munmy of a saint!
'Become a priest'! Facing troubled or disordered existences, the cloister or the chapel opens itself, in the kindly penumbra of renunciations … 'Become a priest'? The thought was to him—a mere lad, wounded and still wild—like that of those crumbling houses with no windows to look out on the horizon, with no gardens for letting in the light, but which, in tempest, shelter the poor who have no other hearths. The boy looked at Jélaine, who seemed in the night to be dressed, like himself, in a soutane of shadow. Once, at least, before now their lots had been separated. But then, a gleam of hope had subsisted after they had parted at the desert-pathway, like those red fires which shine down in the plains at night. Now those beacons were only ashes—it was all too late.
"Farewell," murmured Nino with trembling lips.
Jélaine remained inert for some seconds, crushed.
He understood that the word meant the boy's final choice. With a dull mockery, echoed in his head some words that he himself had uttered one evening—"We have the right to be free."
"What are you going to do, Nino?"
"My duty."
"You have not anybody—?"
"No."
"Take care, Nino! We are weak. You are going to suffer—"
—"For victory—"
—"And perhaps you will keep only the feeling of having deceived yourself; of having caused pain and evil about you. Some day you will know remorse—desertion—restlessness—"
"Which is—life!"[1]
A large anthology of contemporary French verse could be compiled, reflecting uranianism—especially if pederastic—in, or by, many types of lyrists. As the founder of a "school" of elegantly (or other) decadent verse, the uranian Paul Verlaine has described lyrically a pederastiс amour with an ecclesiastical background, in a narrative-poem of some length. An episode in this particular Parnassus, was the recent suicide, in Venice, of Raymond Laurent, a young Parisian homosexual and litteratéur, just fairly started on his career; the authour of some poems dealing with uranian emotions. His tragic end is stated to have
- ↑ Transl. X. M.
— 345 —
