Part 5

So the fools and fops of La Bruyere's time thought or pretended to think that he was seriously claiming to be of noble birth. Nothing was further from his intention; no La Bruyere had taken part in the Crusades, any more than any member of Charles Lamb's family had been Pope of Rome. The moralist's father, Louis de La Bruyere, was Comptroller-General of Rents of the Hotel de Ville of Paris; his mother was an attorney's daughter. The eldest of five, he was born on August 17, 1645, in the centre of old Paris, close to the church of St. Christopher. It is only of late years that this fact has been discovered, and there are still immense blanks in the life of La Bruyere during which he disappears from us altogether, engulfed in the lanes of the Cite, not because of any adventurous mystery, but simply because of his total lack of adventure. There has scarcely lived a great man of letters in comparatively recent times about whose life there is so little to relate as about that of La Bruyere. He is believed to have gone to school to the Fathers of the Oratory, but even that is not certain. His knowledge of Greek is thought to prove it, but, though the Oratorians were admirable Hellenists, surely Greek could be learned elsewhere.

When he was twenty, he passed his examination in law in Orleans, and, coming back to Paris, practised as a lawyer for eight or nine years. He was concerned in no famous case, it is supposed, since his name is never mentioned in the gossip of the time. He inherited a competence from his father, and probably lived an idle life, diversified by a little legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographer says, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to a meditative existence." When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisis came. By some means or other, he secured a lucrative sinecure, that of treasurer of finances at Caen in Normandy. He hated the country and went down to Caen on the rarest occasions possible. La Bruyere, a Parisian to the marrow of his bones, says, "Provincials and fools are always ready to lose their temper and believe that one is laughing at them or despising them. You must never venture on a joke, even the mildest, except with well-bred, witty people." Perhaps he had been trying Godefroi de La Bruyere off on the stolid inhabitants of Caen. He received a salary, however, which was far from being all paid away to a substitute, and he rose, in the curious social scale of those days, from Mister (roturier) into Esquire (ecuyer). The court in Normandy was extremely angry with him at periodical intervals, but apparently could do nothing to assert itself. When it raged, La Bruyere was like the East in Matthew Arnold's poem, he "bow'd low before the blast in patient, deep disdain."

He lived through these quiet years in one apartment after another in the heart of Paris. Vigneul de Marville saw him "nearer heaven than earth" in a room which a light curtain divided into two. "The wind, always at the service of philosophers, running ahead of visitors, would lift this curtain adroitly, and reveal the philosopher, smiling with pleasure at the opportunity of distilling the elixir of his meditations into the brain and the heart of a listener." He was always at work, but his work was confined to meditation, talk and study. Sometimes he left his garret, and studied "the court and the town" from the benches of the public gardens, the Luxembourg and the Tuileries. There has been an enormous amount of speculation and conjecture about the central period of the life of La Bruyere, but we really have only one positive document to go upon. During the illness of his own footman, he borrowed the services of his brother's man, who robbed him of money and clothes. La Bruyere put the case in the hands of the police, who failed to catch the thief. This is the only definite fact which has rewarded the patience of the investigators, and we must build round it what we can. We build round it his own glimpse of self-portraiture (in "Des Biens de Fortune") and find the philosopher bending over the volume where Plato discusses the spirituality of the soul, or measuring, with a rapt expression, the infinite distance between Saturn and Jupiter.

When he is on the point of entering his fortieth year, La Bruyere suddenly breaks out of the cloud which encompasses him, and is revealed as professor of history to the Duke of Bourbon, and resident in the household of the great Prince de Conde. There is no evidence to show how Bossuet, then Bishop of Meaux, and the most influential man of intellect in France, became acquainted with the discreet and obscure treasurer of finances; but it is evident that he was struck by the vast learning and intelligence of this silent, smiling anchorite. Fontenelle tells us that Bossuet, who had been tutor to the Dauphin, "made a practice of supplying to the princes such persons, meritorious in letters, as they had need of." In 1684, then, we know not why nor how, Bossuet recommended La Bruyere as tutor to the House of Conde. It is a matter of ceaseless wonderment, however, that the philosopher accepted and retained the post. He possessed a sufficient though a modest competence already, and he exchanged a life of complete independence for a most painful and trying servitude, hung up between the insolence of those above and the impertinence of those below him. The situation of La Bruyere in the Maison de Conde was like that of Fanny Burney at the court of George III., only worse. Commentators have expended endless ingenuity in conjecturing what were the reasons which induced him to enslave himself.

