which he wore as a mantle over his soul. For thirty-five years he had been a slave to his egos, then, as in the case of the Ancient Mariner, his stubborn heart had yielded without warning, and the weight of his mistakes and failures had dropped into the sea at his feet.
One of the first signs of his spiritual freedom was the magnetism he unconsciously exerted. In the old days the rare homage of his fellows fed his vanity. Now it increased his humility. Night after night in a modest restaurant on the Boulevard Raspail, he found himself the centre of a heterogeneous group of students and artists. Former acquaintances sought him out and, having found him, came back again and again to lay their problems before him. Karl Zurschmiede, the painter, the American-Italian tramp of literary and anarchistic leanings, Paddon, the English poet fresh from circles of radical opinion in Vienna, were among the list. And a prominent figure in the growing confraternity was a young French Jew, Philippe Bloch, whose essays on the theory of relativity, concerning which speculation was rife and comprehension uncertain, were winning attention for him in serious reviews.
Each member of the confraternity, with the exception of Paul, was driven by some demon, Each was bent on entering controversial lists to vindicate the honour of some theory on which he might base a scheme of life. Each was obliged to argue at length and with heat in order to find out what he believed. And through the kaleidoscope of colours that would not blend, in the wars that surged round the names of modern personalities and movements, artistic, political, scientific, religious, Paul's impartiality became the refuge of all parties. He seldom supported an applicant with an axe to grind, but he usually restored harmony by his faculty for reducing all problems to a common denominator, his faculty for eliminating inessentials and raising the issue to a plane
