MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

VOLUME ONE

BY

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

THE REALISTS

PRINTED BY

GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA

1897

THIS EDITION OF

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED

BY

I. G. BURNHAM

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER LE SUEUR

AND DRAWINGS BY

ÉDOUARD TOUDOUZE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN—VOLUME I
[MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN Front.]
[THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS]
[FIRST MEETING WITH ROSETTE]
[EPISODE OF THE "TOILETTE DE BAL"]
[D'ALBERT AND ROSETTE]
[THE ARRIVAL OF THÉODORE]
[THÉODORE AND THE PAGE]
[ROSETTE'S MORNING AUDIENCE]
[THE ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

This celebrated novel, the celebrity of which has not been lessened by the very numerous editions that have been published, had a very modest beginning which in no way foreshadowed the great success which it was to obtain later.

The title: Mademoiselle de Maupin—Double Love appeared, we believe, for the first time in Renduel's catalogue in connection with The Life of Hoffman, by Lœve-Weimars, which appeared in October, 1833, announcing the new work of Théophile Gautier as being in press. Renduel had made the acquaintance of the author at Victor Hugo's; he had published in August, 1833, his first volume of prose, Young France, and now it was a question of launching a work in two volumes, a truly daring undertaking for a publisher of that day; especially in the case of the work of an author but little known and only twenty-two years old.

Mademoiselle de Maupin was not, however, destined to see the light so soon. For two years Théophile Gautier, more enamored of freedom than of work, or preferring the task of making two harmonious rhymes to all the beauties of his learned and rhythmic prose, incessantly abandoned and resumed the promised work. A tradition preserved in the family of the poet tells how his father often shut him up in his room at that time, forbidding him to leave it until he had completed a certain number of pages of the Grotesques or of Mademoiselle de Maupin. When the maternal kindness did not come to his aid, the frolicsome author, who then lived with his parents on Place Royale, often found the means of getting away by the window and so escaping a paternal task. Such escapades being frequently renewed, it may well be believed that the novel made but little progress; 1834 was drawing to a close; only the first of the two volumes was finished; the publisher complained, and the author tried to pacify him by notes similar to the following:

"I have just discovered at a bric-à-brac dealer's a charming picture of Boucher in a splendid state of preservation; it is an opportunity that I do not wish to miss, and not having money enough, I take the liberty of asking you for my balance.[1] You will confer on me a real pleasure in sending it to me.

"I am harnessed to La Maupin, and that prevents me from prowling about and calling on you.

"With cordial wishes, I am, yours,

"THÉOPHILE GAUTIER."

Finally, in 1835, the second volume was written in six weeks on Rue du Doyenné, where the poet, having left the paternal nest, had installed himself; the manuscript was delivered to Renduel and we read the following note in Le Monde Dramatique, of September 20th, concerning the biography of the strange person who really bore the name of Maupin, a biography signed by Rochefort and published in that number under the title: Mademoiselle d'Aubigny-Maupin: "One of our collaborators, Monsieur Théophile Gautier, has been busy for a long time on a romance entitled: Mademoiselle (de) Maupin."

The work was now soon to appear; it was issued in November, 1835, in two octavo volumes, printed by Madame Poussin under the title: Mademoiselle de Maupin—Double Love. The first volume bears the date 1835, the second 1836, while the preface is dated May, 1834.

The work produced no very great sensation. A few journals spoke of it, but publicity was not then systematized as it is to-day, and except by some few literary men and the small romantic group of the author's friends, Mademoiselle de Maupin was soon forgotten. Let us remark, nevertheless, that immediately the book appeared, Honoré de Balzac wrote Renduel a note, asking for a copy, this note we have seen ourselves; from this moment dates the admiration that he always professed thereafter for Théophile Gautier. We learn from Monsieur Arsène Houssaye, the old and faithful friend of the poet, that owing to the failure to sell the work, Renduel determined not to publish anything more for his author; La Comédie de la Mort, already announced upon the covers of the work (as well as Capitaine Fracasse), was, in fact, returned to the author, and only appeared in 1838, when it was published by Desessart, at that time one of Arsène Houssaye's publishers; it was the author of La Couronne de Bleuets, who introduced his friend to him and secured a favorable consideration for his collection of verses.

How strange to us and unlikely, even, all this seems, when one recalls the exorbitant prices obtained for some years past for rare, stitched copies in good condition of the first edition of the work that we are now considering. Many have realized one thousand five hundred francs, that is to say, the total sums received by the author as royalty on the first issue of his work. This sum is verified by his receipts to Renduel, which are in our hands.

A curious incident occurred as to Mademoiselle de Maupin. After its appearance, all the opening of the eleventh chapter was inserted in Le Monde Dramatique of January 4, 1836, without mentioning its source, under the title of: La Comédie Romanesque. Since that time, those pages have been frequently reprinted, but not a single one of these reproductions gives any indication of their origin. It must be admitted that Théophile Gautier himself gave rise to this error in La Presse of December 17, 1838, in again quoting these lines, inserted in an unpublished commentary, as an isolated article which had come under his notice by chance. He had forgotten this extract, and believed in good faith to have found in La Monde Dramatique only a newspaper improvisation. This first mistake was the starting-point of all that succeeded, the most striking of which is the insertion in 1858 of this fragment from Mademoiselle de Maupin in the first volume of Théophile Gautier's work: Histoire de l'Art Dramatique in France. It is useless to add that no one noticed this fact.

Time, however, rolled on, and the renown of the poet continued to increase; his appearance in La Presse in 1836, and his critical work, had made a circle of new readers. Then, Fortunio, La Comédie de la Mort, Une Larme du Diable, Tra Los Montès, Les Grotesques, etc., etc., had considerably increased his literary impedimenta. So, when Monsieur Charpentier, the father of the present publisher of Théophile Gautier's complete works, had founded the collection to which he gave his name, he soon thought of reprinting our author's principal works. Monsieur Charpentier, who succeeded in grouping in his catalogue the most select of the remarkable works of his age, was of refined literary taste and held among the publishers of his day a place similar to that then held by Monsieur Buloz in his capacity of director of La Revue des Deux Mondes: it was difficult to obtain an interview with either, and to appear in print in their collections was regarded as a kind of consecration.

It was in 1845 when four of Théophile Gautier's volumes appeared in the Charpentier catalogue; they were Poésies Complètes, Nouvelles, Voyage en Espagne, and Mademoiselle de Maupin. For this reprint, the first since the original edition[2], the author modified, but very slightly, some phrases of his work, the text of which, from that time, has never been changed.

Here ends, in reality, the history of this work. Since 1845, the number of editions has continued to increase; we will only quote two that appeared in 1878: one in two volumes, 24mo, illustrated with four designs by Eugèn Giraud, and another in a large 12mo volume, upon Holland paper, embellished with a portrait of the heroine by Théophile Gautier himself, the portrait dated 1834. Finally, in 1880, there was added to a reprint of this edition, a reproduction of the medallion of the author by David d'Anger; this reproduction is erroneously dated 1834, instead of 1835, which is the actual year of its execution.

Is it possible, as has often been asserted, that this work, whose incomparable style should have warranted the opening of the doors of the Académie Française to the author, was in part the cause of their remaining stubbornly closed against him?—We do not know; but from another tradition preserved in the poet's family, it would appear that the father himself, when he knew of the completion of the work (only the first volume, as we have seen, was written under his eyes), could not have been without apprehension as to the part which the book would play in the life of his son, and, notwithstanding his admiration for the style of the work, he would often have expressed the fear that the second volume would at times influence the future of the author.

In any case, the renown of Théophile Gautier, like that of his illustrious friend, Honoré de Balzac, who, likewise, was never a member of the Académie, has only increased since his death, and the names of these two rare talents are in truth missed among those of the members of that illustrious body. For Théophile Gautier at least, the Académie itself expressed one day, by the mouth of one of its members, its regret at not having received him. On October 25, 1872, at its public session and at the very hour of the obsequies of the great writer, Monsieur Camille Doucet pronounced the following words which do honor to their author, and we are happy to reproduce them here: "Permit me to digress a moment. When I speak of the fraternity of Letters, I should fail, messieurs, if I appeared longer to forget that at this very hour, upon the threshold of a tomb, which I have left only with regret to come here to fulfil another duty, Letters mourning, weep for a true poet dear to all, a brilliant writer whose wit was thoroughly French and whose heart was still more French. Very many votes have proved to him that his place was indicated among us, and so we deplore the more the sudden stroke to which Théophile Gautier succumbs."

We will add nothing to these touching lines and will close this notice by saying a few words as to the present edition of Mademoiselle de Maupin. It is the first reprint, absolutely conforming to the original text. The work appears in two volumes, divided like those of 1835, and the publishers have exerted every effort to satisfy bibliophiles desirous of possessing as perfect an edition as possible, both as regards the exactness of the text and the technical execution of the work.

Finally, let us say that the designs of E. Toudouze, made especially for this work, will render this edition still more complete. It will rank, we hope, among the most treasured editions of the book.

CHARLES DE LOVENJOUL.

[1] Of his royalties as author of Young France.

[2] Figaro, of May 26, 1837, and some other journals, announced the sale, at Renduel's, of a second edition of this book. It was only the first edition that the publisher was trying to get rid of by this means.

PREFACE

One of the most burlesque incidents of the glorious epoch in which we have the good fortune to live side by side with Deutz and General Bugeaud, is, beyond question, the rehabilitation of virtue undertaken by all the newspapers, of whatever color they may be, red, green, or tri-colored.

Virtue is most assuredly a very respectable thing, and we have no wish to fail in our devotion to the excellent, worthy creature—God forbid!—We consider that her eyes shine with sufficient brilliancy through her spectacles, that her stockings are reasonably well put on, that she takes snuff from her gold snuff-box with all imaginable grace, that her little dog courtesies like a dancing-master.—We agree to all that.—We are even willing to admit that her figure is not bad for her age, and that she carries her years as well as any one could. She is a very agreeable grandmother, but she is a grandmother. It seems to me to be natural to prefer to her, especially when one is twenty years old, some little immorality, very pert, very coquettish, very wanton, with the hair a little out of curl, the skirt rather short than long, the foot and eye alluring, the cheek slightly flushed, a smile on the lips and the heart in the hand.—The most horribly virtuous journalists can hardly be of a different opinion; and, if they say the contrary, it is very probable that they do not think it. To think one thing and write another is something that happens every day, especially among virtuous folk.

I remember the epigrams uttered before the Revolution—I refer to the Revolution of July—against the ill-fated and virginal Vicomte Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, who lengthened the skirts of the dancers at the Opéra and applied with his own patrician hands a chaste plaster around the middle of all the statues.—Monsieur le Vicomte Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld is far surpassed.—Modesty has been greatly perfected since his day, and we go into refinements that he would never have imagined.

I, who am not accustomed to look at statues in certain places, considered, as others did, the vine-leaf cut by the scissors of Monsieur le Chargé des Beaux-Arts, the most absurd thing in the world. It seems that I was wrong, and that the vine-leaf is one of the most meritorious of institutions.

I have been told, but I refused to believe it, it seemed to me so extraordinary, that there were people who, when looking at Michael Angelo's fresco of the Last Judgment, had seen nothing therein but the episode of the lewd priests, and had veiled their faces, crying out at the abomination of desolation!

Such people know nothing of the romance of Rodrigue except the couplet of the snake.—If there is any nudity in a book or a picture, they go straight to it as the swine to the mire, and pay no attention to the blooming flowers or the golden fruit that hang within reach on all sides.

I confess that I am not virtuous enough for that. Dorine, the brazen-faced soubrette, may display before me her swelling bosom, I certainly will not draw my handkerchief to cover it so that it cannot be seen.—I will look at her bosom as at her face, and if it is fair and well-shaped I will take pleasure in it.—But I will not touch Elmire's dress to see if it is soft, nor will I push her reverently upon the table as that poor devil of a Tartuffe did.

This great affectation of morality that reigns to-day would be very laughable if it were not very tiresome.—Every feuilleton becomes a pulpit; every journalist a preacher; only the tonsure and the little neckband are wanting. The weather is rainy and homiletic; one can defend one's self against both by going out only in a carriage and reading Pantagruel between one's bottle and one's pipe.

Blessed Jesus! what an outcry! what a frenzy!—Who bit you? who pricked you? what the devil's the matter with you that you cry so loud, and what has poor vice done to you that you should bear him such a grudge, he is such a good fellow, so easy to live with, and asks nothing except to be allowed to amuse himself and not bore others, if such a thing can be? Act with vice like Serre with the gendarme: embrace and have done with it all.—Believe me, you will be the better for it.—Eh! Mon Dieu! my worthy preachers, what would you do without vice? You would be reduced to beggary to-morrow, if the world should become virtuous to-day.

The theatres would be closed to-night.—What would you take for the subject of your feuilleton?—No more Opéra balls to fill your columns,—no more novels to dissect; for balls, novels, plays, are the real pomps of Satan, if we are to believe our holy Mother Church.—The actress would dismiss her protector and could no longer pay you for puffing her.—Nobody would subscribe to your newspapers; people would read Saint Augustine, they would go to church, they would tell their beads. That would be very praiseworthy, perhaps, but you would gain nothing by it. If people were virtuous, what would you do with your articles on the immorality of the age? You see plainly that vice is good for something.

But it is the fashion nowadays to be virtuous and Christ-like, it is an attitude people affect; they pose as Saint Jeromes just as they used to pose as Don Juans; they are pale and wasted, they wear their hair as the apostles did, they walk with folded hands and eyes glued to the ground, they assume an expression sugared to perfection; they have an open Bible on the mantel, a crucifix and consecrated box-wood above their beds; they never swear, they smoke but little, and they chew almost not at all.—With that they become Christians, they talk about the sanctity of art, the lofty mission of the artist, the poesy of Catholicism, about Monsieur de La Mennais, about the painters of the angelic school, about the Council of Trent, about progressive humanity, and about a thousand other fine things.—Some infuse a little republicanism into their religion, they are not the least interesting. They couple Robespierre and Jesus Christ in the most cheerful way and amalgamate with praiseworthy gravity the Acts of the Apostles and the decrees of the Holy Convention—that is the sacramental title; others add, for a final ingredient, some Saint-Simonian ideas.—These latter are complete, they rest upon a square foundation; after them we can look for nothing better. Human absurdity can go no farther,—has ultra metas—etc. They are the Hercules Pillars of Burlesque.

Christianity is so in vogue by reason of the prevailing hypocrisy, that even Neo-Christianity enjoys a certain amount of favor. They say that it can boast thus far one recruit, Monsieur Drouineau included.

An extremely interesting variety of the moral journalist, properly so-called, is the journalist with a female family.

He carries his modest sensitiveness to the point of anthropophagy, or very nearly that.

His mode of procedure, although it seems at the first glance simple and easy, is none the less clownish and superlatively entertaining, and in my opinion it deserves to be handed down to posterity—to our last nephews, as the old fogies of the so-called Grand Siècle used to say.

In the first place, to pose as a journalist of this variety, you need some few preliminary utensils—such as two or three legitimate wives, a few mothers, as many sisters as possible, a full assortment of daughters, and cousins innumerable.—The second requisite is a play or novel of some sort, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer. Perhaps it would be as well to have an idea or two and several subscribers; but you can do without them, if you have a large stock of philosophy and the shareholders' money.

