From the general use of coffee in the cities and large towns of Germany, we have inferred its general use by the peasantry; but even this is quite limited, in Upper Bavaria at least; it is found only where the influence of city-life has penetrated. Sometimes a peasant woman has a little hid in her chest, from which she stealthily prepares and drinks a cup when her husband is away; but it is little used. This article was brought into Western Europe in the seventeenth century, and found beer in possession of Germany. The monks are said to have preached against the use of coffee, as anticipating, by the dense black smoke which arose from burning it, the "fumes of hell." It came from Turkey, and at that day the Turk was still the hereditary dread of all the peoples on the middle and upper Danube. He was next thing to the Devil; and what came direct from the former could be but recent from the latter.

Their beloved beer could not be traced so directly to an origin in the nether world. The German tribes, as far back as history or tradition reports them, seem to have loved this quieting beverage. Traces of their coming together as now for banqueting purposes, under the shade of Germany's primeval forests, are still found in history and historical traditions. There is one fact which Americans, so accustomed to rapid transformations of society by migration, immigration, and intermixture of races, can scarcely comprehend, even when they know it as a fact: it is the persistency with which national traits adhere to a people in an old country, through generations and decades of generations and of centuries, withstanding the shock of revolution both in government and religion. Tacitus says of these people:—"At meals, they sit every man upon a seat by himself and at a separate table. Arising, they proceed armed to their business; and they go armed also to their banquets. It is no reproach to them to continue day and night drinking. Their drink is fermented from barley or wheat into a certain resemblance of wine. Their food is simple,—wild fruits, fresh game, or coagulated milk. They satisfy hunger without formality and without delicacies. In regard to thirst they do not exercise this moderation. Indulge their appetites by giving them all they desire, and you may conquer them by their vices not less easily than by arms."

Viewing, then, these people of Upper Bavaria, and of Munich in particular, in their cold, raw air,—in their supposed exposure to typhus and typhoid fevers,—deficiency of good food,—the want of the domestic circle as cemented in our country over other beverages,—the national abstemiousness in regard to food, and the addictedness to beer for thousands of years past,—and we have a somewhat rational explanation of the springing-up and development into such monstrous proportions of the manufacture and consumption of this article. Of the many it may be said,—

"They drink their simple beverage with a gust, And feast upon an onion and a crust."

Bavaria, not including the Rhenish Palatinate, uses over six million bushels of barley, and upwards of seven million pounds of hops, annually, in its breweries, making over eight million eimers, that is, about five million barrels of beer. But nearly half the kingdom is wine-growing, and uses comparatively little beer; so that this is mainly consumed in the other half, that is, by about three millions of people. At an average price of three and a half cents per quart, there is consumed in the kingdom fifty million florins, or over twenty million dollars, annually, in this beverage. Both manufacture and consumption have their head-quarters in Munich. The quantity manufactured in this city alone in 1856-7 was nine hundred and fifty thousand eimers, or about five hundred and seventy thousand barrels, being nearly five barrels a head for the whole population, men, women, and children. Allowing for the amount exported, or sent out of the city, there remains something like four barrels to each person. This is one quart, or four of our common table-glasses, per day. But some drink none, others little; a man is scarcely reckoned with real beer-drinkers until he drinks six masses,—twenty-four of our common tumblers; ten masses are not uncommon; twenty to thirty masses—eighty to one hundred and twenty of our dinner-glasses—are drunk by some, and on a wager even much more. The sick man whose physician prescribed for him a quart of herb-tea as the only thing that would save him, and who replied that he was gone, then, for he held but a pint, was no Bavarian; for the most modest Bavarian girl would not feel alarmed in regard to her capacity, if ordered to drink a gallon,—certainly not, if the liquid were beer.

The aggregate labor performed in this branch of popular industry is thus seen at a glance. But how is this done, and by whom? What is the noise or noiselessness with which such torrents of this foaming liquid rush daily through the channels of human bodies made originally too small to admit half the quantity? What are the final results upon body, mind, and heart of the present and future of the race? Does government encourage, stimulate, control, and turn to account this national appetite? These questions invite, and will well repay, a few moments' attention.

