Page:Colour studies in Paris.djvu/260

hoofs and heaving sides, and the head caught back by the fall. Again one sees a delicate twilight landscape of trees and birds, a bit of lovely nature, and in it, with the trouble of a vague nightmare, coming there inexplicably, Le Joueur, a man who holds on his shoulders an immense cube painfully: the man and the trees seem surprised to see each other. There is another landscape, a primeval forest, vague and disquieting, and a solitary figure, the figure of a man who is half a tree, like some forgotten deity of a lost race: the forest and the man are at one, and hold converse. And there are heads, heads floating in space, growing on stalks, couched on pedestals; eyeballs, which voyage phantasmally across the night, which emerge out of nests of fungus, which appear, haloed in light, in the space of sky between huge pillars; there are spectral negroes, there are centaurs, there are gnomes, a Cyclops (with the right accent of terrifying and yet comic reality), embryonic formless little shapes, and, persuasively, the Sciapodes of Flaubert: "La tête le plus has possible, c'est le secret du bonheur! Il y doit avoir quelque part,"