XXIV

I HAVE discovered the secret of that style. In its insistent volubility the line of that architecture continued for so long to repeat that same incomprehensible cliché that I came to understand that insidious cypher, that solicitous eye, that ticklish mystiphication. It was indeed a too transparent masquerade. In those elaborate and mobile lines, in their exaggerated refinement, there was some too sharp paprika, some surfeit of hot piquancy; there was something nimble, fervent and too starkly gesticulatory, something, in a word, coloured, colonial, casting a knowing look... There it is: that style had something stupendously repulsive at the bottom of it — it was licentious, ingenious, tropical, and stupendously cynical.