A careful study of his great book must add to our amazement. No one ever locked himself up in prison with an exacter appreciation of the discomforts of captivity. La Bruyere has some remarks about freedom, which plunge us in bewilderment. "Liberty," he says, "is not laziness: it is a free use of one's time; it is having the choice of one's own work and exercise. To be free, in a word, is not to do nothing, but to be sole judge of what one shall do or not do. In this sense, what a boon is liberty!" This practical freedom he possessed to the full, when in August 1684 he accepted bondage to a spiteful monkey of a boy, a dwarf with a huge head and a dreadful face, to whom he was to impart, with tears of disappointment and humiliation, the rudiments of national history. He was immediately responsible to the father of this infant phenomenon, to Henry Jules, Duke d'Enghien, of whose "useless talents, wasted genius, imagination which was a torment to himself and others," Saint-Simon gives so copious an account. We have to think of our delicate and timid La Bruyere now for years the powerless plaything of this "unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, detestable master, pernicious neighbour, without affection, without friends."

But after two centuries of canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this is to forget that the great Conde, even in his ugly old age, was haloed by the glory of having been the first soldier of the world. It was a privilege, even at the end, to be admitted to his intimacy, and I believe that we pity La Bruyere more than he pitied himself. It scandalizes the biographers that the Prince, on one occasion, made La Bruyere dance a pas seul before him, twanging a tune on the guitar. I suppose De Quincey would have been complaisant if the Duke of Wellington had asked him to whistle "Home, Sweet Home" to him. There is a limit, after all, to the modern theory of the Dignity of Letters.

Valincourt says that "All the time La Bruyere lived in the House of Conde, everybody was always making fun of him." Possibly the fear of appearing pedantic among all these people of fashion and these tinselled flunkeys made him lend himself to ridicule. They all teased and mocked him, I suppose, but not, I think, so as seriously to hurt him, and now, with his book in our hands, the laugh is on his side. For when we examine carefully we see that his position in the House of Conde improved as time went on. He got rid of his rivals, the other tutors; when the Grand Conde died, La Bruyere got rid of his dreadful pupil as well. We find him no longer "precepteur," but "gentilhomme de M. le Duc,"--no longer, that is, a mere scholastic drudge, but a sort of lord-in-waiting. He had probably a large increase of salary, since in 1687 he seems to have resigned his "charge" at Caen. Instead of being pinned to the dark apartment in the recesses of the Cite, he now revolved in ceaseless movement between Chantilly and Fontainebleau, Paris and Versailles. He became a sort of confidential reader to the Duke and Duchess, an essential part of the suite. After the first years, he had a great deal of leisure. He could retire to the security of a handsomely furnished apartment--upholstered in green--on the second floor of the Hotel de Conde, opposite the Luxembourg, and he had another set of rooms at Versailles. The bondage became, I expect, no real bondage at all.

But why had he, so long completely his own master, consented to become the servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothers accept irksome situations for the support of their children, so La Bruyere became the serf of the Condes for the sake of his book. For it is now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, empty life there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collection of the maxims, reflections, pictures, and what not which he had been quietly absorbing and turning into the honey of more and more exquisite prose ever since his early youth. I think that La Bruyere deliberately accepted all that might prove irksome in the captivity to the House of Conde for the sole sake of his book. He needed to see more types, and types of a more brilliant and effective kind than he could become familiar with in his mediocre condition. He knew all that was to be known about the artizans and the shopkeepers of the Cite; he wanted to examine the rulers of society, and while he watched them like a naturalist, they might make what contortions they pleased. How did one of his contemporaries describe him? "When Menippe leaves his home, it is for the purpose of studying the attitudes of the whole human race and of painting them from the life. But he is not merely a portrait-painter, he is an anatomist as well. Do you see that vain and arrogant fellow in the midst of his good fortune? He is enchanted to think Menippe is admiring him. What a mistake! At this very moment Menippe is dissecting him and preparing him as a specimen for a public lecture in the schools. Not a vein, not a fibre will escape him, and from that man's heart he will draw the inmost springs of passion and expose the circulation of every vice."

It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies and less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title of it is "Characters; or, the Manners of this Age." It was published in January 1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caracteres." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyere, always extremely fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for more than a generation, but La Bruyere invented a new kind of portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caracteres," "you make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make my book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument that moves and, rings.

