The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spider’s webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the immanent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates.

When plump young girls, maids of all work, arm themselves each morning with a large feather-duster or even a vacuum cleaner, they are perhaps not completely aware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor. One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night- terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book­keepers…[1]