The Psyche

"Now I know what life is!" beamed the artist. "It's love! It is being lifted above yourself, the rapture of losing yourself in beauty! What my friends call life and pleasure is unreal and as fleeting as a bubble; they know nothing of the pure, heavenly altar wine that initiates us into life!"

The marble block was placed, and the chisel cut away large pieces. Careful measurements were made, and the work proceeded. Little by little, the stone was transformed into a figure of beauty, Psyche, as beautiful and perfect as God's own image in the young girl. That weighty stone was changed into a light, dancing, aerial form, a charming Psyche, with the smile of divine innocence that had captured the young sculptor's heart.

The morning star saw it and understood all that was stirring in the young man's mind, understood the changing color of his cheeks, the look in his eyes, while he strove to utilize the gift God had granted him.

"You are a master like those in the time of the Greeks," said his friends. "Soon the whole world will be admiring your Psyche!"

"My Psyche!" he repeated. "Mine! Yes, she must be mine! I am an artist like the mighty ones of olden times! God has given me this gift in order to raise me to the level of the nobility!" He fell upon his knees and cried in gratitude to God; but he soon forgot Him and thought only of her and her image in marble, his Psyche who stood there as though carved from snow, blushing in the morning sunlight.

He went to see the living, moving Psyche, whose words were like music; he could bring her the news that the marble Psyche was completed at last. He walked through the courtyard, with its fountain trickling through dolphin shapes into the marble basin, where the calla lilies and fresh roses bloomed, and into a great, lofty antechamber, its walls splendid with tapestries and coats of arms. Handsomely dressed servants, haughty, and strutting like sleigh horses with their bells, passed to and fro; some were even stretched out lazily and overbearingly on the carved wooden benches, as much at their ease as if they were the masters of the house.