What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caracteres" after a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may expand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but with a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a dozen chronometers. La Bruyere's observations are noted in a manner that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that he was incessantly improving his work, revising, extending and weighing it. He was one of those timid men who surprise us by their crafty intrepidity. It was dangerous to publish sarcastic "portraits" of well-known influential people, and there are few of these in the first edition, but when the success of the book was once confirmed these were made more and more prominent. It was not until the eighth edition, of 1694, that La Bruyere ventured to print the following study of one of the most influential men of letters of that day. Fontenelle--

THE PORTRAIT OF CYDIAS

"Ascange is a sculptor, Hegion a bronze-founder; AEschine a fuller, and Cydias a wit--that is his profession. He has a signboard, a workshop, finished articles for sale, mechanics who work under him. He cannot deliver for more than a month the stanzas which he has promised you, unless he breaks his word to Dosithee, who has ordered an elegy from him. He has an idyl on the loom; it is for Crantor, who is hurrying him, and from whom he expects a handsome price. Prose, verse, which do you want? He is equally successful with either. Ask him for letters to sympathize with a bereavement or to explain an absence, and he will undertake them. If you want them ready-made, you have only to enter his shop, and to choose what you like. He has a friend whose only duty upon this earth is to promise Cydias a long time ahead to a certain set of people, and then to present him at last in their houses as a man of rare and exquisite conversation; and, there, just as a musician sings or a lute-player touches his lute before the people who have engaged him, Cydias, after having coughed, and lifted the ruffle from his wrist, stretched out his hand and opened his fingers, begins to retail his quintessential thoughts and his sophistical arguments.... He opens his mouth only to contradict. 'It seems to me,' he gracefully says, 'that the truth is exactly the contrary of what you say,' or 'I cannot agree with your opinion,' or even 'that used to be my prepossession, as it is yours, but now----!'"

The idol of the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in the French Academy.

There was great danger, or so it would seem to a timid man like La Bruyere, in affronting public opinion with a book so full of sarcasm and reproof, so unflinching in its way of dealing with success, as the "Caracteres." He adopted a singular mode of self-protection. That was the day of the mighty dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns, and La Bruyere, at all events ostensibly, took the highly respectable side of the Greeks and Romans. There had lived a philosopher in the fourth century B.C., Theophrastus, the successor and elucidator of Aristotle, who left a book of "Ethical Characters" ([Greek: HThikoi charakteres]), which had been introduced to the Western world by Casaubon at the end of the sixteenth century. For some reason or other, the greatest impression had been made by Theophrastus in England, where there appeared a large number of successive imitations or paraphrases of his "Characters." In France, on the other hand, Theophrastus was still unknown to the vulgar, when La Bruyere took him up. It seems likely that his own collection of portraits and maxims was practically finished, when, as M. Paul Morillot has put it, he determined to hoist the Greek flag as a safeguard. He made a French translation of the sketches of Theophrastus, and he put this at the head of his book, waving it to keep off the public, as a lady unfurls her parasol at a cow whose intentions are uncertain.

The evidences of La Bruyere's extreme caution are amusing. He hesitated long, but in 1687 he submitted his MS. to Boileau, who was highly encouraging, and to the poet-mathematician, Malizian, who said, "This will bring you plenty of readers and plenty of enemies." Finally he determined to risk the dive, and he took the book to Michallet, the publisher, saying as he did so, "If it is successful, the result shall be your daughter's dowry," the said daughter being a little child who was then seated on La Bruyere's knee. The ultimate success of the book being prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she was marriageable, have become a remarkable parti, but the story is not one which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "Les Caracteres" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with the veteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts of applause. Bussy frankly said, "It must be admitted that having proved the merit of Theophrastus by his translation, he has obscured the fame of that writer by what he has done next, for he has penetrated, in his own portraits, deeper into the heart of man than Theophrastus did, and has penetrated with even greater delicacy and by means of more exquisite language." This must have been very gratifying from the survivor of the great school of Malherbe and Balzac.

At the age of forty-three, then, previously unknown in the world of letters, this shy and obscure gentleman-in-waiting to the Princes of Conde, rose into fame, and enjoyed the admiration or the envy of whatever was most prominent in Paris. The public which he addressed was one which we may pause a moment to contemplate. The authority of the Academic and noble salons was practically at an end, and intellectual culture had spread to a somewhat wider circle. Those who governed taste had thrown off many affectations of a previous generation, and in particular the curious disease of "preciousness." They were healthier, soberer and slightly less amusing than their forerunners. But they formed, in the heart of Paris, the most compact body of general intelligence to be met with at that time in any part of the world. They were certain, in their little sphere, of their aesthetic and logical aims. They were the flower of an intense civilization, very limited, in a way very simple; so far as the adoption of outer impulses went, very inactive, and yet within its own range energetic, elegant and audacious. To this world the "Caracteres" was now offered, modestly, as though it were a summing up of the moralizations of the last fifty years. The author begins by deprecating the idea that he has anything new to impart. His trick is rather subtle; he concentrates our attention on the sayings of an ancient Aristotelian philosopher, and then, as if to fill up the time, he ventures to repeat a few reflexions of his own. These he introduces with the words: "Everything has been said, and we arrive too late into a world of men who have been thinking for more than seven thousand years. In the field of morals, all that is fairest and best has been reaped already; we can but glean among the ancients and among the cleverest of the moderns." In this insinuating manner, he leads the reader on to the perusal of his own part of the book, and soon we become aware how cold and dry and pale the Greek translation seems beside the rich and palpitating world of the new French morality.