When you have all these things you can set up as a moral journalist. The two following recipes, varied to suit the occasion, will suffice for the editorial part.

Models of Virtuous Articles Concerning a First Performance.

"After the literature of blood, the literature of mud; after the morgue and the galleys, the alcove and the brothel; after the rags stained by murder, the rags stained by debauchery; after," etc. (according to the necessity of the occasion and the available space, you can continue in this vein from six lines to fifty or more),—"this is as it should be.—This is where neglect of sacred doctrines and romantic licentiousness lead: the stage has become a school of prostitution where one dares not venture, save with fear and trembling, with a woman one respects. You come upon the faith of an illustrious name, and you are obliged to retire at the third act with your young daughter all confused and abashed. Your wife hides her blushes behind her fan; your sister, your cousin," etc. (The degrees of relationship may be diversified at pleasure; it is enough that they be all females.)

NOTE.—There is one man who has carried morality so far as to say: "I will not go to see that play with my mistress."—That man I admire and love; I carry him in my heart, as Louis XVIII. carried all France in his; for he has conceived the most triumphant, the most monumental, the most insane, the most extravagant idea that has passed through the brain of man in this blessed nineteenth century, which has seen the birth of so many and such amusing ideas.

The method of dealing with a book is very expeditious and within the range of every intellect:

"If you choose to read this book, lock yourself securely into your own room; do not leave it lying on the table. If your wife and your daughter should open it, they would be lost.—This is a dangerous book, it advises vicious habits. It would have made a great success, perhaps, in the time of Crébillon, in the houses of kept mistresses, at a duchess's select supper-parties; but now that morals are purified, now that the hand of the people has razed the rotten edifice of aristocracy, and that,—etc., etc.—there must be in every work an idea—an idea—yes, a moral and religious idea which—an exalted and profound aim, answering to the needs of humanity; for it is a deplorable thing that young writers should sacrifice the most sacred things to success, and should expend their talent—a notable talent by the way—in lewd descriptions that would make a captain of dragoons blush."—(The virginity of the captain of dragoons is, after the discovery of America, the most delightful discovery that has been made for a long while.)—"The novel we are considering recalls Justine, the philosophic Thérèse, Félicia, Compère Matthieu, the Contes de Grécourt, the Priapées of the Marquis de Sade." The virtuous journalist is immensely erudite in the matter of filthy novels;—I am very curious to know why.

It may be obtained at Eugène Renduel's, Rue des Grands-Augustins, No. 22. A handsome volume in 8vo. with vignette. Price 7 francs 50 centimes.

Eccò,—ecce,—see it.

It is frightful to think that, through the fault of the newspapers, there are many honest manufacturers who have only these two recipes to live upon, they and the numerous families they employ.

Apparently I am the most monumentally immoral personage to be found in Europe or elsewhere; for I can see nothing more licentious in the novels and plays of the present day than in the novels and plays of an earlier time, and I find it difficult to understand why the ears of the gentlemen of the journals have suddenly become so Jansenically ticklish.

I do not believe that the most innocent newspaper man will dare to say that Pigault-Lebrun, Crébillon Fils, Louvet, Voisenon, Marmontel, and all other writers of novels and tales do not surpass in immorality, since there is such a thing as immorality, the most dissolute and licentious productions of Messieurs Such-an-one and So-and-so, whom I do not name out of regard for their modesty.

One must be most notoriously false to his convictions not to agree to that.

Let not the objection be made that I have cited names little known or unfavorably known. If I have not mentioned the brilliant, imperishable names, it is not because they will not support my assertion with the weight of their great authority.

The novels and tales of Voltaire, aside from the question of merit, are most assuredly no more suitable to be given as prizes to little slips of boarding-school misses than are the immoral tales of our friend the lycanthropist, or even the moral tales of the insipid Marmontel.

What do we find in the comedies of the great Molière? the sacred institution of marriage—as the catechism and the newspapers call it—scoffed at and ridiculed in every scene.

The husband is old, ugly, and peevish; he wears his wig awry; his coat is out of fashion; he has a bill-headed cane, a nose smeared with snuff, short legs, and a paunch as fat as a budget.—He stammers, says nothing but foolish things, and does as many as he says; he sees nothing, he hears nothing; his wife is kissed before his face, and he has no idea what is going on; that state of things lasts until he is well and duly proved a cuckold in his own eyes and in the eyes of the whole audience, who are mightily edified and applaud in a way to bring the walls down.

They who applaud the loudest are they who are the most married.

In Molière, marriage is named George Dandin or Sganarelle.

Adultery is Damis or Clitandre; there is no name sweet and charming enough for it.

The adulterer is always young, handsome, well-made, and a marquis at the very least. He enters from the wings humming the very latest waltz; he takes one or two steps on the stage with the most deliberate, all-conquering air imaginable; he scratches his ear with the pink nail of his deftly spread little finger; he combs his lovely fair hair with his tortoise-shell comb, and arranges his ruffles, which are of great volume. His doublet and his hose are almost covered with bows and knots of ribbon; his neckband is from the best maker; his gloves smell sweeter than balsam and civet; his plumes cost a louis apiece.

How his eye sparkles and his cheek glows! how smiling his mouth! how white his teeth! how soft and well cared for his hand!

He speaks, naught issues from his lips save poesy, perfumed gallantries in the most refined style and with the most charming manner; he has read the latest novels and knows all about poetry, he is brave, and quick to draw his sword, he scatters gold with lavish hand.—And so Angélique, Agnès, Isabelle, can hardly refrain from leaping on his neck, well-bred and great ladies though they be; and so the husband is regularly betrayed in the fifth act, and is very lucky that he was not in the first.

That is how marriage is treated by Molière, one of the loftiest and most serious geniuses who ever lived.—Do you think there is anything stronger in the suits of Indiana and of Valentine?

Paternity is even less respected, if that be possible. Witness Orgon, Géronte, and all the rest of them.

How they are robbed by their sons, cheated by their valets! How their avarice, their obstinacy, their idiocy are laid bare, without mercy for their age!—What practical jokes! what mystifications.—How they are taken by the shoulder and pushed out of life, poor old fellows, who take a long time to die and refuse to give up their money! how much is said about the immortality of parents! what arguments against heredity, and how much more convincing they are than all this Saint-Simonian declamation!

A father is an ogre, an Argus, a jailer, a tyrant, something that at the best is good for nothing but to delay a marriage for three acts until the final reconciliation.—A father is the ridiculous husband perfected.—A son is never ridiculous in Molière; for Molière, like all authors at all possible epochs, paid his court to the young generation at the expense of the old.

And what of the Scapins, with their striped cloaks à la Napolitaine, their caps tilted over their ears, their plumes sweeping the layers of air,—are not they very pious, very chaste individuals, most worthy of canonization?—The galleys are filled with honest folk who have not done the fourth part of what they do. The knavery of Trialph is paltry knavery compared with theirs. And the Lisettes, the Martons, tudieu! what hussies!—The girls of the street are far from being as sharp, as quick at prurient retort as they. How well they understand how to deliver a note! what good watch they keep during assignations!—On my word, they are invaluable girls, serviceable and shrewd advisers.

It is a charming company that walks and fidgets through those comedies and imbroglios.—Duped guardians, cuckold husbands, lewd maids, keen-witted valets, young ladies mad with love, dissolute sons, adulterous wives; are not these quite as bad as the melancholy young beaux and poor, weak women, oppressed and impassioned, of the dramas and novels of the writers in vogue to-day?

And yet the denouements, minus the final blow of the dagger, minus the regulation cup of poison, are as happy as the time-honored ending of a fairy tale, and everybody, even the husband, is perfectly satisfied. In Molière, virtue is always in disgrace, always being pummelled; it is virtue that wears horns and turns her back to Mascarille; morality barely shows its face once at the end of the play, in the somewhat commonplace person of the gendarme Loyal.

All this that we have said is not intended to knock a chip off Molière's pedestal; we are not mad enough to attempt to shake that bronze colossus with our weak arms; we desired simply to show the pious feuilletonistes, who are terrified by recent works and by those of the romantic school, that the old classics, whom they urge us every day to read and imitate, far surpass them in looseness and immorality.

To Molière we might easily add Marivaux and La Fontaine, those two strongly-contrasted exponents of the French mind, and Regnier and Rabelais and Marot, and many others. But it is not our purpose in this place to prepare, from the standpoint of morality, a course in literature for the benefit of the virgin minds of the feuilleton.

It seems to me that we should not raise such a hubbub for so small a matter. Luckily we are not living in the days of the fair Eve, and we cannot, in good conscience, be as primitive and patriarchal as people were in the days of the ark. We are not little girls preparing for our first communion; and when we play crambo, we do not answer cream-pie. We are passably knowing in our innocence, and our virginity has been on the town for a long while; those are things that one does not have twice, and, whatever we may do, we cannot recover them, for there is nothing in the world that runs faster than a fleeing virginity and a vanishing illusion.

After all, perhaps there is no great harm in that, and knowledge of everything is preferable to ignorance of everything. That is a question that I leave for those who know more than I, to discuss. The fact remains that the world has passed the age when one can feign modesty and chastity, and I consider it too old a greybeard to play the child and the virgin without making itself ridiculous.

Since its marriage to civilization, society has lost the right to be artless and bashful. There are certain blushes that are all right for the bridal bed, but can serve no further purpose the next day; for the young wife thinks no more of the maiden, it may be, or if she does think of her, it is a most improper thing and gravely endangers her husband's reputation.

When I chance to read one of the fine sermons that have taken the place of literary criticism in the public sheets, I sometimes feel great remorse and dire apprehension, having on my conscience some paltry equivocal stories, a little too highly spiced, such as a young man of spirit and animation may have to reproach himself for.

Beside these Bossuets of the Café de Paris, these Bourdaloues of the balcony at the Opéra, these Catos at so much a line, who berate the present age in such fine fashion, I esteem myself the most infamous villain that ever marred the face of the earth; and yet, God knows, the list of my sins, capital as well as venial, with the usual blank spaces and leads, would barely, even in the hands of the most skilful publisher, make one or two octavo volumes a day, which is a small matter for one who does not claim to be bound for paradise in the other world and to win the Monthyon prize or be rose-maiden in this.

And then, when I think that I have met under the table, and elsewhere, too, a considerable number of these dragons of virtue, I return to a better opinion of myself, and I consider that, whatever faults I may have, they have another which is, in my eyes, the greatest and worst of all:—I refer to hypocrisy.

By looking carefully one might perhaps find another little vice to add; but this is so hideous that I really hardly dare to name it. Come nearer and I will breathe its name into your ear:—it is envy.

Envy, and nothing else.

It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet.

I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.—I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter.

An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet—of him who does nothing to him who does something—of the drone to the bee—of the gelding to the stallion.

You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain.

I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk.

He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.—He is a eunuch.—The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.—In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.

It is the same with the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with its nine fair odalisques, and disporting himself indolently in the shade of tall green laurels. It is very hard for him not to pick up stones in the road to throw at him and wound him over the wall, if he is skilful enough to do it.

The critic who has produced nothing of his own is a coward; he is like an abbé paying court to a layman's wife: the layman cannot pay him back in his own coin or fight with him.

I think that an account of the different methods of depreciating any sort of work, resorted to during the last month, would be at least as interesting as the story of Tiglath-Pileser, or of Gemmagog, who invented peaked shoes.

There would be enough matter to fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but we will have pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines—a favor for which we demand more than everlasting gratitude.—In a very remote age, lost in the darkness of time—it was fully three weeks ago—the romance of the Middle Ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in high esteem; coiffures à la Hennin were not despised and party-colored trousers were thought well of; the dagger was priceless; the peaked shoe was adored as a fetich.—There was nothing but ogive windows, turrets, colonnettes, stained glass, cathedrals, and fortified châteaux;—the characters were all damoiselles and damoiseaux, pages and varlets, beggars and swash-bucklers, gallant knights and ferocious castellans;—all of which were more innocent certainly than innocent games, and did absolutely no harm to anybody.

The critic did not wait for the second romance before beginning his work of depreciation: as soon as the first appeared, he enveloped himself in his robe of camel's hair, and sprinkled a bushel of ashes on his head; then, in his loud, wailing voice, he began to cry:

"More Middle Ages, nothing but the Middle Ages! who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages which are not the Middle Ages?—Paste-board and terra-cotta Middle Ages, which have nothing of the Middle Ages save the name!—Oh! these iron barons, in their iron armor, with iron hearts in their iron breasts! Oh! the cathedrals with their rose-work always in bloom and their stained glass in flower, with their lace-work of granite, with their open-work trefoils, their toothed gables, their chasubles of stone embroidered like a bride's veil, with their tapers, their psalms, their glittering priests, with their people on their knees, their rumbling organ, and their angels soaring aloft and flapping their wings under the arches!—how they have spoiled my Middle Ages, my refined, brightly-colored Middle Ages!—how they have blotted it from sight under a layer of coarse plaster!—what discordant colors!—Ah! ignorant daubers, who fancy you have created an effect by splashing red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow, you have seen only the outer shell of the Middle Ages, you have not divined the true meaning of the Middle Ages, the blood does not circulate beneath the skin in which you have clothed your phantoms, there is no heart in your steel corselets, there are no legs in your tricot trousers, no stomach or breast behind your emblazoned skirts; they are clothes that have the shape of men and that is all.—So, down with the Middle Ages as they are presented to us by the fabricators"—the great word is out, the fabricators!—"The Middle Ages meet no need of the present day, we must have something else."

And the public, seeing how the feuilletonistes snarled at the Middle Ages, was seized with an ardent passion for the Middle Ages, which they claim to have killed at a single blow. The Middle Ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the newspapers:—dramas, melodramas, novels, tales, poetry—there were even Middle-Age vaudevilles, and Momus recited feudal mummeries.

Beside the romance of the Middle Ages flourished the carrion romance, a very pleasing variety, which nervous petites-maîtresses and blasé cooks consumed in great numbers.

The feuilletonistes speedily came flocking to the stench, like crows to the carrion, and they tore with the beaks of their pens and inhumanly put to death that poor species of novel, which asked nothing more than to be allowed to prosper and putrefy in peace on the greasy shelves of the book-stalls. What did they not say? what did they not write?—Literature of the morgue or the galleys, an executioner's nightmare, hallucination of a drunken butcher, or a convict-keeper with the jail-fever! They benignly gave us to understand that the authors were assassins and vampires, that they had contracted the vicious habit of killing their fathers and mothers, that they drank blood from human skulls, that they used the bones of the legs for forks and cut their bread with a guillotine.

And yet they knew better than any one, from having frequently breakfasted with them, that the authors of those charming slaughters were excellent young men of family, very easy-going and in the best society, white-gloved and fashionably near-sighted,—with a decided preference for beefsteak over human cutlets, and more accustomed to drink Bordeaux wine than the blood of young girls or new-born children.—From having seen and touched their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were written with ink of great virtue upon English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine upon the skin of a Christian flayed alive.

