The direction obviates is obviously
the illustration of the myth of
Oedipus, of the man with the enigma of the life and death. But
also as Moreau explains it itself, it is the fight between the
good
and the evil: " the painter supposes the man made at the
serious and
severe hour of the life, being in the presence of the eternal
enigma.
It presses it and the grip under its terrible claw. But the
traveller, proud and quiet in his moral fibre, looks it without
trembling. It is the dream terrestrial, cheap like the matter
and
gravitational like it, represented by this charming head of woman
with
her promising wings of the ideal, but the body of the monster,
the
carnivore who tears and destroys. "
Pierre-Louis Mathieu