I once heard a college student announce as the text of his oration Lindley Murray's well-known definition of the verb,—a word which signifies "to be, to do, or to suffer"; and he followed up his announcement by a most beautiful and conclusive argument to show that this definition describes with equal accuracy three classes of men into which the whole world may be divided: a class who have no purpose in life but simply "to be"; an active class, whose mission is "to do," to which they bend all their energies; and a passive class, who merely "suffer" themselves to be employed as the tools of the men of action. Whether he would have modified his statement, had he known something of Bavarian beer-drinkers, I do not know; for, although these belong, doubtless, in general, to the class of men which he designated as having no purpose but simply "to be," yet they certainly have a decided preference as to the means of their being, which must be beer; they have activity enough to get where this can be obtained, and to handle the needed quantity; and the man who holds and bears about fifteen or twenty quarts a day must have no small share of the grace of passive endurance.

There is a class of the nobility too poor to treat themselves with the diversions of court-life, and with notions of noble birth which forbid them to engage in business, especially as they would thereby forfeit their rank. They fund their small means, so as to yield them a stated income; and in spending this and their time, they fall into a round which brings them three or four times a day to some place where beer is to be found, and with it a billiard-table and a reading-room. This class does not, perhaps, embrace a very large number of the nobility, but it is largely reinforced from others, whose small means are similarly invested, and whose whole time is on their hands for disposal. The class of men engaged in business, and pursuing it somewhat actively, give less attention to beer during the day. They take a couple of glasses—four of our common tumblers—at dinner, and perhaps send out a servant occasionally during the day to replenish a pitcher for the counter,—not, however, to treat customers, as used to be done in our country; but as beer had been all day secondary to business, the latter is dropped for the evening, and the undivided attention bestowed upon the national beverage. A large portion of the poor, and many who cannot be called poor, have not the means for this indulgence; and yet men and women are seldom seen at their work without a mug of beer standing near them. Ladies have the same provision in their families, as also students, and all who occupy rented rooms in connection with the families of the city; from ten to one o'clock servant-girls, with pitchers in their hands and immense bunches of keys hanging to their apron-strings, are seen running to and from the neighboring beer-houses thick as butterflies floating in a summer sun, and seem far more as if on business requiring haste. No room is sought for renting without an inquiry as to the quality of the beer of the neighborhood; and the landlady feels that her chances for a tenant are exceedingly slim, if she cannot furnish a satisfactory recommendation in this respect. Scarcely a house in the city is thirty steps from where the article can be had. The places fitted up with seats and tables for drinking accommodate from twenty to five hundred persons, and even one thousand or more in summer, when a garden is generally prepared with seats for the purpose. At these larger places, music is often provided, and ladies are frequently found lending the charm and solace of their presence, and sometimes a good deal more, to the other sex, in this self-denying work, in which the men have generally been the great burden-bearers. But the greatest crowds of real beer-drinkers go to another class of houses,—that is, the breweries themselves, where rooms are always fitted up for drinking. Of these the Court Brewery is perhaps in highest repute, and is at least a great curiosity. I visited it three or four times during a six years' residence in the city, and always in company with others who wished to see the lions of the place, and for the same reason that would have taken us to see a menagerie. Why did the monks never think of applying to such places the figure by which they protested against the introduction of coffee, "the fumes of hell"? The smoke of five hundred cigars or pipes rising to a ceiling which had been thus smoked for centuries,—the hoarse hum of five hundred voices uttering the German gutturals from tongues thickened by the use of beer, and floating heavily through an atmosphere of densest smoke, dimming the lights and turning all into an indefinite and uniform brown color,—this may indeed be a picture of Elysium to some minds, but to ours it is not. I never found a vacant seat there, nor felt a desire to occupy one, had there been such. Stone mugs of double the size of the common glasses are used, perhaps to save servants' labor in drawing, which is no small matter, as a barrel of beer lasts not more than ten minutes at the height of the drinking-time of the evening.

None of the drinking-places in the city are filled until evening. In the afternoon many take their walks into the suburbs, and turn aside where a glass may be had. On all holidays the whole city is adrift, much of it in the surrounding country, and most of this drift lodges against the suburban beer-houses. In summer evenings there are frequent entertainments, some provided by the government,—as one every Saturday evening from six to seven o'clock, from May to November, a mile from the city, in the English Garden, where sometimes two thousand persons may be in attendance, to hear the royal bands play. It is presumed that there will always be a considerable number among these who will not be able to stand it an hour without beer, and a beneficent provision is made for such,—seats and tables for at least five hundred persons being there provided, and often filled, so that some must drink standing.

