tivate one's own garden. Counsels of artistic perfection—he had gathered an inexhaustible store.
Yes, it had been the most wonderful of years. And yet, it was strange, he had come to Paris with the idea perhaps of passing his life there, and within a year he had wearied of it all. He had found himself surfeited with the French mind and its utterance. And why? He had been welcomed by the Olympians, in a sense; but really welcomed? Had there not been abysses of mental reservation on both sides? He had been privileged to listen: that was the truth of the matter. He had had only to put in a rash word to be reminded that his place was below the salt. Even Flaubert, the huge, the diffident, the courteous and accessible Flaubert, had abused him, unmercifully, when he had presumed to make some depreciatory comment on the style of Prosper Mérimée. They were so hostile and exclusive, at bottom, these Olympians; they positively preaccepted such a degree of interest in their own behalf. Even Turgenev, whom they so much admired, had remarked that the French recognized no originality whatever in other peoples, that, apart from their own affairs, they were interested in nothing, they knew nothing. They were the people in the world whom one had to go more of the way to meet than to meet any other, and did they sufficiently requite one's effort? Did their conversation, on such terms, and beyond a certain point, compensate for that ruthless abrogation of one's amour-propre? One adored them as craftsmen, but otherwise? They were ignorant and complacent: they would discuss by the hour some trifle of Daudet's while they neither knew nor cared what the great George Eliot was doing across the Channel. Yes, and they were corrupt! Turgenev felt that also; quiet aristocrat that he was, he had been disgusted, again and again, by their cynicism; he had never felt at ease in the atmosphere of the Magny dinners. Flaubert was out of the picture most of the time; he was in Paris only for a few months in the winter; and with the younger men one simply could not become intimate. Was it possible that he had come to Paris too late, that he would have been more at home there in the old romantic days? If he had grown up in France . . . if he had been still in his twenties. . . . It was impossible now; and besides, there was something so harsh and metallic about these naturalists, who dissected