But whatever they might say or do, the age was after carrion, and the charnel-house suited them better than the boudoir; the reader would bite at no hook that was not baited with a little body already turning blue.—A state of things easily conceived; put a rose at the end of your line and the spiders will have time to spin their webs in the crook of your elbow before you catch the tiniest minnow; put on a worm or a piece of rank cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, eels, will all leap three feet out of water to snap at it.—Men are not so different from fish as people generally seem to believe.

One would have said that the newspaper men had become Quakers, Brahmins, or Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had been suddenly seized with such a horror of red and of blood.—Never had they been known to be in such a soft and melting mood;—it was cream and buttermilk.—They admitted the existence of only two colors, sky-blue and apple-green. Pink was only tolerated, and if the public would have allowed them to do as they chose, they would have led it to the banks of the Lignon to feed on spinach beside the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black frock-coats for the dove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose-feathers with clusters of roses and ribbons after the style of a shepherd's crook. They let their hair float in the wind like a child's, and had made themselves virgins according to the recipe of Marion Delorme, and about as successfully as she.

They applied to literature the article in the Decalogue:

Thou shalt not kill.

The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility.

They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of jeunes premiers of about sixty years each.

It was about this time that I threw into the fire—after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens—two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual.

To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called Héliogabale, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.—I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to Antoni,—Arthur, or L'Homme Fatal, where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.—A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that God is just, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded.

As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back—all that family so strangely swarming—all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes à la Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of Goya, could find favor before them; they sent him back to his odes when he wrote novels, to his novels when he wrote dramas: the ordinary tactics of journalists who always praise what you have done at the expense of what you are doing. A fortunate man, however, is he who is acknowledged to be superior, even by the feuilletonistes, in all his works,—except, of course, the particular one with whom they are dealing,—and who need only write a theological treatise or a manual of cooking to have his plays admired.

Concerning the romance of the heart, the ardent, impassioned romance, whose father is Werther the German, and its mother Manon Lescaut the French-woman, we had a few words to say, at the beginning of this preface, of the moral scurf that has fastened itself upon it in desperation, on the pretext of religion and good morals. The critical louse is like the body-louse that deserts the dead body for the living. From the corpse of the Middle Ages the critics have passed on to the living body of this age, whose skin is tough and hard and might well break their teeth.

We think, notwithstanding a deep respect for the modern apostles, that the authors of these so-called immoral novels, without being so thoroughly married as the virtuous journalist, generally have a mother, and that several of them have sisters and are provided with an abundance of female relations; but their mothers and sisters do not read novels, even immoral novels; they sew and embroider and look after the house-keeping.—Their stockings, as Monsieur Planard would say, are—entirely white: you can look at them on their legs—they are not blue, and excellent Chrysale, who hated learned women so, would suggest them as models to the skilled Philaminte.

As for these gentlemen's wives, as they have so many of them, however spotless their husbands may be, it seems to my simple mind that there are certain things they ought to know.—Indeed, it may well be that their husbands have never shown them anything. In that case I understand that they are bent upon keeping them in that useful state of blessed ignorance. God is great and Mohammed is his prophet!—Women are inquisitive creatures; may Heaven and morality grant that they gratify their curiosity in a more legitimate way than that adopted by their grandmother Eve, and do not go putting questions to the serpent!

As for their daughters, if they have been at boarding-school, I fail to see what they can learn from these books.

It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes an orgy, or a debauchee because he narrates a debauch, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morals; we see the contrary every day. It is the character that speaks, not the author; his hero may be an atheist, that does not mean that he is an atheist; he represents brigands as acting and talking like brigands, but that does not make him a brigand. On that theory we should have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille, and all the writers of tragedy; they have committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche; we have not done it, however, and, indeed, I do not believe that we shall do it for a long time to come, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the manias of these little shallow-brained scribblers always to substitute the author for the work, and to resort to personalities, in order to give some paltry scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they are well aware that nobody would read if they contained only their individual opinions.

We can hardly imagine the tendency of all this wailing, or what good purpose all this indignation and snarling can serve—or who impels these Messieurs Geoffroy on a small scale to set themselves up as the Don Quixotes of morality, and, like genuine literary policemen, to lay hands upon and club, in the name of virtue, every idea that appears in a book with its mob-cap awry or its petticoats raised a little too high.—It is very strange.

Whatever they may say, the present age is immoral,—if the word means anything, which we much doubt,—and we require no other proof of it than the quantity of immoral books it produces and the success they meet with.—Books follow morals, morals do not follow books.—The Regency produced Crébillon, not Crébillon the Regency. Boucher's little shepherdesses were painted and immodest because the little marchionesses of the day were painted and immodest.—Pictures are painted after models, not models after pictures. Somebody or other has said somewhere or other that literature and the arts have a great influence on morals. Whoever he is, he is unquestionably a great fool.—It is as if some one should say: "Green peas make the springtime grow;" on the other hand, green peas grow because it is spring, and cherries because it is summer. The trees bear fruit, the fruit assuredly does not bear the trees—the law is everlasting and invariable in its variations; the centuries succeed one another and each bears its fruit, which differs from that of the preceding century; books are the fruit of morals.

Beside the moral journalists, under this shower of homilies, as if it were a summer shower in a park, there has arisen, between the boards of the Saint-Simonian stage, a school of little mushrooms of a curious new variety, of which we propose to give the natural history.

They are the utilitarian critics,—poor fellows whose noses were so short that they would not hold spectacles, and who could not see to the end of their noses.

When an author tossed upon their desk a volume of any sort,—novel or poetry,—these gentry would lean back nonchalantly in their chairs, balance them on their hind legs, sway back and forth, puffing themselves out with a knowing air, and say:

"What purpose does this book serve? How can it be applied to securing the moral and spiritual well-being of the most numerous and poorest class? What! not a word of the needs of society, nothing civilizing and progressive! How, instead of dealing synthetically with the great problems of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of the regenerating, providential idea, can you waste time writing poetry and novels which lead to nothing, and which do nothing to help the generation forward in the pathway of the future? How can you concern yourself about form and style and rhythm, in presence of such grave interests?—What do we care for rhythm and style and form? that is all right in its place!" (Poor foxes, they are too green!)—"Society is suffering, it has a terrible gnawing at the vitals;" (translate: no one will subscribe to the utilitarian papers.) "It is for the poet to seek the cause of the trouble and cure it. He will find a way by sympathizing heart and soul with humanity;" (philanthropic poets! that would be something rare and charming.) "We await the coming of that poet, we pray for his coming with all our hearts. When he appears, his will be the acclamations of the multitude, his the palm-leaves, his the wreaths, his the Prytaneum."

Very fine; but as we desire the reader to stay awake to the end of this blessed preface, we will not continue this very close imitation of the utilitarian style, which, by its nature, is unusually soporific, and might advantageously replace laudanum and the discourses of the Academy.

No, fools, no, cretins and goitrous creatures that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup;—a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet is not a syringe with a continuous stream; a drama is not a railroad,—all essentially civilizing things and tending to assist humanity along the pathway of progress.

By the bowels of all the popes, past, present, and to come, no, two hundred thousand times no.

You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy, or wear comparisons by way of slippers; you cannot use antithesis as an umbrella; unluckily we have not the secret of clapping a few variegated rhymes upon the stomach as we put on a waistcoat. I have a firm conviction that the ode is a garment too light for winter, and that one would be no more warmly clad with the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, than the wife of the cynic who was contented to have only her virtue as a chemise and went about as naked as your hand, as history tells us.

The famous Monsieur de la Calprenède once had a coat, and when some one asked what kind of cloth it was made of, he answered: Silvandre.—Silvandre was a play of his that had just been produced with success.

Such arguments make one raise his shoulders above his head, higher than the Duke of Gloucester's.

People who claim to be economists and who wish to rebuild society from top to bottom, seriously put forward such trash.

A novel may be useful in two ways:—one material, the other spiritual, if we may use such an expression with reference to a novel.—Its material utility consists, first, of the few thousand francs that go into the author's pocket, and ballast him so that neither the devil nor the wind can whisk him away; to the publisher it is a noble race-horse who stamps and rears with his cabriolet of ebony and steel, as Figaro says; to the paper manufacturer, one more factory on some stream and often the means of spoiling a fine site; to the printers, divers hogsheads of logwood to put their windpipes in shape once a week; to the circulating libraries, piles of big sous covered with proletariat verdigris and a quantity of grease, which if it were carefully collected and utilized would render the whale-fishery useless.—The spiritual utility consists in this: that, while you are reading novels, you fall asleep, and you are not reading utilitarian, virtuous, and progressive newspapers, or other similar indigestible, stupefying drugs.

Let any one say after this that novels do not assist civilization.—I will say nothing of the tobacco agents, grocers, and dealers in fried potatoes, who have a very great interest in this branch of literature, the paper used therein being, as a general rule, of a superior quality to that used by the newspapers.

Verily it is enough to make one split one's sides with laughter to hear messieurs the republican or Saint-Simonian utilitarians hold forth.—In the first place, I should be glad to know the exact meaning of that great lubberly substantive with which they daily lard the empty void of their columns, and which serves them as a sort of shibboleth and sacramental term:—Utility; what is the word, and to what is it applied?

There are two kinds of utilities, and the meaning of the word is always relative. What is useful for one is not for another. You are a cobbler, I am a poet.—It is useful for me to have my first line rhyme with my second.—A dictionary of rhymes is of great utility to me; you have no use for it in cobbling an old pair of boots, and it is fair to say that a cobbler's knife would be of no great use to me in writing an ode.—Now, you will remark that a cobbler is much above a poet, and that we could get along better without the latter than without the former. Without undertaking to cry down the illustrious profession of cobbler, which I honor equally with the profession of constitutional monarch, I will humbly confess that I should prefer to have my shoe down at heel rather than to have my lines haltingly rhymed, and that I should be more willing to go without boots than without poems. As I rarely go out, and walk more readily on my head than on my feet, I wear out fewer shoes than a virtuous republican who does nothing but run from one government department to another trying to induce somebody to toss him an office.

I know that there are those who prefer windmills to churches, and the bread that feeds the body to that that feeds the soul. To them I have nothing to say. They deserve to be economists in this world and also in the other.

Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this life that we live? In the first place, there is very little use in one being on the earth and living. I challenge the most erudite of the band to say of what use we are, unless it be to subscribe neither to the Constitutionnel nor to a journal of any sort.

Secondly, the utility of our existence being admitted a priori, what are the really useful things to maintain it? A plate of soup and a bit of bread twice a day are all that we need to fill the stomach, in the strict acceptation of the word. The man for whom a coffin six feet by two will be enough and more than enough after his death, does not need much more space during his life. A hollow cube, seven or eight feet broad, long and deep, with a hole to breathe through, a single cell in the hive, is all that he needs to lodge him and to keep the rain from falling on his back. A quilt, rolled properly about his body, will protect him from the cold as well as, yes, better than, Staub's most stylish and elegant frock-coat.

With that a man can exist, theoretically. They say that one can live on twenty-five sous a day; but to keep from dying is not living; and I cannot see wherein a city organized on utilitarian principles would be more agreeable to live in than Père La Chaise.

Nothing beautiful is indispensable to life.—If flowers should be suppressed, the world would not suffer materially; and yet who could wish that there were no flowers? I would rather give up potatoes than roses, and I do not believe there is more than one utilitarian in the world capable of digging up a bed of tulips to make room for cabbages.

What good purpose does female beauty serve? Provided that a woman is well-developed physically, in a condition to receive a man and to produce children, she will always be good enough for the economist.

What is the use of music? or painting? Who would be foolish enough to prefer Mozart to Monsieur Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?

Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature.—The most useful part of a house is the privy.

I myself, with due respect to those gentlemen, am one of those to whom superfluities are necessaries—and my liking for people and things is in inverse ratio to the services they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase, covered with dragons and mandarins, which is of no use to me at all, to a certain other vase, which is useful to me; and that one of my talents which I prize most highly is my inability to guess riddles and charades. I would very willingly renounce my privileges as a Frenchman and a citizen to see an authentic painting by Raphael, or a beautiful nude woman: the Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she was in her bath. For my part I would gladly consent to the return of that cannibal of a Charles X., if he would bring me, from his castle in Bohemia, a hamper of Tokay or Johannisberg, and I would agree that the suffrage laws were broad enough, if some of the streets were more so and other things less so.—Although I am not a born dilettante, I prefer the noise of squeaking fiddles and bass drums to that of Monsieur le Président's bell. I would sell my trousers to buy a ring and my daily bread for sweetmeats.—The most becoming occupation for a polished man is, it seems to me, to do nothing, or to smoke his pipe or his cigar analytically. I also have a high regard for those who play at skittles and for those who write good poetry. You see that my principles are very far from being utilitarian, and that I shall never become editor of a virtuous newspaper unless I am converted, which would be droll enough.

Instead of awarding a Monthyon prize as a reward of virtue, I would prefer to give, like Sardanapalus, that great philosopher who has been so misunderstood, a handsome premium to the man who should invent a new form of pleasure; for enjoyment seems to me the true aim of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, for it was He who made women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wines, prancing horses, greyhounds, and Angora cats; nor did he say to his angels: "Be virtuous," but: "Love;" and he gave us a mouth, more sensitive than the rest of the skin, with which to kiss women, eyes uplifted to see the light, a subtle sense of smell to inhale the soul of flowers, well-knit thighs to press the sides of stallions and fly swifter than thought without railroad or steamboat, delicate hands with which to caress the long head of the greyhound, the velvety back of the cat, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures of doubtful virtue; in a word, he bestowed only upon us the threefold, glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of striking a light, and of making love at all seasons, which distinguishes us from the brute much more than the custom of reading newspapers and drawing maps.

Mon Dieu! what an idiotic thing is this alleged perfectibility of the human race that is being dinned into our ears! One would say in truth that man is a machine susceptible of improvements, and that the more careful adjustment of a wheel, a counterpoise more conveniently placed, might make it work more smoothly and more handily. When they have succeeded in giving man a double stomach, so that he can chew his cud like an ox, and eyes in the back of his head, like Janus, so that he can see those who stick out their tongues at him behind his back, and contemplate his unworthiness in a less uncomfortable position than that of the Venus Callipyges at Athens, and in planting wings on his shoulder blades so that he will not be obliged to pay six sous to ride in an omnibus; when they have given him a new organ, well and good: then the word perfectibility will begin to mean something.

Since all these fine ameliorations, what has been done that was not done as well and better before the deluge?

Have we succeeded in drinking more than they drank in the days of ignorance and barbarism—old style? Alexander, the doubtful friend of the fair Hephæstion, was no small drinker, although there was no Journal des Connaissances Utiles in his day, and I am unable to conceive how any utilitarian, unless he should become oïnopic and more puffed out than the younger Lepeintre or a hippopotamus, could drain the great beaker which he called Hercules' cup. The Maréchal de Bassompierre, who emptied his long boot to the health of the Thirteen Cantons, seems to me a singularly estimable personage in his way and very hard to improve upon. What economist will enlarge our stomachs so that they will hold as many beefsteaks as the late Milo of Crotona, who ate an ox? The bill of fare at Véfour's Café Anglais, or at any other culinary celebrity's that you choose, seems to me very ill-supplied and commonplace compared to the menu of Trimalcion's dinner.—At whose table in these days are a sow and her twelve shoats served on a single platter? Who has eaten muræna and lampreys fattened on man? Do you really think that Brillat-Savarin has improved upon Apicius? Could Vitellius's big tripe-man find at Chevet's the wherewithal to fill his famous Minerva's shield with pheasants' and peacocks' brains, tongues of flamingoes and scarus livers?—The oysters you eat at the Rocher de Cancale are such a great delicacy compared with the oysters of Lucrin, for which a lake was made expressly.—The little establishments in the suburbs kept by the marquises of the Regency were wretched little boxes, if we compare them with the villas of the Roman patricians at Baiæ, Capri, and Tibur. The Cyclopean splendor of the great voluptuaries who erected everlasting monuments for a day's pleasure should cause us to fall flat on our faces before the genius of antiquity and erase forever from our dictionaries the word perfectibility.