The regularity with which the men of Munich bring themselves around to the same place at about the same time of day, especially if that place is a beer-house, is remarkable,—indeed, amusing. A gentleman residing in Berlin, where this everlasting beer-drinking does not prevail, mentioned to me, as one of the most ludicrous occurrences of his life, an invitation which he once received to visit a Munich professor whose acquaintance he had made in Berlin. The professor told him, that, in case he should arrive in Munich after a certain hour of the day, he must go directly to the Court Brewery, and would find him there. We do indeed regard this as the consummation of the ridiculous; but to this bachelor professor it was the most natural thing in the world. He might change his lodgings half a dozen times in a year, and so might not be readily found; but the Court Brewery would remain from generation to generation, and while he lived he expected regularly to appear there, and there, of course, was the only place where he could make appointments for years to come.

This incident will intimate what an external view of this dark brown mass of humanity would never have hinted,—that it contains men of learning and parts. Could one go round and listen to each party by itself, instead of hearing the low rumble which falls upon the ears of the general observer, the profoundest problems of philosophy, statesmanship, philology, geography, ethnography, and history would be found undergoing the most searching examination. Fame says of our politicians who rise to positions which ought to be occupied only by statesmen, that they frequent low places and mingle with the boisterous crowd. This is probably not a slander. But these men frequent such places only for a purpose. Their tastes do not lead them thither. They go no oftener than serves their purpose. Not so with the learned German beer-drinker. He is in his own proper society. Chinese or Sanscrit, Arabic or Coptic, the last discoveries in the interior of Africa or about the North Pole, or the more recondite regions of chemistry or mineralogy, may be the theme of a familiar discourse, which each of the party may fully appreciate.

To these places, of course, only the men resort. Indeed, in this part of Germany there is little of family-life. The members of the family take their coffee separately, as each rises and is ready. The men quite generally dine and sup away from home, and that, too, when their business and their residence are in the same house, and the hotel or eating-house is at a distance. An English gentleman told me of a German friend of his who appeared in his seat in the beer-house on the evening of his wedding-day; and to the suggestion that this was not quite right to the newly married wife, he replied that it did indeed seem so, but he thought it better not to encourage hopes destined to disappointment. This may, too, have been one of those numerous instances in which the parties had already spent many evenings together in such a way as to have diminished the interest of both in each other's society on the first evening of married life. A genuine Munich man would never be embarrassed like the Parisian, of whom the well-known story is told, that, having been accustomed to spend all his evenings in the drawing-room of a certain lady, he was advised, on the death of her husband, to marry her, and promptly replied with the question, "Where, then, should I spend my evenings?" A true South-Bavarian's plan of spending his evenings is not affected by the trifling event of his marriage.

Indeed, there is an aspect of this virtual dissolution of family-life which has great interest as connected with German erudition. The English or American scholar, whose social hours are mainly spent with his family, or in the mixed society of the sexes, would never think of introducing the subjects of his study into such circles, and hence is without the best means of familiarizing his mind with the very topics to which all his hours of close application are devoted; for no subject is fully understood and reduced to material for ready use until it has been in some form the theme of frequent familiar discourse. It is thus turned over,—looked at on every side,—the views of men of different tastes, studies, and orders of mind, who have not disqualified themselves for this by being curled into the same nutshell, are called forth,—and the sparks thus elicited catch on other tinder, which had not been touched by those struck out in solitary study. It is thus that the thoughts of the learned are familiarized, and their area extended. It is thus that subjects which sit upon us as holiday-clothes are, in a society of German literati, who are together every day at dinner, or over their coffee after dinner, and every evening over their beer, become to them as their every-day clothing. I am not of those who deem this result well purchased at the price of the refining influence of the other sex, and the virtual breaking-up of family-life; but if some middle way could be hit upon to secure the two advantages at once, both science and society would be great gainers.

