other purpose; he had come to learn, and what surprising opportunities he had encountered! Madame Viardot's Sunday evenings had not been very amusing, since he had no ear; but he had met Turgenev there, not always on all fours in the act of presenting some extravagant charade. And he had got the Théâtre Français by heart: he had had his precious moments even behind the scenes, behind the veil of the temple of decorum. And there had been mornings at Auteuil, in Edmond de Goncourt's study, odorous with the enchanting smell of old books and thronged with articles of virtu, redolent of the eighteenth century. Best of all, there had been Flaubert's Sunday afternoons. He had heard the old master discourse upon Hugo and recite, with his beautiful accent, the sonnets of Gautier; and he had met the disciples there, Goncourt again, straight and tall, with his pointer-like nose and his sharp glance, Zola, pale and sombre, and the indefatigable Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant, still inédit, with his fantastic tales, Maupassant the never absent, the apple of the master's eye. What conversation! Could one ever, in the long future, hope to hear its like again?
Memories indeed, guardian memories, memories to store away in one's mind, in one's conscience, against the famine years to come! Thick-witted England would never provide such a feast for one's insatiable craftsman’s appetite. These besotted mandarins, with their truly infernal intelligence of art, form, manner: well, theirs was the only work that one would ever be able to respect. They spoiled one for the English style—save the mark!—the puffy, stuffy, hasty, padded three-decker, informe, ingens, which those amiable islanders slapped together and tossed into the face of the public. Who could forget Flaubert's thundering objurgations on that unendurable English lack of the sense of design? Design, plan—that was the uppermost idea in every mind at those councils at which one had assisted, silently, in one's corner—listening, while the Olympians, old and young, with what passion and what conviction, and how systematically and articulately, exchanged their free confidences on the work of the day, on the pusillanimity, the superficiality, the vulgarity of those who were not Olympians, and on their own schemes and ambitions. Lightness and shapeliness, grace and felicity in style, lucidity, logic, the clear image, the just word, the precise observation: true, these were the arts with which to cul-