Has a new capital crime been invented? Unfortunately there are only seven of them as before, the number of the just man's backslidings for one day, which is very moderate.—Indeed, I do not think that after a century of progress, at the rate we are travelling, any lover would be capable of renewing the thirteenth labor of Hercules.—Can a man be agreeable to his divinity a single time oftener than in the days of Solomon? Many very illustrious scholars and very respectable ladies answer that question in the negative, and aver that amiability is on the wane. Very good! if that is so, why do you talk of progress?—I know that you will tell me that there is an Upper Chamber and a Lower Chamber, that you hope that everybody will soon be an elector and the number of representatives doubled or trebled. Do you think that there are not enough mistakes in grammar made in the national tribune as it is, and that the deputies are not numerous enough for the vile work they have to do? I can hardly understand the utility of quartering two or three hundred provincials in a wooden barrack, with a ceiling painted by Monsieur Fragonard, there to botch and bungle nobody knows how many absurd or atrocious little laws.—What difference does it make whether it is a sabre, a holy-water sprinkler, or an umbrella that governs us?—It is a club all the same, and I am amazed that progressive men should dispute as to the kind of club that is to make their shoulders tingle, when it would be much more progressive and less expensive to break it and throw the pieces to all the devils.

The only one of you who has any common sense is a madman, a great genius, an imbecile, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron; it is Charles Fourrier, the phalansterian, who is all that in his single person: he alone is logical and has the courage to carry his theory through to its inevitable consequence.—He asserts, without hesitation, that man will soon have a tail fifteen feet long with an eye at the end of it; that surely is progress and will permit us to do a thousand fine things we could not do before, such as killing elephants without striking a blow, balancing ourselves on trees without swings, as handily as the most expert ape, doing without sunshade or umbrella by raising the tail above the head like a plume, as squirrels do, who get along very well without umbrellas; and other prerogatives too numerous to mention. Several phalansterians claim that they already have a little tail that asks nothing better than to grow longer, if only God gives them length of days.

Charles Fourrier has invented as many species of animals as George Cuvier, the great naturalist. He invented horses that will be thrice the size of elephants, dogs as large as tigers, fish capable of feeding more people than the three small fishes of the Saviour, which the incredulous Voltaireans believe were poissons d'Avril,[1] and I the text of a noble parable. He has built cities beside which Rome, Tyre, and Babylon are simply mole-hills; he has piled Babels one upon another and built spiral stairways ascending among the clouds to a greater height than all those in John Martinn's engravings; he has conceived I cannot say how many orders of architecture and new sauces; he has drawn a plan for a theatre which would seem immense even to Romans of the Empire, and prepared a dinner menu that Lucius or Nomentanus might have deemed sufficient for a dinner to their friends; he promises to create new forms of pleasure and to develop the organs and the senses; he is to make women fairer and more voluptuous, men more robust and sturdy; he guarantees you children and proposes to reduce the population of the world so that every one will be in easy circumstances; which is more reasonable than to urge paupers to make other paupers, with the idea of shooting them down in the streets when they breed too fast and sending them bullets instead of bread.

Progress is possible in no other way.—All the rest is bitter mockery, buffoonery without wit, which is not even calculated to deceive gullible fools.

The phalanstery is really a step in advance of the abbey of Thélème, and definitely relegates the earthly paradise to the ranks of those things that are altogether superannuated and old-fashioned. The Thousand and One Nights and Madame d'Aulnay's Tales alone can contend successfully with the phalanstery. What fertility! what invention! There is material there from which to supply marvels for three thousand cartloads of romantic or classic poems; and our versifiers, whether academicians or not, are paltry inventors compared to Monsieur Charles Fourrier, the inventor of startling attractions.—This idea of making use of impulses which people have hitherto sought to repress, is most assuredly a lofty and powerful idea.

Ah! you say that we are making progress!—Suppose that a volcano should open its maw to-morrow at Montmartre, and should make a winding-sheet of ashes and a tomb of lava for Paris, as Vesuvius once did for Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and that, some thousand years hence, the antiquaries of that day should make excavations and exhume the corpse of the dead city, tell me what monument would remain standing to bear witness to the splendor of the mighty entombed, the Gothic Notre-Dame?—They would form truly a fine idea of our artistic development when they cleared away the rubbish from the Tuileries, redecorated by Monsieur Fontaine! The statues on Pont Louis XV. would look splendid in the museums of those days. And were it not for the pictures of the ancient schools and the statues of antiquity or the Renaissance crowded together in the gallery of the Louvre, that long shapeless conduit; were it not for the ceiling by Ingres, which would show that Paris was not a Barbary camp or a village of Welches or Topinamboux, the things that would be unearthed from the ruins would be very interesting.—Short swords carried by National Guardsmen, firemen's helmets, coins struck from pyriform dies, that is the kind of thing they would find instead of the beautiful, curiously-carved weapons that the Middle Ages left in the recesses of their towers and ruined tombs, the medallions that fill the Etruscan vases and pave the cellars of all Roman buildings. As for our wretched veneered furniture, all the cheap boxes, naked and ugly and shabby, that we call commodes or secretaries, and all our shapeless, fragile utensils,—I trust that time would have been compassionate enough to destroy the last vestige of them.

Once, this whim of erecting a magnificent, pretentious monument took possession of us. In the first place we were obliged to borrow the plan from the old Romans; and even before it was finished, our Panthéon tottered on its legs like a child with the rickets and staggered like a drunken man, so that we had to give it crutches of stone, otherwise it would have measured its shameful length on the ground, in sight of all the world, and would have given the nations something to laugh at for more than a hundred francs.—We thought it better to set up an obelisk on one of our squares; we had to go and filch it at Luxor, and we were two years bringing it home. Old Egypt lined its roads with obelisks as we line ours with poplars; it carried bundles of them under its arm as the market-gardener carries bunches of asparagus, and carved a monolith from the sides of its mountains of granite more easily than we make tooth-picks or ear-picks. A few centuries ago Raphael was living and Michael Angelo; now we have Monsieur Paul Delaroche, all because we are progressing.—You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could dance a saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin, himself, with his tame tiger and his poor gouty lion, sound asleep like a subscriber to the Gazette, makes a very poor showing beside the gladiator of antiquity. Take your benefit performances that last till two o'clock in the morning—what do they amount to when you think of the games that lasted a hundred days, of the plays in which real ships really fought in real water; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut one another in pieces;—aye, turn pale O heroic Franconi!—in which, when the sea retired, the desert arrived with its roaring tigers and lions, awe-inspiring supernumeraries who did duty but once; in which the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian lioness who had fasted for three days?—Does it not seem to you that the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is,—Galeria Coppiola played ingénue rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It is fair to say that the oldest of our jeunes premières is but little more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a strange kind of progress.—Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have discovered or even improved.

After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them, come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is falsely drawn;"—or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.

"'Who will deliver us from men and women?'

"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion of the Pont-Neuf:[2] nothing in the world could be more common; I read it somewhere or other;—when I was out at nurse or somewhere else; it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.—By the way, monsieur, understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the most contemptible pedants."

Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert, Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.

They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.—If it is winter, they prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire, and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous line:

Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,

by the aid of which they assume a knowing and at the same time ingenuous air, the most fascinating thing imaginable. They pose as men upon whom the work of men can no longer make any impression, whom the emotions aroused by the drama leave as cold and hard as the knife with which they cut their quills, but who exclaim, nevertheless, with Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Ah! there's the periwinkle!" They profess fierce antipathy to the colonels at the Gymnase, the American uncles, the cousins, male and female, the sensitive old grumblers, the romantic widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by proving every day by the feuilletons that all Frenchmen are not born wicked.—In truth, we see no great harm in that, but the contrary, and we are glad to acknowledge that the extinction of the vaudeville or the opera-comique in France—national style—would be one of the greatest benefactions that the press and Heaven could bestow.—But I should be very glad to know what species of literature these gentlemen would allow to be established in its place. To be sure, it could be no worse.

Others preach against false taste and translate Seneca the tragedian. Lastly, and to close the procession, a new battalion of critics has been formed, of a species never before seen.

Their formula for estimating a work is the most convenient, the most elastic, the most malleable, the most peremptory, the most superlative, and the most successful that a critic ever could have conceived. Zoilus would certainly have lost nothing thereby.

Hitherto, when it has seemed desirable to depreciate a work of any sort or to cast odium upon it in the eyes of the patriarchal and simple-minded subscriber, the ordinary method has been to make false or cunningly isolated quotations; to maim sentences and mutilate lines in such a way that the author himself would have considered himself the most ridiculous creature on earth; to bring accusations of imaginary plagiarisms; to place passages from his book side by side with passages from ancient or modern authors, which had not the least connection therewith; to accuse him, after the style of a cook and with innumerable solecisms, of not knowing his own language and of degrading the French of Racine and Voltaire; to assert in all seriousness that his book tended toward anthropophagy, and that readers would infallibly become cannibals or have hydrophobia in the course of the week; but all that was paltry, out of date, false and fossilized to the last degree. By dint of having dragged along through feuilletons and Variétés articles, the charge of immorality became insufficient, and so unfit for service that the Constitutionnel, a bashful and progressive journal, as we know, was almost the only one that had the desperate courage to continue to use it.

So they invented the criticism of the future, the Prospective criticism. Can you imagine, at first thought, what a charming thing it is and what a prolific imagination it indicates? The recipe is simple and I can tell you what it is. The book that will be considered fine and will be praised is the book that has not yet appeared. The one that has just appeared is infallibly detestable. The one to appear to-morrow will be superb; but it is always to-day. It is the same with this sort of criticism as with the barber who had these words in huge letters for his sign:

SHAVING FREE HERE TO-MORROW.

All the poor devils who read the placard promised themselves for the next day the ineffable, sovereign sweetness of being barbered once in their lives without unloosing their purse-strings: and the hair on their chins easily grew half a foot during the night that preceded that blessed day; but when they had the napkin around their necks, the barber asked them if they had any money and bade them pay up, or he would treat them like nut-pickers or apple-gatherers of Le Perche; and he swore a mighty sacre dieu that he would cut their throats with his razor unless they paid him; and when the poor devils, whining and whimpering, talked about the sign and the sacrosanct inscription:—"Ha! ha! my little fatties!" said the barber, "you don't know so much after all, and you'd much better go back to school! The sign says: 'To-morrow!' I'm no such whimsical fool as to shave for nothing to-day; my confrères would say I was throwing away my trade.—Come another time, come the week that has two Sundays together, and you'll find everything all right. May I be called a niggardly fellow and a flat, if I don't shave you for nothing, on the word of an honest barber."

Authors who read a prospective article in which an existing work is attacked always flatter themselves that the book they are writing will be the book of the future. They try to accommodate themselves, as much as possible, to the ideas of the critic, and become socialists, progressives, moralizers, palingenetics, mystics, pantheists, buchezists, thinking in that way to escape the anathema; but the same thing happens to them that happened to the barber's customers:—to-day is not the eve of to-morrow. The to-morrow that we hear so much about will never shine upon the world; for the formula is too convenient to be abandoned so soon. Even while decrying the book of which they are jealous and which they would be glad to annihilate, they put on the gloves of the most generous impartiality. They apparently ask nothing better than to approve and praise it, and yet they never do it. This recipe is very superior to the one that we might call retrospective, which consists in vaunting ancient works only—works which no one reads and no one cares about—at the expense of modern books, which people do think about and which wound their self-esteem more directly.

We said, before beginning this review of messieurs the critics, that the material would fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but that we would content ourselves with a few lines; I am beginning to fear that those lines will prove to be each two or three thousand fathoms long and will resemble those thick, bulky pamphlets that a cannon-ball would not make a hole through, which bear the perfidious title: "A word concerning the Revolution," a word concerning this or that. The history of the doings of the manifold loves of the goddess Madeleine de Maupin, would run great risk of being elbowed out of the first book, and you will understand that two whole volumes are not too much to sing worthily the adventures of that lovely Bradamante.—That is why, however much we may desire to continue the blazonry of the illustrious Aristarchuses of the age, we will content ourselves with the partial sketch we have drawn, adding a few reflections concerning the good-nature of our easy-going confrères in Apollo, who, as stupid as the Cassander of pantomime, stand still to receive the blows from Harlequin's lath and the clown's kicks in the stern, without budging any more than an idol.

They resemble a fencing-master, who should fold his arms behind his back during a bout, and receive all his opponent's thrusts in his unprotected breast without attempting a single parry.

It is like the trial of a cause in which the king's attorney only is allowed to speak, or a debate in which no reply is permitted.

The critic puts forward this or that theory. He makes a great dash and ostentatious display. Absurd, detestable, monstrous; it resembles nothing, it resembles everything. A drama is produced, the critic goes to see it; he finds that it bears no resemblance to the drama he had constructed in his head on the strength of the title; thereupon he substitutes, in his feuilleton, his own drama for the author's. He interlards it with his erudite phrases; he relieves himself of all the knowledge he has collected the day before in some library, and belabors people to whom he ought to go to school, and the least of whom could teach greater men than he.

Authors endure this with a magnanimity, a long-suffering which seems to me truly inconceivable. After all is said and done, who are these critics whose tone is so cutting, whose words are so peremptory, that one would say they were veritable sons of the gods? they are simply men who were our school-fellows, and who have evidently profited less by their studies than we, since they have produced nothing and can do nothing but befoul and spoil the work of others like genuine Stymphalian vampires.

Would it not be worth while to criticise the critics? for those disgruntled great men, who are so fond of playing the magnificent and the fastidious, are far from being infallible like the Holy Father. There would be matter enough to fill a daily newspaper of the largest size. Their errors, historical or otherwise, their distorted quotations, their mistakes in grammar, their plagiarism, their drivel, their oft-repeated, ill-bred jests, their paucity of ideas, their lack of intelligence and tact, their ignorance of the simplest things which leads them to mistake the Piræus for a man and Monsieur Delaroche for a painter, would furnish authors with ample material for vengeance, without other labor than that of drawing a line under the passages and reproducing them word for word; for one does not receive a commission as a great writer with a commission as critic, and to reproach others for errors in language or taste is not enough to ensure one against making them himself; our critics prove it every day.—If Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and other men of that stamp should become critics, I could understand that people might go down on their knees and worship them; but that Messieurs Z. K. Y. V. Q. X., or any other letter of the alphabet between Alpha and Omega, should set themselves up as little Quintilians and scold you in the name of morality and good literature—that is what always disgusts me and sends me into an unparalleled rage. I would like to have a police ordinance issued prohibiting certain names from attacking certain others. To be sure, a cat may look at a king, and Saint-Peter's at Rome, giant that it is, cannot prevent the Transteverins from defiling its base in strange fashion; but I do not believe, nevertheless, that it would be a bad idea to inscribe upon certain monumental reputations:

NO FILTH DEPOSITED HERE.

