that contradiction, inventor? Now your My Travelling Companion isn't invented—it's good just because it isn't invented. But when you think, you beget knights, all Amadises and Siegfrieds."
I remarked that as long as we live in the narrow sphere of our anthropomorphous and unavoidable "travelling companions," we build everything on quicksands and in a hostile medium.
He smiled and nudged me slightly with his elbow: "From that very, very dangerous conclusions can be drawn. You are a questionable Socialist. You are a romantic, and romantics must be monarchists—they always have been."
"And Hugo?"
"Hugo? That's another thing. I don't like him, a noisy man."
He often asked me what I was reading, and always reproached me if I had chosen, in his opinion, a bad book.
"Gibbon is worse than Kostomarov; one ought to read Mommsen, he's very tedious, but it's all so solid."
When he heard that the first book I ever read was The Brothers Semganno, he even got angry: " Now, you see—a stupid novel. That's what has spoilt you. The French have three writers, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert; and, well, perhaps Maupassant, though Tchekhov is better than he. The Goncourts are mere clowns, they only pretended to be serious. They had studied life from books
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