Whether he perceived it or not--and I for one am convinced that he did perceive it--La Bruyere introduced a new thing into French literature; he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The classical attitude of the great age had produced splendid manifestations of thought and form. However revolutionary it pleases us of 1918 to be, we cannot get away from the perfection of the age of Bossuet and Racine and La Fontaine and Fenelon. We come back to these solid and passionate writers after each one of our romantic excursions, not entirely satisfied with them, as our forefathers were, but with a sense of their solid glory, with a confidence in their permanent value in stimulating and supporting human effort. They may not give us all that they were once presumed to give, but they offer us a firm basis; they are always there for the imagination to start from. We must not forget, of course, that in 1688 in Paris these classics of the hour represented a great deal more than that; their prestige was untarnished. They so completely outshone, in cultivated opinion, all else that had been produced since the Christian era, that the Italy of Dante, the Spain of Cervantes, and the England of Shakespeare did not so much as exist. If the intelligence was not satisfied by Descartes, well! there was nothing for it but to go back to Plato, and if Racine did not sufficiently rouse the passions, they must be worked upon by Sophocles. In all this, the divines took a particularly prominent place because they alone presented something for which no definite parallel could be found in antiquity. It was the great theologians of the age with whom La Bruyere chiefly competed.

These theologians were themselves artists to a degree which we have now a difficulty in realizing, although in the seventeenth century the Church of England also had some great artists in her pulpits. If Jeremy Taylor had been a Frenchman, the work of La Bruyere might have been different. But the French orators lacked the splendour and oddity of the author of "The Great Exemplar," and we can feel that La Bruyere, who was instinct with the need for colour, was dissatisfied with the broad outlines and masses of character for which the French divines were famous; indeed, even Bossuet, to an English reader fresh from Fuller and Taylor, seems with all his magnificence too abstract and too rhetorical. La Bruyere determined to be less exacting and yet more exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous and to designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint them with a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited. The consequence was that the public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to contemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but to turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyere's finished etchings of the tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings.

Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caracteres" is obliged to pause to commend the style of La Bruyere. It is indeed exquisite. At the time his book was published our own John Locke was putting together his famous "Thoughts on Education," and he remarked on the "policy" of the French, who were not thinking it "beneath the public care to promote and reward the improvement of their own language. Polishing and enriching their tongue," so Locke proceeds, "is no small business amongst them." It is perhaps not extravagant to believe that in writing these words the English philosopher was thinking of the new Parisian moralist. For La Bruyere was a great artist, who understood the moral value of form in a degree which would peculiarly commend itself to the lucid mind of Locke. He says, early in his book, "Among all the different expressions which can render a single one of our thoughts, there is only one which is right. We do not always hit upon it in speaking or composing; nevertheless it is a fact that somewhere it exists, and everything else is feeble and does not satisfy a man of intelligence who desires to be understood." This search for the one and only perfect expression was an unfailing passion with La Bruyere. In another place he says: "The author who only considers the taste of his own age is thinking more of himself than of his writings. We ought always to be striving after perfection, and then posterity will render us that justice which is sometimes refused to us by our contemporaries." This is an ideal to which Locke, anxious to make disciples by his regular and sometimes racy use of language, never attained. La Bruyere, who did not address the passing age, so polished his periods that all successive generations have hailed him as one of the greatest masters of prose.

