ent to his master, serving him faithfully however, listened to
Mallare one night.

Sitting in the center of the room, his black hair grown into a long
slant across his pale forehead, Mallare talked to his servant as a man,
still asleep, reciting a dream.

"Here in this room, Goliath," he said, "are interesting works of art
which I am about to destroy. On the canvases are dithyrambic burlesques
in color, vicious fantasies, despairing caricatures. My fingers
fashioned them and I remember the pleasant sleep each brought me. But
now I must beware of sleep. My egomania, like a swollen thing, has
become impossible to articulate or to reduce to the impotent ironies of
clay and paint. But I must beware of falling asleep under it.

"My friends have vanished as naturally as if by death. I have forbidden
them to come. This disturbs them, but see to it, Goliath, that no one
ever enters my room unless I bring them. Frighten them if they come.

"Tonight, while there remained a little sanity, I had made up my mind to
kill myself. But I have changed it. I will destroy instead my work. This
is because I find the compromise easier and the destruction, perhaps,
more interesting. I feel disinclined to abandon the things I loathe. The
world with its nauseous swarm of life, its monstrous multiplications
which are the eternal insult to the Omniscience I feel, still holds me.
I am caught in a tangle and I remain suspended and inanimate, in the
depth of a nightmare. But with your aid, Goliath, I will continue
tenaciously mimicking an outward sanity so that people, when they see
me, will go away happy in the assurance that I am as stupid as they."

Rising from his chair Mallare attacked, one by one, the canvases and
statues. Goliath watched him in silence as he moved from pedestal to
pedestal from which, like a company of inert monsters, arose figures in
clay and bronze. The first of them was a man four feet in height but
massive-seeming beyond its dimensions. Mallare had entitled it "The
Lover."

Its legs were planted obliquely on the pedestal top, their ligaments
wrenched into bizarre muscular patterns. Its body rose in an anatomical
spiral. From its flattened pelvis that seemed like some evil bat
stretched in flight, protruded a huge phallus. The head of the phallus
was enlivened with the face of a saint. The eyes of this face were
raised in pensive adoration. At the lower end of the phallus, the
testicles were fashioned in the form of