useless reading, what crushing knowledge, for a life so brief and passed in the midst of dunces! Why take all this tiresome luggage for so short a journey? People praise my learning. I no longer want other learning than in the realm of love. Love is now my unique, my particular study. It is to that I devote the flickering remains of passion. If only I could write all that the little god inspires in me! Dismal prudery reigns in literature, prudery more silly, cruel and criminal than the Holy Inquisition."
Day after day the indulgent and salacious "old dog"—this is Mr. Pollock's word for "the greatest man of letters" in his time—recounts to his disciple his amorous adventures, usually with a humorous twist—adventures with all sorts of heroines, concerning whom the master seems not to have been more fastidious than Sainte-Beuve, the grossness of whose tastes was offensive, it may be remembered, to George Sand, whose own tastes were, from some points of view, catholic. Again and again, the "old dog" gives to the young one the advice which Robert Herrick addressed to the Virgins. He tempers this, however, with a theory that the men who have done great things in the world have not been happy in love. He discourses at length on Napoleon Bonaparte, and is quite sure that the Little Corporal's conquests in the tented field were a kind of noisy demonstration to draw the attention of the world away from his thorny defeats under love's banner. "If Lætitia Ramolino's son overturned the world and made blood run like rain water, it was because he was impotent."
The only branch of morality to which the master gives much careful thought is the morality of writing well. His method of composition he had from Renan.
