman!’ interrupted Sandoz, ’it was she who throttled him!  If you knew how he worshipped her!  I was never able to cast her out of him.  And how can one possibly have clear perception, a solid, properly-balanced brain when such phantasmagoria sprouts forth from your skull?  Though coming after yours, our generation is too imaginative to leave healthy work behind it.  Another generation, perhaps two, will be required before people will be able to paint and write logically, with the high, pure simplicity of truth.  Truth, nature alone, is the right basis, the necessary guide, outside of which madness begins; and the toiler needn’t be afraid of flattening his work, his temperament is there, which will always carry him sufficiently away.  Does any one dream of denying personality, the involuntary thumb-stroke which deforms whatever we touch and constitutes our poor creativeness?’

However, he turned his head, and involuntarily added: 

‘Hallo! what’s burning?  Are they lighting bonfires here?’

The procession had turned on reaching the Rond Point, where the ossuary was situated—­the common vault gradually filled with all the remnants removed from the graves, and the stone slab of which, in the centre of a circular lawn, disappeared under a heap of wreaths, deposited there by the pious relatives of those who no longer had an individual resting-place.  And, as the hearse rolled slowly to the left in transversal Avenue No. 2, there had come a sound of crackling, and thick smoke had risen above the little plane trees bordering the path.  Some distance ahead, as the party approached, they could see a large pile of earthy things beginning to burn, and they ended by understanding.  The fire was lighted at the edge of a large square patch of ground, which had been dug up in broad parallel furrows, so as to remove the coffins before allotting the soil to other corpses; just as the peasant turns the stubble over before sowing afresh.  The long empty furrows seemed to yawn, the mounds of rich soil seemed to be purifying under the broad grey sky; and the fire thus burning in that corner was formed of the rotten wood of the coffins that had been removed—­slit, broken boards, eaten into by the earth, often reduced to a ruddy humus, and gathered together in an enormous pile.  They broke up with faint detonations, and being damp with human mud, they refused to flame, and merely smoked with growing intensity.  Large columns of the smoke rose into the pale sky, and were beaten down by the November wind, and torn into ruddy shreds, which flew across the low tombs of quite one half of the cemetery.