Charles X. alone understood the question. By ordering the suppression of newspapers he conferred a great service upon the arts and civilization. Newspapers are in a certain sense courtiers or jobbers, who interpose between artists and public, between king and people. We know the fine things that resulted therefrom. This perpetual barking and snarling benumbs inspiration and causes such a feeling of distrust in the heart and mind, that no one dares place his confidence either in a poet or in a government; the result being that royalty and poesy, the two greatest things in the world, become impossible, to the great detriment of the people, who sacrifice their well-being to the paltry pleasure of reading every morning a few vile sheets printed on vile paper, besmeared with vile ink, and filled with vile stuff. There was no criticism of art under Julius II., and I never heard of any feuilleton on the subject of Daniel de Volterra, Sebastiano del Piombo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Ghiberti della Porta, or Benvenuto Cellini; and yet I think that, for people who had no newspapers, who did not know the word art or the word artistic, they had a fair share of talent and acquitted themselves reasonably well at their trade. The reading of newspapers hinders the growth of genuine scholars and genuine artists; it is like daily dissipation that brings you, enervated and weak, to the bed of the Muses, those harsh, exacting damsels who will have none but fresh and lusty lovers. The newspaper kills the book, as the book has killed architecture, as artillery has killed physical courage and muscular strength. No one realizes the pleasures that the newspapers deprive us of. They strip everything of its virginity; they prevent us from having anything of our own, even from owning a book all by ourselves; they deprive us of the pleasure of being surprised at the theatre by telling us beforehand how every play ends; they deprive us of the pleasure of spreading idle gossip and tittle-tattle and slander, of inventing false news or peddling genuine news for a whole week through every salon in society. They drone ready-made opinions to us, do what we will, and warn us against things we might like; by their means, dealers in phosphorous matches, although they have poor memories, discuss literature as impertinently as provincial academicians; by their means we hear, all day long, in place of artless opinions or individual nonsense, ill-digested fragments of newspapers, which resemble omelets half cooked on one side and burned on the other,—and we are pitilessly stuffed with news three or four hours old, which children at the breast already know; they deaden our taste, they make us like those people who drink spiced brandy, and those who swallow lemons and grape-stalks, and lose the flavor of the most generous wines and cannot appreciate their delicate, perfumed bouquet. If Louis-Philippe should suppress all literary and political journals once for all, I should be infinitely grateful to him and I would dash off on the spot a fine, rambling dithyramb, in soaring verse with alternate rhymes; signed: "Your most humble and loyal subject," etc. Pray do not imagine that there would be no further interest in literature; in the days when there were no newspapers, a quatrain engrossed all Paris for a week, and a first performance for six months.

It is true that this step would result in the loss of advertisements and puffs at thirty sous a line, and notoriety would be less sudden and less overwhelming. But I have thought out a very ingenious way of replacing advertisements. If, between now and the day when this magnificent novel is placed on sale, my gracious sovereign shall have suppressed the newspapers, I shall most assuredly make use of it, and I anticipate wonders therefrom. When the great day arrives, twenty-four mounted criers, in the livery of Renduel, with his address on their backs and breasts, carrying banners in their hands with the title of the novel embroidered on both sides, each preceded by a drummer and kettle-drummer, will ride through the city, and, halting on all the squares and corners, will shout in a loud, distinct voice: "To-day, not yesterday or to-morrow, is placed on sale the admirable, the inimitable, the divine and more than divine novel by the most illustrious Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, which Europe, not to mention other parts of the world and Polynesia, has been awaiting so impatiently for a year and more. It is selling at the rate of five hundred a minute, and editions follow one another from half-hour to half-hour; the nineteenth is already on sale. A detachment of municipal guards is stationed at the door of the shop, holding back the crowd and preventing all confusion." Surely that would be worth as much as three lines in the Débats or the Courrier Français, between advertisements of elastic belts, hoop-skirts, nursing-bottles with indestructible teats, Regnault paste, and remedies for fluor albus.

May, 1834.

[1] April fools—literally, April fishes.

[2] New Bridge.

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

I

You complain, my dear friend, of the infrequency of my letters.—What would you have me write you except that I am well and that my affection for you never changes?—Those are facts that you know perfectly well, and that are so natural to my age and to the noble qualities that every one recognizes in you, that it is almost absurd to send a paltry sheet of paper a hundred leagues to say nothing more.—In vain do I cudgel my brains, I know of nothing that is worth the trouble of repeating; mine is the most monotonous life imaginable and nothing happens to break the monotony. To-day leads up to to-morrow as yesterday led up to to-day; and without claiming to be a prophet, I can boldly prophesy in the morning what will happen to me in the afternoon.

This is how I arrange my day:—I rise, that goes without saying, and that is the beginning of every day; I breakfast, I fence, I go out to walk, I come home, I dine, make a few calls or amuse myself reading: then I go to bed precisely as I did the day before; I go to sleep, and as my imagination is not excited by unfamiliar objects, it supplies me with none but threadbare, often repeated dreams, as monotonous as my actual life: all this is not very entertaining, as you see. However, I reconcile myself to this existence better than I should have done six months ago.—I am bored, to be sure, but in a tranquil, resigned fashion, which does not lack a certain agreeableness, which might well be compared to those gray, mild autumn days in which one finds a secret charm after the excessive heat of summer.

This sort of existence, although I have apparently accepted it, is hardly suited to me, however, or, at all events, it bears but little resemblance to the existence I dream of and consider myself well adapted for.—Perhaps I am mistaken and am in reality adapted for no other kind of life than this; but I can hardly believe it, for, if it were my real destiny, I should more readily have adapted myself to it and should not be so painfully bruised by its sharp corners in so many places.

You know what a powerful attraction strange adventures have for me, how I adore everything out of the common course, extravagant and dangerous, and with what avidity I devour novels and tales of travel; I doubt if there is on this earth a madder, more vagabond fancy than mine; and yet, by some curious fatality or other, I have never had an adventure, I have never made a journey. So far as I am concerned, the tour of the world means the tour of the town in which I live; I touch my horizon on every side; I am elbow to elbow with reality. My life is that of the shell on the sand-bank, of the ivy clinging to the tree, of the cricket on the hearth.—Verily, I am surprised that my feet have never taken root.

Cupid is represented with a bandage over his eyes; Destiny should be represented in the same condition.

I have for a valet a sort of rustic boor, loutish and stupid enough, who has travelled as much as the north wind, who has been to the devil, to every conceivable place, who has seen with his eyes all the things of which I conceive charming ideas, and cares as little about them as about a glass of water; he has been in the most extraordinary situations; he has had the most amazing adventures that a man can have. I make him talk sometimes, and I rage inwardly when I think that all those fine things have happened to a clown who is capable neither of sentiment nor reflection, and who is good for nothing but to do what he does, that is to say, brush clothes and clean boots.

It is clear that that knave's life should have been mine.—For his part, he considers me very fortunate, and his surprise is unbounded when he sees how melancholy I am.

All this is not very interesting, my poor friend, and hardly worth the trouble of writing, is it? But as you insist upon it that I must write to you, I must tell you what I think and what I feel, and must give you the history of my ideas, in default of events and acts.—It may be that there will be little order and little novelty in what I shall have to say to you; but you must blame nobody but yourself for it. You would have it.

You are the friend of my childhood, I was brought up with you; we lived our lives in common for a long, long while, and we are accustomed to exchange our most secret thoughts. I can tell you, therefore, without blushing, all the absurd things that pass through my unoccupied brain; I will not add a word, I will not cut out a word, I have no self-love with you. So I will be absolutely frank—even in petty, shameful things; not before you, certainly, will I cover my nakedness.

Beneath the shroud of indifferent, depressed ennui to which I have referred just now, there stirs sometimes a thought that is benumbed rather than dead, and I have not always the sad and gentle tranquillity that melancholy gives.—I have relapses and fall back into my old attacks of agitation. Nothing in the world is so fatiguing as those motiveless paroxysms, those aimless impulses.—On those days, although I have no more to do than on any others, I rise very early in the morning, before sunrise, I have such a feeling of being in a hurry, of not having all the time I need; I dress in hot haste, as if the house were on fire, tossing on my clothes at random and bewailing a wasted minute.—Any one who happened to see me would think that I was going to keep an assignation or to hunt for money.—Not at all.—I have no idea where I shall go; but go I must, and I should think my salvation endangered if I remained at home.—It seems to me as if somebody were calling me outside, as if my destiny were passing through the street at the moment and the question of my life or death were on the point of being decided.

I go down with an air of surprise and alarm, clothes in disorder, hair uncombed: people turn to look and laugh when they meet me, and take me for a young rake who has passed the night at the ale-house or elsewhere. I am drunk to all intent, although I have drunk nothing, and I have the aspect of a drunken man even to the uncertain gait, now slow, now fast. I go from street to street like a dog that has lost his master, looking in every direction, ill at ease, on the alert, turning at the slightest sound, gliding into the centre of every group, heedless of the rebuffs of the people I jostle against, and scrutinizing everything with a clear-sightedness that I do not possess at other times.—Then all of a sudden it is made clear to me that I am mistaken, that that surely is not the place, that I must go on farther, to the other end of the town, Heaven knows where.—And I rush off as if the devil were after me.—I touch the ground only with the tips of my toes and I don't weigh an ounce.—Really I must be a strange sight with my terrified, frantic manner, my waving arms and the inarticulate cries I utter.—When I think it over in cold blood, I laugh at myself with all my heart, which doesn't prevent me, I beg you to believe, from doing it all over again on the first occasion.

If any one should ask me why I rush about so, I certainly should be much embarrassed to answer. I am in no hurry to arrive, as I am going nowhere. I am not afraid of being late, as I have no appointment.—No one is waiting for me—and I have no possible reason for hurrying so.

Is it because an opportunity to love, an adventure, a woman, an idea, a fortune, or anything else is missing in my life, and I am seeking it unconsciously, impelled by a vague instinct? is my existence struggling to complete itself? is it a longing to get away from myself and my surroundings, the tiresomeness of my life and the wish for something different? It is one of these, or perhaps all of them together.—At all events, it is a very unpleasant experience, a feverish irritation ordinarily succeeded by the most complete collapse.

I often have the idea that, if I had started an hour earlier, or if I had quickened my gait, I should have arrived in time; that, while I was passing through one street, the thing I was looking for passed through another, and that a block of carriages was enough to make me miss what I have been pursuing, regardless of everything else, for so long a time.—You cannot imagine the intense melancholy and profound despair into which I fall when I see that all this comes to nothing and that my youth is passing and no prospect opening before me; thereupon all my idle passions mutter in my heart and devour each other for lack of better food, like the wild beasts in a menagerie whom the keeper has forgotten to feed. Despite the stifled, unacknowledged disappointments of every day, there is something within me that resists and will not die. I have no hope, for, in order to hope, one must have a desire, a certain propensity to wish that things should turn out in one way rather than another. I desire nothing, for I desire everything. I do not hope, or rather I have ceased to hope;—this is too absurd—and it is absolutely one to me whether a thing is or is not.—I am waiting—for what? I don't know, but I am waiting.

It is a shuddering sort of expectation, overflowing with impatience, broken with somersaults and nervous movements, like the suspense of a lover waiting for his mistress.—Nothing comes;—I fly into a passion or begin to weep.—I am waiting for heaven to open and an angel to descend and make some revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and the people to give me a throne, for one of Raphaël's virgins to step out of its canvas and come and embrace me, for relations that I don't possess to die and leave me the wherewithal to set my fancy afloat upon a sea of gold, for a hippogriff to snatch me up and bear me away into unknown regions.—But whatever I am waiting for, it certainly is nothing commonplace and ordinary.

It has gone so far that, when I return home, I never fail to ask: "Has no one been here? is there no letter for me? nothing new?"—I know perfectly well that there is nothing, that there can be nothing. That makes no difference; I am always much surprised and much disappointed when I receive the regular reply:—"No, monsieur—nothing at all."

Sometimes—very rarely, however—the idea takes a more definite form.—It will be some lovely woman whom I don't know and who doesn't know me, whom I have met at church or at the theatre and who has not taken the slightest notice of me.—I rush all over the house, and until I have opened the door of the last room—I hardly dare confess it, it is so utterly absurd—I hope that she has come and is there.—It is not conceit on my part.—I am so far from being conceited that several women have taken a most affectionate interest in me—at least so others have told me—when I had supposed them to be entirely indifferent to me and never to have thought much about me.—That comes from another source.

When I am not stupefied by ennui and discouragement my mind awakes and recovers all its former vigor. I hope, I love, I desire, and my desires are so violent that I imagine they will force everything to come to them, as a powerful magnet attracts bits of iron although they are at a great distance.—That is why I wait for the things I desire, instead of going to them, and I often neglect opportunities that open most favorably before my hopes.—Another than I would write the most amorous note you can imagine to his heart's divinity, or would seek an opportunity to approach her.—But I ask the messenger for the reply to a letter I have not written, and pass my time constructing in my brain situations most marvellously adapted to exhibit me to the woman I love in the most unlooked-for and most favorable light.—I could make a book thicker and more ingenious than the Stratagems of Polybius of all the stratagems I invent to make my way to her presence and reveal my passion to her. Generally it would be enough to say to one of my friends: "Present me to Madame So-and-So," and to indulge in a mythological compliment suitably punctuated with sighs.

After listening to all this, one would naturally think me a fit subject for the Petites-Maisons; I am a sensible fellow enough, however, and I haven't carried many mad ideas into execution. All this takes place in the cellar of my brain, and all these ridiculous ideas are very carefully buried in my lowest depths; no one notices anything on the outside, and I am reputed to be a calm, cold young man, by no means susceptible to female charms and indifferent to things affected by most young men of my age; all of which is as far from the truth as society's judgments usually are.

However, in spite of all the things that have happened to dishearten me, some of my longings have been gratified, and from the small amount of pleasure their gratification has afforded me, I have come to dread the realization of the others. You remember the childish ardor of my longing to have a horse of my own? my mother gave me one very recently; he is as black as ebony, with a little white star on his face, flowing mane and tail, glossy coat, slender legs, just exactly the horse I wanted. When they brought him to me, it gave me such a shock, that I was as pale as death, and unable to recover myself, for a good quarter of an hour; then I mounted him, and started off at a gallop without saying a word; I rode straight ahead through the fields for more than an hour, in a state of ecstasy hard to conceive; I did the same every day for more than a week, and, upon my word, I don't know why I didn't founder him, or at least break his wind.—Gradually my intense zeal slackened. I rode my horse at a trot, then at a walk, then I began to ride so indifferently that he would frequently stop without my noticing it: the pleasure was transformed to a habit much more quickly than I supposed.—As for Ferragus—that is the name I gave him—he is really the most beautiful creature you can imagine. The hair on his feet is like the down on a young eagle; he is as active as a goat and as gentle as a lamb. You will enjoy above all things taking a gallop on him when you come here; and, although my passion for equestrianism has grown decidedly cool, I am still very fond of him, for he has a very estimable equine character and I very much prefer him to many human beings. If you could hear his neigh of delight when I go to see him in his stable, and how intelligent his eyes are when he looks at me! I confess that I am touched by those marks of affection, and I put my arm around his neck and kiss him as affectionately, on my word, as if he were a lovely girl.

