the lecture-hall, good-looking, youngish, the very tenor of lecturers. But to what hopeless mediocrities he treated us, what lieux-communs he imperturbably walked us through! It was one of Gresset's plays he analysed. The gist of it all was that our grandmothers were better bred than we are, because they indulged in persiflage and we in blagues. And this was the great lecturer of the hour!
Everybody knows the initial story of the French salon, and the fortunate influence on manners and literature of the prestige of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; Molière, who laughed at everything, even at his own desperate sufferings, laughed at it in his Les Précieuses Ridicules, for nothing on earth is sacred to a Frenchman. Whatever his name, in whatever century he was born, he must, in consistency with his nationality, prove himself a scoffer; and as he has the art of mocking admirably, it is always very difficult to know when he is serious or when he is laughing in his sleeve. A Frenchman will work night and day with frenzy for a purpose dearer to him than anything on earth, and all the while will deliberately make a mockery of his labour and his devotion. Writing to me on this subject, the eternal passion of the French for blagues (my correspondent defines in lucid English the word blaguer, "To say about somebody or something one admires or respects, jokes of which one does
