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286 stare, who are bewildered, dazzled and aghast with great visionary eyes that understand nothing of life, law or morality,—the weak, the hopeless, lambs that are always shorn, passive instruments, dupes who have jostled every infamy, and remain as candid as children; easy-going folk who would never have killed a fly had not ruffians taken them in; vitiated but not vicious, as greatly torn by life as they are wreckers of life …"

"Are you speaking for yourself?" interrupted Marbol.

"You an artist!" sneered Paridael, without answering his question. "What have you suffered for your art; what have you sacrificed to it? It was there that I met a true artist! And a sincere one, mind you! After having led me from workshop to workshop, the director took me into a model smithy. Imagine three tiers of anvils, as many bellows beating out, with their Aeolian breath, the rhythm of the red dance of the flames; a hundred men, their chests and stomachs protected by leather aprons as inflexible as armor, hairy, bearded, black, strong, their arms bare to the bulging muscles, quickly tapping hammers; the thunder and the temperature of a crater in eruption; a maddening whirl of filings in human sweat; the flash of tests alternating with bursts of flame; and, splashed in sparks, torsos comparable to that in the Vatican.

"Apart from its huge dimensions and more complex apparatus, nothing distinguished this smithy from any other; the magnificent and robust smiths looked like all the other blacksmiths in the world. The activity and the fever of emulation that pervaded this immense hall were neither more nor less edifying than those of a workshop full of free workers, and many a criminologist, versed in the science of Gall and