Voltaire's definition of the style of La Bruyere is well known, but cannot too often be repeated. He calls it "a rapid, concise, nervous style, with picturesque expressions, a wholly novel use of the French language, yet with no infringement of its rules." Fortunately, with all his admiration of others--and his great chapter "Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit" is one of the most generous and catholic examples of current criticism which we possess in all literature--with his modest and glowing appreciation of his famous predecessors, he did not attempt to imitate them in the grand manner. We are able to perceive that Bossuet, who was nearly twenty years his senior, to whom he owed his advancement in life, whose majestic genius and princely prestige were so well adapted to dazzle La Bruyere, remained his indefatigable patron and probably his closest friend. But we do not find in La Bruyere a trace of imitation of the great preacher whom he loved and honoured. If we think what the authority of Bossuet had come to be at the time when the "Caracteres" was published, how hardly its evangelical science pressed upon the convictions of all Frenchmen, and particularly upon those of men who accepted it as unquestionably as did the author of that book, that there should be no trace of Bossuet on his style is a great tribute to the originality of La Bruyere.

"There is no pleasure without variety," this same mighty Bossuet had written in 1670, and his young friend had taken the axiom to heart. We find him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the search for variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought, startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, if they were not so eminently successful that we adopt them at once, as we do Shakespeare's. La Bruyere passes from mysterious ironies to bold and coarse invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrases of a roguish simplicity. He suddenly drops his voice to a shuddering whisper, and the next moment is fluting like a blackbird. The gaiety with which he mocks the ambitions of the rich is suddenly relieved by the dreadful calm with which he reveals the horror of their disappointments. He is never in the same mood, or adopting the same tone, for two pages running. It is difficult in a translation to give an idea of the surprising element in his style, but something of its oddity may be preserved in such an attempt as this--

"There are creatures of God whom we call men, who have a soul which is intelligence, and whose whole life is spent and whose whole attention is centred in the sawing of marble. This is a very simple, a very little thing. There are others who are amazed at this, but who themselves are utterly useless, and who spend their days in doing nothing at all. This is a still smaller thing than sawing marble."

English prose, which a century earlier had limped so far behind French in clearness and conciseness, was rapidly catching its rival up, and in the next generation was to run abreast with it. But if we wish to see how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, we need but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the "Caracteres" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famous Theophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the "Character of a Trimmer." In the characteristics of a lively prose artist, we shall have to confess La Bruyere nearer to Robert Louis Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax.

The surface of La Bruyere's writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception. He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the principles which actuate their malice and their frailty"; he aims at showing that such is the native evil implanted in their souls that "no one should any longer be surprised at the thousands of vicious or frivolous actions with which their lives are crowded." We note him at first as entirely devoted to these painful investigations, and we are apt to confound his attitude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the weary Titan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe of human amour-propre. But we do not begin to understand the attitude of La Bruyere until we notice that there always is, in the popular phrase, "more in him than meets the eye." He is indeed a satirist, but not of the profound order of the Timons of the mind; his satire is superficial, and under it there flows a lenient curiosity mingled with a sympathy that fears to be detected.

There is a note of sadness, a mysterious melancholy, which frequently recurs in the "Caracteres," and this produces a constant variety in its appeal to the feelings. We find the author amusing himself by detailing the weaknesses of his fellow-beings, but the entertainment they offer him soon leaves him dissatisfied and sad. He is overheard to sigh, he is seen to shake his head, as he turns his clear eyes away from the self-humiliation of men. There is nothing of this in the hard superiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important things which we have to note is the advance in feeling which the later moralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious attitude. La Bruyere attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediate predecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish to reach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, but quite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance. Here is a passage which could scarcely have been written by any other moralist of the seventeenth century:--

"It is useless to fly into a passion with human beings because of their harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love and their forgetfulness of others. They are made so, it is their nature, and to be angry about it is to be angry with the stone for falling or with the flame for rising."

Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living in the house of that Prince de Conde of whom Saint Simon said that, "A pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to do." I like to imagine La Bruyere escaping from some dreadful scene where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son, "incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there flinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the painted bedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and the fright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the great oaken bureau which displayed his faience and his guitar. He would glance, for encouragement, at the framed portrait of Bossuet which was the principal ornament of the wall above it, and then, listening a moment to be sure that he was safe from disturbance, he would unlock one of the three drawers, and take out the little portfolio in which for years and years he had been storing up his observations upon society and his consolations in affliction. Presently, with infinite deliberation and most fastidious choice of the faultless phrase and single available word, he would paint the Holbein portrait of one of the prodigious creatures whom he had just seen in action, some erratic, brilliant and hateful "ornament of society" such as the Duke de Lauzun, and the picture of Straton would be added to his gallery:--

"Straton was born under two stars; unlucky, lucky in the same degree. His life is a romance: no, for it lacks probability. He has had beautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don't dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum existence: nothing has escaped him.... He is an enigma, a riddle that can probably be never solved."