The government has regulated the manufacture of beer, and collected an income-tax upon it, for centuries past; and this is even now one of its most puzzling problems. It determines the price, both wholesale and retail, at which the beer may be sold. The calculations are based upon an estimate of the medium amount of fixed capital necessary for the manufacture, then the labor, then the average price of barley and hops at the October and November markets of each year; every item which enters into the manufacture, including interest at five per cent on capital, enters also into the government's calculation by which it determines its tax and the price of beer. The price is never increased or diminished by less than half a kreutzer, or two pfennigs, that is, one-third of a cent, per mass. The fractional parts of this half-kreutzer which may appear in the calculation are divided by a fixed rule between the public and the brewer: that is, when the fraction is one-fourth of a kreutzer, or less, the brewer must drop it for the public benefit; when more, he may call it a half for his own benefit. The government tax is nearly one kreutzer per mass, making about six millions of florins. There is also in several places an additional local beer-tax, amounting to nearly two million florins more. The population of the kingdom is about five millions. A considerable portion of this population are wine-growing, and manufacture and drink but little beer. Ledlmayr, the largest brewer in Munich, made in the year 1856—the latest statistics published—one hundred and twenty-nine thousand eimers. Allowing three hundred working-days to the year, this would be four hundred and thirty eimers, or twenty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty masses, per day, and would pay to the government, at one kreutzer per mass, one hundred and eighty dollars of our money for each of these working-days, or fifty-four thousand dollars yearly. In a time of popular sensitiveness, there is nothing which the government could do that would be so likely to be followed by a revolutionary outbreak as to add a kreutzer to the price of the mass or quart of beer. This article is ranked in all police-regulations among the necessaries of life. The bakeries and beer-houses must remain open at those holiday-hours when all other shopkeepers, except the apothecaries, must close their shops.

The statistics already given have reference to the common beer; but, besides this, the brewers have permission to brew for certain short periods what are called the double beers, without paying a tax upon them. My statistics of the beer-drinking will, therefore, fall short of the truth, at least by this uncertain quantity. During the brief periods of the sale of the double beers, there is a great rush for them, relieving somewhat the monotony of the ordinary routine. The two principal kinds of double beer are the Bock-beer and the Salvator-beer. The latter creates quite a furor. Many, led by curiosity to the head-quarters of its sale, find their amusement there in testing the capacity of some great beer-drinker,—and such are always on hand waiting the chance,—by paying for all he will drink. These curious visitors seldom return without a similar test of their own capacities; and as the article has double the alcohol of the common beer, many a one staggers a little on his homeward way who had never felt such effect from the common form of the beverage.

There is also no small amount of wine drunk in Munich. I have not the statistics, but the number of large houses with the sign, "Weinhandlung," and of the smaller ones with the sign, "Weinschenck," and then the fact that at all the large hotels wine is mainly drunk at dinner, furnish my data for this conclusion. In the wine-growing districts of Bavaria beer-drinking is reduced to about one-fourth of the Munich standard, and so we may suppose that the removal of all wine from the capital might add one-fourth to the beer-drinking as given above,—at least, it takes the place of one-fourth of that which would be the aggregate of the beer-drinking.

The government has a commission for the examination of the quality of the beer; and, indeed, aside from this, the popular taste is not a bad test in this respect. There is an error in the lines of Prior,—

"When you with High-Dutch Herren dine, Expect false Latin and stummed wine: They never taste who always drink; They always talk who never think."[C]

The most common manifestation of Bavarian beer-drinking is a perpetual tasting, and not a pouring-down of the liquid a glass at a time. These people seem to have the art of doing this thing so gradually and quietly that the soothing liquor passes gently into the circulation, and produces an effect very different from that which would result from swallowing it a glass at a draught, enabling them to drink without visible effect a much larger quantity in the aggregate. They practise upon the proverb, "The still sow drinks the swill,"—a proverb which would serve admirably the purpose of those who desire to join in the general sarcasm expended upon Bavarian beer-drinking, since almost every word in it seems to express so exactly some characteristic which North Germans and others are disposed to attribute to Bavarians.

