The two dialogues of history – Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle (1912) and Clio, dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne (1913) – share the same artistic motif : the evocation of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies cycle, which is briefly evoked at the opening of the first dialogue, and much more broadly and diffusely described in the second (where it represents a real common thread). Péguy associates it with what he calls the “water-lily problem” – which is “a problem of limits, a singular problem of maximum and minimum”. While the point here is to reiterate a resolute opposition to the modern theory of progress, the choice of this name is no less striking: the article wagers that the way in which Monet’s series matters to Péguy says something – maybe the most important thing indeed – about the writer’s relationship with aesthetic forms.