I had another longing also, more intense, more ardent, more constantly awake, more dearly cherished, upon which I had built a fascinating house of cards in my mind, a palace of chimeras, very often demolished, and reared again with desperate constancy;—it was to have a mistress—a mistress all my own—like the horse.—I cannot say whether the realization of that dream would have cooled my ardor as speedily as the realization of the other; I doubt it. But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I should have grown weary as quickly.—It is a peculiarity of my disposition that I crave so frantically what I desire, although I never do anything to procure it, that if by chance, or by any other means, I attain the object of my desire, I am so afflicted with moral weakness and confused to such an extent, that I feel faint and ill, and have no strength left to enjoy it: so it is that the things that come to me without my having wished for them ordinarily afford me more pleasure than those I have most eagerly coveted.

I am twenty-two years old; I am not virgin.—Alas! nowadays nobody is so at that age,—either in body—or in heart—which is much worse.—Aside from those who afford pleasure to men for money, and who ought not to count any more than a bad dream, I have had, here and there, in some dark corner, divers virtuous, or almost virtuous women, neither lovely nor ugly, neither young nor old, such as fall in the way of a young man who has no settled attachment and whose heart is disengaged.—With a little good will and a considerable dose of romantic illusion, you can call that having a mistress, if you choose.—So far as I am concerned, it is impossible, and if I should have a thousand of that sort I should still consider my longing as far from accomplishment as ever.

I have had no mistress, therefore, and my sole desire is to have one.—It is a matter that disturbs me strangely; it isn't an effervescent temperament, a boiling of the blood, the first glow of virility. It is not woman that I want, it is a woman, a mistress; I want her, I will have her, and before long; if I don't succeed, I admit that I shall never get over it and that I shall retain an inward timidity, a secret discouragement that will have a serious influence on the rest of my life.—I shall consider myself lacking in certain respects, inharmonious, incomplete—deformed in mind or heart; for, after all, what I ask is no more than fair, and nature owes it to every man. So long as I fail to gain my end, I shall look upon myself as nothing more than a child, and I shall not have the confidence in myself that I ought to have.—A mistress for myself, that is the toga virilis for a young Roman.

I see so many men, despicable in every respect, with lovely women whose lackeys they are hardly worthy to be, that a blush rises to my cheeks for the women—and for myself.—It gives me a pitiable opinion of women to see them sully themselves with such blackguards who despise and deceive them, rather than bestow themselves upon some loyal, sincere young man who would deem himself very fortunate and would adore them on bended knees; myself, for example. To be sure, that sort of creature frequents salons, struts about in all weathers, and is always sprawling over the back of some easy-chair, while I stay at home, with my face against the window-pane, watching the river steam and the mist rise, while rearing silently in my heart the perfumed sanctuary, the marvellous temple in which I am to set up the future idol of my soul.—A chaste and poetical occupation which makes women feel as little kindly toward you as possible.

Women have very little liking for contemplative men and take strangely to those who put their ideas into action. After all, they are not wrong. Compelled by their education and social position to hold their tongues and to wait, they naturally prefer those men who come to them and talk, for they relieve them from an unnatural and wearisome silence: I realize all that; but never as long as I live shall I be able to make up my mind, as I see many men do, to leave my seat, walk across a salon and say unexpectedly to a woman: "Your dress makes you look like an angel," or: "Your eyes are particularly bright to-night."

All this does not make it any less essential for me to have a mistress. I don't know who it will be, but I see no one among the women I know who can fill that dignified and important position properly. I find in them but very few of the qualities I must have. Those who are young enough haven't sufficient beauty or charm of mind; those who are young and beautiful are disgracefully and repulsively virtuous or lack the necessary freedom of action; and then there is always some husband or brother about, or a mother or an aunt, or I don't know what, who has big eyes and long ears, and whom one must cajole or throw out of the window.—Every rose has its grub, every woman has heaps of relations whom you must get rid of like the caterpillars on a tree, if you want to pluck the fruit of her beauty some day. There is not one of them, even to the third cousins in the provinces, whom no one has ever seen, who is not determined to maintain his or her dear cousin's immaculate purity in all its snowy whiteness. That is nauseating, and I shall never have the necessary patience to tear up all the rank weeds and lop off the thorns that fatally obstruct the approaches to a pretty woman.

I don't care much for mammas and I care still less for little girls. I must confess, too, that married women have very moderate attractions for me.—There is a confusion and mixture in the latter case that disgust me; I cannot endure the idea of going shares. The woman who has a husband and a lover is a prostitute to one of them, often to both, and then I could never consent to give place to another. My natural pride would be incapable of stooping to such degradation. Never will I go away because another man is coming. Though the woman should be compromised and ruined, though we should fight with knives, each with one foot on her body—I would remain.—Secret staircases, closets, wardrobes, and all the machinery of adultery would be poor expedients with me.

I am but little enamored of what is known as virgin purity, the innocence of the flower of life, purity of heart, and other charming things which sound most beautiful in verse; I call it all pure nonsense, ignorance, imbecility, or hypocrisy.—Virgin purity, which consists in sitting on the edge of a chair, with the arms pressed close against the body, the eye on the point of the corset, and in speaking only after permission from its grandparents, the innocence which has a monopoly of uncurled hair and white dresses, the purity of heart which wears the corsage high in the neck, because it has as yet no breast or shoulders, do not seem to me, in very truth, a marvellously tempting pleasure.

I am not at all anxious to teach little fools to say the alphabet of love.—I am not old enough or corrupt enough to take any great pleasure in that. I should have but ill-success, too, for I have never had the knack of teaching anybody, even the things that I knew best. I prefer women who can read freely, you get to the end of the chapter sooner; and in all things, but especially in love, what one must consider, is the end. In that respect I am much like those people who take a novel by the tail and read the conclusion first, being prepared then to go backward to the first page. That method of reading and loving has its charm. One relishes the details better when one's mind is at ease concerning the end, and reversing the natural order of things brings the unexpected to pass.

So young girls and married women are excluded from the category. Therefore we must select our divinity from among the widows.—Alas! I am very much afraid that although we have nothing left but them, we shall still fail to find what we want.

If I should fall in love with one of those pale narcissuses bathed in a warm dew of tears and stooping with melancholy grace over the brand-new marble gravestone of some husband happily and recently deceased, I should certainly be, and in a very short time, as unhappy as the defunct spouse in his lifetime. Widows, however young and charming they may be, have one terrible inconvenience that other women have not; the instant that everything does not go well with them and the slightest cloud floats across the sky of love, they say at once, with a high and mighty, contemptuous manner: "Oh! how you act to-day! You are exactly like monsieur: when we quarrelled he never said anything but that; it's very strange, you have the same tone and the same expression; when you are angry, you can't imagine how much you resemble my husband:—it's enough to make one shudder."—It's very pleasant to have such things thrown in your face point-blank! There are some who carry their impudence to the point of praising the departed like an epitaph and extolling his heart and his leg at the expense of your leg and your—heart.—With women who have only one or several lovers, one has, at all events, the inestimable advantage of never hearing of one's predecessor, which is no trifling consideration. Women have too great an affection for what is proper and legitimate not to be very careful to keep quiet under such circumstances, and all those matters are relegated as speedily as possible to the old records.—It is always understood that one is always a woman's first lover.

I do not consider that there is any serious answer to be made to such a well-founded aversion. It is not that I look upon widows as altogether unpleasing, when they are young and pretty and haven't put off their mourning. There are the little languishing airs, the little tricks of letting the arms fall, bending the neck and puffing up like a half-fledged turtle-dove; a multitude of charming mannerisms prettily veiled behind the transparent mask of crêpe, a coquetry of despair so skilfully managed, sighs so adroitly husbanded, tears that fall so in the nick of time and make the eyes so bright!—Certainly, after my wine, if not before, the liqueur I love best to drink is a lovely, clear, limpid tear trembling at the end of a dark or light eyelash.—How is a man to resist that!—We don't resist it;—and then black is so becoming to women!—The fair skin, poetry aside, turns to ivory, snow, milk, alabaster, to everything pure and white on earth that madrigal-makers can use: the dark skin has only a dash of brown, full of animation and fire.—Mourning is good fortune for a woman, and the reason why I shall never marry is that I am afraid my wife would get rid of me in order to wear mourning for me.—There are women, however, who do not know how to make the most of their affliction and who weep in such a way as to make their noses red and to distort their features so that they look like the grotesque figures we see on fountains: that's a great stumbling-block. A woman must have many charms and much art to weep agreeably; lacking those, she runs the risk of not being consoled for a long time.—Nevertheless, great as the pleasure may be of making some Artemisia unfaithful to the shade of her Mausolus, I do not intend to choose definitely, from among the lamenting swarm, the one whom I will ask to give me her heart in exchange for mine.

I hear you say at that: "Whom will you take, then?—You won't have unmarried girls nor married women, nor widows.—You don't love mammas; I don't imagine that you love grandmammas any better.—Whom in the devil do you love?"—That is the key to the charade, and if I knew it I should not torment myself so. Thus far I have never loved any woman, but I have loved and I do love love. Although I have had no mistresses and the women I have had have aroused in me nothing but desire, I have felt and I know the sensation of love itself: I do not love this one or that one, one rather than another, but some one I have never seen, who must exist somewhere, and whom I shall find, God willing. I know what she looks like, and when I meet her I shall know her.

I have very often imagined the place she lives in, the dress she wears, the color of her eyes and her hair.—I can hear her voice; I should know her step among a thousand others, and if, by chance, any one should mention her name, I should turn to look; it is impossible that she should not have one of five or six names I have assigned to her in my head.

She is twenty-six years old—no more, neither less nor more.—She is not ignorant and she has not yet become blasé. It is a charming age at which to make love as it should be made, without puerile nonsense and without libertinage.—She is of medium height. I don't like a giant or a dwarf. I want to be able to carry my deity from the sofa to the bed without assistance; but it would be unpleasant to me to have to hunt for her there. She must be just tall enough to put her mouth to mine for a kiss by standing on tiptoe. That is the proper height. As for her size, she is rather plump than thin. I am a little of a Turk on that point, and it would be very disagreeable to me to find an angle where I was looking for a rounded outline; a woman's skin should be well filled out, her flesh hard and firm as the pulp of an almost ripe peach: the mistress I shall have is made in just that way. She is a blonde with black eyes, the fair skin of a blonde and the rich coloring of a brunette, something red and sparkling in her smile. The lower lip a little thick, the pupil of the eye swimming in a sea of aqueous humor, the throat well-rounded and small, the wrists slender, the hands long and plump, the gait undulating like a snake rearing on its tail, the hips full and flexible, the shoulders broad, the back of the neck covered with down;—a refined and yet healthy style of beauty, animated and graceful, poetic and human; a sketch by Giorgione executed by Rubens.

This is her costume! she wears a dress of scarlet or black velvet slashed with white satin or cloth of silver, an open corsage, a huge ruff à la Medici, a felt hat, capriciously dented like Helena Systerman's, and long white feathers crisp and curled, a gold chain or a stream of diamonds around her neck, and on all her fingers a number of large rings of various enamels.

I would not waive a single ring or bracelet. The dress must be of velvet or brocade; if I should allow her to descend to satin, it would be the utmost concession I would make. I would rather rumple a silk skirt than a cotton one, and pull pearls or feathers from a head than natural flowers or a simple knot of ribbon; I am aware that the lining of the cotton skirt is often at least as appetizing as that of the silk skirt; but I prefer the latter.—And so, in my dreams, I have taken for my mistress many queens, many empresses, many princesses, many sultanas, many famous courtesans, but never middle-class women or shepherdesses; and in my most vagabond desires, I have never taken advantage of any one on a carpet of turf or in a bed of Aumale serge. I consider that beauty is a diamond which should be mounted and set in solid gold. I cannot imagine a lovely woman who has not a carriage, horses, servants, and everything that one has with a hundred thousand francs a year: there is a certain harmony between beauty and wealth. One demands the other; a pretty foot calls for a pretty shoe, a pretty shoe calls for carpets and a carriage, and so on. A lovely woman with mean clothes in a wretched house is, to my mind, the most painful spectacle one can see, and I could never fall in love with her. Only the comely and the rich can fall in love without making themselves ridiculous or pitiable.—On that principle few people have the right to fall in love: I myself should be shut out first of all; however, that's my opinion.

It will be evening when we meet for the first time—during a lovely sunset;—the sky will have the bright orange-yellow and pale-green tints that we see in some pictures by the great masters of the old days: there will be a broad avenue of chestnuts in flower and venerable elms all covered with ringdoves,—lovely trees clothed in cool dark green, shadows full of mystery and moisture; here and there a statue or two, some marble vases, standing out in their snowy whiteness against the background of verdure, and a sheet of water in which the familiar swan disports itself,—and in the background a château of brick and stone as in the days of Henri IV., pointed, slate-covered roof, tall chimneys, weather-cocks on every gable, long, narrow windows.—At one of the windows, leaning in melancholy mood upon the balcony rail, stands the queen of my heart in the costume I described to you a moment ago; behind her is a little negro carrying her fan and her parrot.—You see that nothing is lacking and that it is all utterly absurd.—The fair one drops her glove;—I pick it up, kiss it and return it. We engage in conversation; I display all the wit that I do not possess; I say some charming things; she answers me, I retort; it is a display of fireworks, a luminous shower of dazzling repartee.—In short, I am adorable—and adored.—The supper hour arrives, she invites me to join her;—I accept.—What a supper, my dear friend, and what a cook my imagination is!—The wine laughs in the crystal goblet, the white and gold pheasant smokes in a platter bearing her crest: the feast is prolonged far into the night and you can imagine that I don't finish up the night at home.—Isn't that a fine bit of imaginative work?—Nothing in the world could be simpler, and upon my word it's very surprising that it doesn't happen ten times rather than once.

Chapter I — What a supper——The wine laughs in the crystal goblet, the white and gold pheasant smokes in a platter bearing her crest: the feast is prolonged far into the night and you can imagine that I don't finish up the night at home.

Sometimes it is in a great forest.—The hunt sweeps by; the horn rings out, the pack gives tongue and crosses the path with the swiftness of lightning; the fair one in a riding habit is mounted on a Turkish horse, white as milk, spirited and swift beyond words. Although she is an excellent horsewoman, he paws and curvets and rears, and she has all the difficulty in the world in holding him; he takes the bit in his teeth and rushes straight toward a precipice with her. I fall from heaven for the express purpose of saving her, I stop the horse, I catch the swooning princess in my arms, I bring her to herself and escort her to her château. What well-born woman would refuse her heart to a man who has risked his life for her?—None;—and gratitude is a cross-cut that leads very quickly to love.

