The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (5.1895)

Pierre Gascon

By Charles Kennett Burrow

Pierre Gascon was old, so old that he seemed to have drifted
into a backwater of time, and to lie there forgotten. His age
had grown upon him imperceptibly. He had not feit its steady
besiegement, like other men, in the waning of the vital fires of life ;
it was only something more placid than his youth ; a time of less
excursive contemplation, a season of calm more wholly personal
than before. He had deliberately shut out the world, and knew it
only by rumour as a place where people committed intolerable
follies both of body and mind, rearing children to reap what they
had sown, loving with preposterous fatuity and a devotion, Pierre
Gascon in his blind soul believed, a hundred times more worthy
than its object.

He lived in a great house surrounded by a beautiful and luxuriant
garden, enclosed by high walls. It was not far from a busy city,
and on silent evenings as he sat under his lime trees, the humming
of the restless hive reached him in an unvarying undertone. Some-
times, on clear mornings, he caught the gleam of distant spires—
the Symbols, in his eyes, of a vain and idle worship. He argued
with the almost divine assumption of lack of knowledge, and for
many years had held himself the only true philosopher.

Pierre Gascon’s face bore none of the marks that blazon a man’s
The Yellow Book—Vol. V. h life