You will agree, at all events, that when I go into romance, I don't stop half-way, and that I am as mad as it is possible for a man to be. That is as it should be, for nothing in the world is more sickening than rational madness. You will agree also that, when I write letters, they are volumes rather than simple notes. I love whatever goes beyond ordinary bounds in everything.—That is why I love you. Don't laugh too much at all the nonsense I have scribbled; I lay aside my pen to carry some of it into execution; for I recur always to my refrain! I mean to have a mistress. I cannot say whether it will be the lady of the park or the lady of the balcony, but I bid you farewell to go in quest of her. My mind is made up. Though she whom I seek should hide herself in the heart of the kingdom of Cathay or Samarcand, I shall find a way to dislodge her. I will let you know of the success or non-success of my undertaking. I hope that it will be success: give me your prayers, my dear friend. As for myself, I dress up in my best coat, and go out of the house determined not to return except with such a mistress as I have in my mind.—I have dreamed long enough; now to work.

P.S.—Tell me something about little D——; what has become of him? no one here knows anything about him; and give my compliments to your good brother and all the family.

II

Well, my friend, I have come home again, I have not been to Cathay or Cashmere or Samarcand;—but it is fair to say that I am no nearer having a mistress than ever.—And yet I took myself by the hand, I swore a mighty oath that I would go to the end of the world. I have not even been to the end of the town. I don't know what the matter is with me, but I have never been able to keep my word to anybody, even to myself: it must be that the devil takes a hand in it. If I say: "I will go there to-morrow," it is certain that I shall stay at home; if I propose to go to the wine-shop, I go to church; if I start to go to church, the roads get tangled under my feet like skeins of thread, and I find myself in an entirely different place. I fast when I have determined to have a debauch, and so it goes. Therefore I am inclined to believe that what prevents me from having a mistress is that I have determined to have one.

I must tell you about my expedition, step by step: it is well worth the honors of narration. I had passed at least two full hours at my toilet that day. I had had my hair combed and curled and my moustaches, such as they are, twisted and waxed a little; and as the excitement of longing imparted some slight animation to my ordinarily pale face, really I was not so bad. At last, after scrutinizing myself attentively in the mirror in different lights, to see if I was fine enough and if my bearing was sufficiently gallant, I went resolutely forth with head erect, chin well raised, eyes front, one hand on the hip, making the heels of my boots ring like an anspessade, elbowing the bourgeois, and with a flawlessly triumphant and all-conquering air.

I was like another Jason setting out to conquer the Golden Fleece.—But, alas! Jason was more fortunate than I: besides the conquest of the fleece, he made, at the same time, the conquest of a beautiful princess, and I—I have neither fleece nor princess.

I walked through the streets, eying all the women, and hurrying toward them and gazing at them at closer quarters when they seemed to me to be worth the trouble of examining.—Some assumed their high and mighty virtuous air and passed without raising their eyes.—Others were surprised at first, then smiled if they had white teeth.—Some turned after a little time, to look at me when they thought I was not looking at them, and blushed like cherries when they found themselves face to face with me.—It was a lovely day; there were quantities of people out walking.—And yet I must confess, notwithstanding all the respect I feel for that interesting half of the human race, which is called by common consent the fair sex, it is, as a whole, devilishly ugly: out of a hundred women there is hardly one who is passably good-looking. This one had a moustache; that one had a blue nose; others had red spots in place of eyebrows; one was not badly built, but she had a pimply face. The head of another was charming, but she could scratch her ear with her shoulder; a third would have put Praxiteles to shame with the graceful roundness of certain outlines, but she stumbled along on feet like Turkish stirrups. Another exhibited the most magnificent shoulders imaginable; in revenge, her hands resembled in shape and size those immense scarlet gloves that haberdashers use for signs.—Generally speaking, what tired-looking faces! how worn and streaked they were, withered by degrading petty passions and petty vices! What expressions of envy, of malevolent curiosity, of avarice, of brazen coquetry! and how much uglier is a woman who is not beautiful, than a man who is not handsome!

I saw nobody worth looking at—except a few grisettes;—but they have more cotton than silk to rumple, and they don't interest me.—In very truth, I believe that man, and when I say man I include woman, is the vilest animal on the face of the earth. That quadruped who walks on his hind feet seems to me extraordinarily presumptuous to claim the first place in creation as his undoubted right. A lion, a tiger, are finer animals than men, and in their species many individuals attain all the beauty that belongs to it. But such a thing rarely happens among human beings.—How many abortions for one Antinous! how many Goths for one Phyllis!

I am very much afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never be able to embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extraordinary or unnatural about it.—It is not the ideal of a third-form school-boy. I do not ask for ivory globes or alabaster pillars, or azure veins; I have not used in its composition either lilies, or snow, or roses, or jet, or ebony, or coral, or ambrosia, or pearls or diamonds; I have left the stars of heaven at rest, and I have not unhung the sun unseasonably. It is almost a bourgeois ideal, it is so simple, and it seems to me that with a bag or two of piastres I could find it all ready-made and realized in the first bazaar I might happen upon at Constantinople or Smyrna; it would probably cost me less than a blooded horse or dog; and to think that I shall not get what I want, for I have a feeling that I shall not! It is enough to drive a man mad, and I fly into the hottest sort of a rage against fate.

You are not such a mad fool as I, you are fortunate;—you have simply taken your life as it came, without tormenting yourself trying to shape it, and you have dealt with things as they turned up. You haven't sought for happiness, it has come in search of you; you love and are loved.—I don't envy you;—for Heaven's sake, don't think that! but I am not so happy as I ought to be when I think of your felicity, and I say to myself, with a sigh, that I would like to enjoy felicity of the same sort.

Perhaps my happiness passed by my side and I did not see it, blind that I was; perhaps a voice spoke, and the uproar of my internal tempests prevented me from hearing it.

Perhaps I have been loved in secret by some humble heart that I have neglected or broken; perhaps I have myself been the ideal of another, the pole-star of a suffering heart,—the dream of a night and the thought of a day.—If I had looked at my feet, perhaps I should have seen there some fair Magdalene with her box of ointment and her dishevelled hair. I walked along with my arms raised to heaven, longing to pluck the stars that fled from me, and scorning to pick the little daisy that opened its golden heart in the dewy grass. I have made a great mistake: I have asked love for something other than love, something that it could not give. I forgot that love was naked, I failed to grasp the meaning of that magnificent symbol.—I asked him for brocade dresses, feathers, diamonds, sublime intellect, learning, poesy, beauty, youth, supreme power—everything that is not love;—love can offer naught but love, and he who seeks to extort anything else from him is unworthy to be loved.

I have been in too much of a hurry, of course: my hour has not yet come; God who lent me my life will not take it back without letting me live. What's the use of giving a poet a lyre without strings, or man a life without love? God cannot be guilty of such inconsistency; and I have no doubt that when the allotted moment comes, He will place in my path the woman I am to love and by whom I am to be loved.—But why has love come to me before a mistress? Why am I thirsty when I have no fountain at which to quench my thirst? or why can I not fly, like the birds of the desert, to the spot where water is to be found? The world to me is a Sahara without wells or date-trees. I have not in my whole life a single shady nook to give me shelter from the sun: I suffer all the ardors of passion without its ineffable ecstasy and delight; I know its torments and have not its pleasures. I am jealous of something that does not exist; I am ill at ease for the shadow of a shade; I heave sighs that mean nothing; I have sleepless nights embellished by no adored vision; I shed tears that flow to the ground without being wiped away; I give the wind kisses that are not returned to me; I wear out my eyes trying to distinguish a vague, deceitful shape in the distance; I await what cannot come, and I count the hours with feverish anxiety as if I had an appointment.

Whoever you be, angel or demon, virgin or courtesan, shepherdess or princess, whether you come from north or south, you whom I do not know but whom I love! oh! do not force me to wait longer, or the flame will consume the altar, and you will find only a heap of cold ashes in place of my heart. Descend from the sphere where you now are; leave the crystal sky, O comforting spirit, and cast upon my heart the shadow of your great wings. Come, woman that I love, come, and let me clasp about you the arms that have been open so long. Ye golden doors of the palace where she dwells, turn on your hinges; raise yourself, latch of her humble cottage; untwine yourselves, ye branches of trees and thorns by the road-side; be broken, ye enchantments of the turret, ye spells of magicians; open, ranks of the common herd, and let her pass.

If you come too late, O my ideal! I shall not have the strength to love you:—my heart is like a dovecote full of doves. Every hour of the day some desire takes flight. The doves return to the dovecote, but my desires do not return to my heart.—The azure sky is whitened by their countless swarms; they wing their way through space, from world to world, from sky to sky, seeking some love to light upon and pass the night: haste, O my dream! or you will find naught in the empty nest save the shells of the birds that have flown.

My friend, my childhood's companion, you are the only one to whom I can say such things. Write me that you pity me and that you don't look upon me as a hypochondriac; comfort me, I never was in greater need of it; how greatly to be envied are they who have a passion they can satisfy! The drunkard finds no cruelty in any sort of a bottle; he falls from the wine-shop to the gutter and is happier on his dung-heap than a king on his throne. The sensual man resorts to courtesans in search of ready loves or shameless refinements of indecency: a painted cheek, a short skirt, an exposed bosom, an obscene jest, he is happy; his eye turns white, his lip is moist; he attains the height of his happiness, he enjoys the ecstasy of his vulgar lust. The gambler needs only a green cloth and a worn and greasy pack of cards to procure the poignant excitement, the nervous spasms and the diabolical joy of his ghastly passion. Such people can satisfy their cravings or find distraction;—to me it is impossible.

This idea has taken such thorough possession of me that I no longer care for the arts, and poetry has now no charm for me; the things that used to be my delight do not make the least impression on me. I begin to believe that I am wrong, I demand more of nature and society than they can give. What I seek does not exist and I ought not to complain because I cannot find it. However, if the woman we dream of does not come within the conditions of human nature, how is it that we love only her and not others, since we are men and our instinct should draw us irresistibly toward them? What puts this imaginary woman into our head? with what clay do we mould this invisible statue? where do we get the feathers we fasten to the back of this chimera? what mystic bird laid in a dark corner of our soul the unseen egg from which our dream was hatched? what is this abstract beauty that we feel but cannot define? why, before a woman who may be charming, do we sometimes say that she is beautiful,—whereas we find her very ugly? Where is the model, the type, the interior pattern that serves us as a point of comparison? for beauty is always comparative and can be appreciated only by contrast.—Was it in the sky that we saw her—in a star—at a ball in the shadow of a mother, fresh bud of a leafless rose?—was it in Italy or in Spain? was it here or there, yesterday or long ago? was it the admired courtesan, the popular cantatrice, the prince's daughter? a proud and noble head bending under a heavy diadem of pearls and rubies? a young and childish face stooping over the nasturtiums and volubilis in the window?—Of what school was the picture from which that beauty looked forth, fair and beaming amid dark shadows? Was it Raphael who caressed the contour that has caught your fancy? Was it Cleomenes who polished the marble that you adore?—are you in love with a Madonna or a Diana?—is your ideal an angel, a sylph, or a woman?

Alas! it is a little of all of these and it is none of them.

That transparent tint, that charming, blooming freshness, that flesh wherein the blood and the life flow in abundance, that lovely fair hair falling over the shoulders like a cloak of gold, that sparkling laughter, those amorous dimples, that figure undulating like a flame, that strength, that suppleness, that glistening satin, those rounded outlines, those plump arms, that full, smooth back, that whole appearance of blooming health belongs to Rubens.—Raphael alone could have given that pale tinge of amber to such pure features. What other than he drew the curves of those long, fine black eyebrows, and spread out the lashes of those modestly lowered lids?—Do you think that Allegri had no part in your ideal? From him the lady of your thoughts stole the warm, ivory whiteness of complexion that fascinates you. She stood long before his canvas to catch the secret of the angelic smile that is always on her lips; she modelled her oval features upon those of a nymph or a saint. That line of the hip that undulates so voluptuously is taken from the sleeping Antiope.—Those plump, well-shaped hands might be claimed by Danaë or Magdalen. Dusty antiquity itself supplied much material for the composition of your young chimera; those strong and supple loins, about which you twine your arms so passionately, were carved by Praxiteles. The divinity left everything for the express purpose of putting the toes of her charming foot outside the ruins of Herculaneum, so that your idol should not be lame. Nature also has contributed its share. You have seen here and there, in the prismatic rays of desire, a beautiful eye behind a blind, an ivory forehead pressed against a window, a mouth smiling behind a fan.—You have divined the quality of the arm from the hand, of the knee from the ankle. What you saw was perfect; you assumed that the rest was like what you saw and you finished it out with bits of other beauties gathered elsewhere.—Not even ideal beauty, as realized by painters, is sufficient for you, and you must go and ask the poets for outlines even more gracefully rounded, shapes more ethereal, charms more divine, refinement more exquisite; you begged them to give breath and speech to your phantom, all their love, all their musings, all their joy and their sadness, their melancholy and their morbid fancies, all their memories and all their hopes, their knowledge and their passion, their mind and their heart; you took all these from them and you added, to cap the climax of the impossible, your own passion, your own mind, your dreams and your thoughts. The star lent its beams, the flower its perfume, the palette its colors, the poet his harmony, the marble its shape, and you, your longing.—How could a real woman, who eats and drinks, who goes to bed at night and gets up in the morning—however adorable and instinct with charm she may be—sustain comparison with such a creature! We cannot reasonably hope for such a thing, and yet we do hope for it and seek it.—What extraordinary blindness! it is sublime or absurd. How I pity and admire those who pursue the reality of their dream through everything and die content, if only they have once kissed their chimera on the lips! But what a frightful fate is that of the Columbuses who have not discovered their world, and of lovers who have not found their mistress.

Ah! if I were a poet, I would consecrate my verses to those whose existence is a failure, whose arrows have not reached the target, who have died with the word they had to say still unsaid and without pressing the hand that was destined for them; to all who have been unsuccessful or have passed by unnoticed, to genius without issue, stifled fire, the undiscovered pearl at the bottom of the sea, to all who have loved without being loved, to all who have suffered and not been pitied;—it would be a noble task.

How wise it was of Plato to wish to banish you from his republic, and what harm you have done us, O poets! Your ambrosia has made our absinthe more bitter than ever; and we have found our lives more arid and more devastated after plunging our eyes into the vistas leading to eternity that you open to us! What a terrible struggle your dreams have brought upon our realities! and how our hearts have been stamped upon and trampled under foot by those rude athletes!

We have seated ourselves like Adam at the foot of the walls of the terrestrial paradise, on the steps of the staircase that leads to the world you have created, seeing a light brighter than the sunlight gleam through the chinks of the door, hearing vaguely some few scattered notes of a seraphic harmony. Whenever one of the elect enters or comes out amid a flood of glory, we stretch our necks trying to see something through the open door. It is fairy-like architecture equalled nowhere save in Arabian tales. Great numbers of pillars, superimposed arches, fluted spiral columns, leaf-work marvellously carved, trefoils hollowed out of the stone, porphyry, jasper, lapis-lazuli and Heaven knows what! transparencies and dazzling reflections, a profusion of strange stones, sardonyx, chrysoberyl, aquamarines, rainbow-hued opals, azerodrach, jets of crystal, torches to make the stars turn pale, a gorgeous vapor filled with noise and vertigo—genuine Assyrian magnificence!

The door closes: you see no more—and you cast down your eyes, filled with burning tears, to the poor, bare, lifeless earth, to the ruined hovels, to the people in rags, to your own soul, an arid rock upon which nothing grows, to all the woes and misfortunes of reality. Ah! if we could only fly as far as that, if the steps of that fiery staircase did not burn our feet; but alas! none but angels can climb Jacob's ladder!

What a fate is that of the poor man at the rich man's door! what ghastly irony in a palace opposite a hovel, the ideal opposite the real, poetry opposite prose! what deep-rooted hatred must tighten the knots at the bottom of the poor wretches' hearts! what a gnashing of teeth there must be at night on their poor beds, when the wind brings to their ears the sighing notes of the lutes and viols of love! Poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, why have you lied to us? Poets, why did you tell us your dreams? Painters, why did you place upon your canvas the intangible phantom that ascended and descended between your heart and your brain with the throbbing of your blood, and say to us: "This is a woman." Sculptors, why did you procure marble from the bowels of Carrara to make it express for all time, in the eyes of all men, your most secret and most fleeting desire? Musicians, why did you listen to the song of the stars and the flowers during the night, and note it down? Why do you write such lovely ballads that the softest voice that says to us: "I love you!" seems to us as hoarse as the rasping of a saw or the cawing of a crow?—My curse on you, impostors!—and may the fire from heaven burn and destroy all pictures, poems, statues, and concerted pieces.—Ouf! there's a tirade of interminable length and a little out of the ordinary epistolary style.—What a harangue!

I just gave full swing to the lyric impulse, my dear friend, and I have been talking on stilts for a long, long time. All this is very far from our subject, which is, if I remember rightly, the glorious and triumphant history of the Chevalier d'Albert in pursuit of Daraïde, the loveliest princess in the world, as the old romances say. But in truth the story is so poor that I am compelled to have recourse to digressions and reflections. I hope that it will not always be so, and that, before long, the romance of my life will be more involved and complicated than a Spanish imbroglio.

After wandering about from street to street, I decided to call on one of my friends who was to present me at a house where, according to what he told me, I should see a world of pretty women—a collection of flesh and blood idealities—the wherewithal to satisfy a score of poets.—There are some there to suit all tastes:—aristocratic beauties with eagle glances, sea-green eyes, straight noses, chins haughtily elevated, queenly hands, and the gait of a goddess; silver lilies mounted upon golden stalks;—modest violets, pale of hue, sweet of perfume, with melting, downcast eyes, slender neck, transparent flesh;—animated, piquant beauties; devout beauties, beauties of all sorts;—for the house is a genuine seraglio, minus the eunuchs and the Kislar aga.—My friend tells me that he has already had five or six affairs there—quite as many as that;—that seemed to me a prodigious record and I am very much afraid that I shall not have the like success; De C—— says yes, and that I shall succeed much better than I shall care to. According to him I have only one fault, which I am certain to correct as I grow older and go more into society—he says I think too much of woman and not enough of women.—It may well be that there's some truth in that.—He says that I will be perfectly lovable when I rid myself of that little failing. God grant it! It must be that women feel that I despise them; for a compliment, which they would consider adorable and delightful to the last degree in the mouth of another, in mine displeases them and makes them angry, as if it were the most savage epigram. That probably has something to do with the fault De C—— refers to.

My heart beat a little faster as I went up the stairs, and I had barely recovered from my emotion when De C——, taking me by the elbow, brought me face to face with a woman of about thirty—not ill-looking—dressed with dissembled magnificence and extreme affectation of childlike simplicity—which did not prevent her being daubed with rouge like a carriage-wheel:—it was the lady of the house.

De C——, assuming the shrill, mocking voice which is so different from his ordinary voice, and which he uses in society when he wants to be fascinating, said to her, half aloud, with abundant demonstrations of ironical respect, in which the most profound contempt could plainly be detected:

"This is the young man of whom I spoke to you the other day—a man of very distinguished merit; he is of unexceptionable birth and I think that it cannot be otherwise than agreeable to you to receive him; that is why I have taken the liberty to present him to you."

"Assuredly, monsieur, you have done well," rejoined the lady, with a most outrageously affected manner. Then she turned to me, and after looking me over out of the corner of her eye, like a clever connoisseur, and in a way that made me blush to my ears, she said: "You may consider yourself invited once for all, and come as often as you have an evening to waste."

I bowed awkwardly enough, and stammered a few disconnected words which could not have given her a very exalted opinion of my talents; other persons came in and I was delivered from the ennui inseparable from an introduction. De C—— led me to a window recess and began to lecture me vigorously.

"What the devil! you will get me into a scrape; I announced you as a perfect phœnix of wit, a man of unbridled imagination, a lyric poet, everything that is most transcendent and impassioned, and you stand there like a ninny without lisping a word. What a wretched imagination! I thought your vein was more fruitful; come, come, give your tongue the rein, chatter away through thick and thin; you don't need to say sensible, judicious things, on the contrary, they might injure your chances; talk, that's the main thing; talk fast, talk all the time; attract attention to yourself; throw aside all fear and all modesty; fix it firmly in your head that all who are here are fools, or almost that, and don't forget that an orator who wants to succeed cannot despise his audience enough.—What do you think of the mistress of the house?"

"I dislike her very much already; and although I talked with her hardly three minutes, I was as bored as if I were her husband."

"Aha! that's what you think of her, eh?"

"Why, yes."

"Is your repugnance for her altogether insurmountable?—So much the worse; it would have been decent for you to have her, if only for a month; it's good form, and a young man with a little money can't get into society except through her."

"Very good! I'll have her," I said piteously, "since it must be; but is it as necessary as you seem to think?"

"Alas! yes, it is absolutely indispensable, and I will tell you why. Madame de Thémines is the fashion now; she has all the absurd foibles of the day in a superior way,—sometimes those of to-morrow, but never yesterday's: she is thoroughly posted. People will wear what she wears, and she never wears what any one else has worn. She is rich, too, and her carriages are in the best taste.—She has no wit, but much small-talk; she has very keen fancies and little passion. People amuse her but do not move her; she has a cold heart and a dissolute head. As for her soul—if she has one, which is doubtful—it is of the blackest, and there is no malice and baseness of which she is not capable; but she is extremely adroit and keeps up appearances, just what is necessary to prevent anything being proved against her. For instance, she will lie with a man, but she will never write him the simplest kind of a note. Thus her most intimate enemies can find nothing to say against her except that she applies too much rouge and that certain parts of her person are not, in fact, so well rounded as they seem to be—which is false."

"How do you know?"

"What a question!—how does one know that sort of thing except by finding out for himself?"

"Then you have had Madame de Thémines?"

"Certainly I have! Why shouldn't I have had her? It would have been most unseemly of me not to have her.—She has done me some very great favors, and I am very grateful to her for them."

"I don't understand what kind of favors she can have done you."

"Are you really a fool?" said De C——, gazing at me with the most comical expression imaginable.—"Faith, I am much afraid of it; must I tell you everything? Madame de Thémines is considered, and justly, to have special information in certain directions, and a young man whom she has taken and kept for some time can present himself boldly anywhere, and be sure that he won't be long without having an affair—more likely two than one.—Aside from that ineffable advantage, there is another hardly less great; and that is that, as soon as the female members of this circle see that you are Madame de Thémines' official lover, even though they have not the slightest taste for you, they will consider it a pleasure and a duty to take you away from a fashionable woman like her; and, instead of the advances and manœuvres you would otherwise have to make, you will have an embarrassment of riches, and you will necessarily become the focus of all imaginable cajoleries and blandishments.

"However, if she arouses too strong a repugnance in you, don't take her. You are not exactly obliged to do it, although that would be courteous and proper. But make your choice quickly and attack the one who pleases you best or seems to offer the most facilities, for by delaying you will lose the benefit of novelty, and the advantage it gives you over all the men here for a few days. All these ladies have no conception of the passions that are born in private intercourse and develop gradually in respect and silence; they are all for lightning strokes and occult sympathies; a wonderfully well-conceived scheme to avoid the ennui of resistance and all the long and wearisome repetitions that sentiment mingles with the romance of love, and which serve only to defer the conclusion to no purpose.—These ladies are very saving of their time, and it seems so valuable to them that they would be in despair at the thought of leaving a single moment unemployed.—They have a craving to oblige the human race which one cannot praise too highly, and they love their neighbor as themselves—which is most meritorious and perfectly angelic; they are very charitable creatures who would not, for anything in the world, drive a man to die of despair.

"There must be three or four of them already who are impressed in your favor, and I advise you as a friend to press your advantage warmly in that direction, instead of amusing yourself prattling with me in a window-recess, which will not materially assist your prospects."

"But, my dear C——, I am altogether green in such matters, I haven't the necessary experience of society to distinguish at first glance a woman who is impressed from one who isn't; and I might make some strange blunders unless you will assist me with your experience."

"Upon my word, you are a primitive creature without a name, and I didn't suppose it was possible to be so pastoral and bucolic in the blessed age we live in!—What the devil are you doing with that pair of great black eyes of yours, which would produce a most stunning effect if you knew how to use them?

"Just look over yonder, in the corner by the fire-place, at that little woman in pink playing with her fan: she has been staring at you for a quarter of an hour with most significant assiduity and fixity; no one in the world but she can be indecent in so superior a fashion and display such noble insolence. The women don't like her at all, for they despair of ever reaching that height of impudence, but, on the other hand, she is very popular with the men who find in her all the piquant flavor of the courtesan.—To be sure, her depravity is of a fascinating sort, she is full of wit and impulse and caprice.—She's an excellent mistress for a young man who has prejudices.—Within a week she will rid your conscience of all scruples and corrupt your heart to such an extent that you will never make yourself ridiculous or indulge in elegiacs. She has incredibly positive ideas on every subject; she goes to the bottom of everything with astonishing rapidity and accuracy of insight. The little woman is the incarnation of algebra; she is precisely what a dreamer and an enthusiast needs. She will soon cure you of your misty idealism: therein she will render you a great service. She will do it with the greatest pleasure, however, for her instinct leads her to disenchant poets."

My curiosity being aroused by De C——'s description, I emerged from my retreat, and, gliding from group to group, approached the lady in question and observed her closely,—she may have been twenty-five or twenty-six years old. She was small, but well shaped, although a little inclined to be stout; she had round, white arms, well-formed hands and pretty feet, almost too small,—plump, polished shoulders, breast but little exposed, but what there was, very satisfactory and affording a favorable idea of the rest; her hair was extremely glossy and of a blue-black shade like a jay's wing; the corner of the eye was turned well up toward the temple, nose thin, nostrils very open, mouth moist and sensuous, a little crease on the lower lip and an almost imperceptible down at the corners. And with it all, vivacity, animation, health, and an indefinable suggestion of wantonness adroitly tempered by coquetry and tact, which made her a very desirable creature and more than justified the very lively passions she had inspired and continued to inspire every day.

I desired her; but yet I understood that that woman, agreeable as she might be, was not my ideal, or could make me say: "At last I have a mistress!"

I returned to De C—— and said: "I like her looks, and perhaps I may come to an understanding with her. But, before saying anything definite which will bind me, I would be very glad if you would have the kindness to point out those indulgent beauties who are so condescending as to be impressed with me, so that I may make my choice.—You will also oblige me, as you are acting as showman on this occasion, by adding a little descriptive notice and a list of their good and bad qualities; how I must attack them and the tone I must adopt with them in order not to seem too much like a provincial or a literary man."

"I most certainly will," said De C——. "Do you see that lovely, melancholy swan who manages her neck so gracefully and makes her sleeves move like wings? she is modesty itself, the most chaste and virginal creature in the world; she has a snow-white brow, a heart of ice, the expression of a madonna, the smile of an Agnes; she has a white dress and a soul of the same color; she wears nothing but orange-blossoms or water-lily leaves in her hair, and is attached to earth only by a thread. She has never had an evil thought and has no idea wherein man differs from woman. The Blessed Virgin is a Bacchante beside her, all of which does not prevent her having had more lovers than any woman I know, and that is certainly saying a good deal. Just cast your eye on that discreet person's throat; it is a little masterpiece, and really it is very difficult to show so much without showing more; tell me if, with all her reserve and all her prudery, she isn't ten times more indecent than that good lady at her left, who bravely displays two hemispheres which, if they were united, would form a life-size globe,—or the other one at her right, décolletée to the navel, who parades her nothingness with fascinating intrepidity?—That virginal creature, unless I am very much mistaken, has already figured out in her head how much love and passion your pallor and your black eyes may be taken to promise; and my reason for saying so is that she hasn't once looked in your direction, visibly at least; for she can manage her pupils with such art and roll them into the corner of her eyes so cleverly that nothing escapes her; one would think that she looked through the back of her head, for she knows perfectly well what is going on behind her.—She's a female Janus.—If you want to succeed with her, you must lay aside anything like a free-and-easy, victorious manner. You must talk to her without looking at her, without moving, in a contrite attitude and in a subdued, respectful voice; in that way you can say whatever you choose to her, provided that it is suitably glossed over, and she will allow you to take the greatest liberties, at first in words; afterward in deeds. Simply take care to roll your eyes tenderly when hers are cast down, and talk to her about the joys of platonic love and the communion of souls, while you employ with her the least platonic and least ideal pantomime imaginable! She is very sensual and very sensitive; kiss her as often as you choose, but don't forget, even in the most intimate intercourse, to call her madame at least three times per sentence: she fell out with me, because, when I was in her bed, I said something or other to her and called her thou. What the devil! a woman is not virtuous for nothing!"

"After what you tell me I have no great desire to try my luck. A prudish Messalina! an entirely novel and monstrous combination."

"Old as the world, my dear boy! it is seen every day and nothing is more common.—You are wrong not to try your hand with her.—She has one great charm, which is that with her you always seem to be committing a deadly sin, and the least kiss seems altogether damnable; while with others you think of it as nothing more than a venial sin, and often you don't think you're doing anything wrong at all.—That is why I kept her longer than any other mistress.—I should have her still if she had not left me herself; she's the only woman who ever got ahead of me, and I look upon her with a certain amount of respect on that account.—She has the most delicate little refinements of pleasure and the great art of appearing to be forced to grant what she grants very freely; which gives to each of her favors the fascination of rape. You will find in society ten of her lovers who will swear to you that she is one of the most virtuous creatures on earth.—She is precisely the contrary.—It is an interesting study to analyze that virtue of hers on a pillow. Being forewarned, you run no risk, and you won't make the blunder of falling in love with her in earnest."

"How old is this adorable creature?" I asked De C——, for it was impossible to decide, even after examining her with the most careful attention.

"Ah! there you are! how old is she? that's a mystery and God only knows the clue. For my own part, and I pride myself on telling a woman's age almost to a minute, I have never succeeded in finding out hers. I can only estimate approximately that she is somewhere between eighteen and thirty-six.—I have seen her in full dress, in déshabille, in her linen, and I can tell you nothing in that connection: my knowledge is at fault; the age that you would generally take her to be is eighteen, and yet that can't be her age.—She is a combination of a virgin body and the soul of a harlot, and she must have had much time or much genius to corrupt herself so thoroughly and so speciously; she must have a heart of brass in a breast of steel; but she has neither; that makes me think that she is thirty-six, but in reality I know nothing about it."

"Hasn't she any intimate friend who could enlighten you on the subject?"