Reference was made above to the government's regulating the price of beer. The margin allowed between the wholesale and retail price is half a kreutzer on the mass,—that is, one-fourth of a kreutzer or one-sixth of a cent on the glass. What a blessing, if the retail liquor-trade in our country were reduced to such a scale of profit! This would bring less than two dollars on one thousand glasses. The work would have to be turned over to benevolence for its prosecution, and would doubtless be done much more to the advantage of the community. The profit, however, on this trade in Bavaria is somewhat increased by the manner in which servants are paid. Especially if good-looking girls are employed, the employer may pay them nothing, but leave them to get their pay from the customer. They bring him his change in kreutzers and fractions of a kreutzer, and he shoves back to them often these fractional parts; and if no such are there, a truly liberal soul may give the girl a whole kreutzer, and then in return he will receive an expression of thanks somewhat stronger than our lordly porters would allow themselves to make for half a dollar on which they had no claim. Small as this profit is, it brings to the retailers of Munich about five hundred thousand florins, somewhat more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold per annum. Then, if the servants receive from the customers gratuities of half that amount, that is, an average of one-twelfth of a cent on the glass, this amounts to two hundred and fifty thousand florins per annum. In view of all these facts, it can be conceived that nothing would be so certain to be followed by a revolutionary outbreak as the addition of a kreutzer to the price of a mass of beer.

The wit which sparkles and flashes in a Bavarian beer-house may be as much less boisterous, or rather as much more quiet, than that which explodes over the distilled spirits of our bar-rooms, as the stimulant itself is less exciting, but is for this very reason the more genuine. Like the myriads of fire-flies on a warm summer evening amid the rising fog of a marshy ground, so gleams this wit in its smoky atmosphere; still it is there, notwithstanding the popular notion of Bavarian stupidity. The North German, and even English and American satirists of these people, fare generally much as did Ulysses's men on drinking of Circe's magic cup; and once turned into swine, they are seldom turned back again, at least until they leave the charmed spot. When once drawn into the vortex of students' convivial gatherings, they feel that there is no escape without flying from the place.

A drinking frolic, involving Americans, once called in my aid to settle a great international difficulty—that is, one about as threatening as most of those diplomatic cases flaunted so often in our newspapers—between the United States and Bavarian governments. Two American art-students had taken a room at Nymphenburg, a little village in the vicinity of Munich, the site of a royal chateau, which in summer is always occupied by a royal prince. There the great Napoleon lodged, when he visited the Bavarian capital. There the present king was born. There, at the time to which I refer, the king's youngest brother, Adalbert,—who would have succeeded Otho on the throne of Greece, if the Greeks had not otherwise determined,—was residing in the palace, and a company of cuirassiers was stationed in the town. The two students were visited on a Sunday evening by three or four more Americans, and one English and two Bavarian friends. The usual beer-guzzling prevailed; some exciting topic was up, and each must have his glass empty when the time for refilling was announced. One of the Americans felt his capacity not quite equal to the demands made upon it. The shift often resorted to in such a trying situation is quietly to empty the glass under the table or out of a window, if this can be done without observation,—and most young men are not very observing at such times. Under the window, outside, sat a party of the cuirassiers drinking, about a dozen of whom made a sudden irruption into that bacchanal chamber, and, with little explanation, proceeded to clear it of its tenants and guests, knocking down, beating, and pitching them headlong down-stairs, until the work was done. There were sundry flesh-bruises inflicted, some small blood-vessels lying near the surface tapped, one collar-bone fractured, a wrist sprained, garments torn off or left hanging in shreds; and rarely has the darkness of a summer evening concealed a more ludicrous spectacle than that of these dispersed beer-bacchanalians, each running on his own account, hatless or coatless, as he happened to have been left by some stout cuirassier into whose hands he had fallen. The next day, a deputation of the injured company and their friends came to me, desiring that redress might be demanded of the Bavarian government. They stated their case both verbally and in writing. They were conscious of no offence. If the assailants gave any reason for their assault, it was not understood. Most of the young men knew but little German, and perhaps just then less than usual of that or any other language. The supposition was, that the rough treatment grew out of the cuirassiers' jealousy that they were not so well served by the waiting-maids as the American company and their guests. One, however, stated the unimportant incident, that the coat of the man who handled him so carelessly seemed to be very wet. One of the Americans who had been present on this occasion did not present himself until sent for several days afterwards. He had observed an incident seen by no other,—one of which the performer, himself as honest a young man as ever lived, was utterly unconscious,—the pouring of a glass of beer from the window. The beer did as little harm on the cuirassiers' coats as it would have done in the American's stomach, and was at least the incidental means of bringing the whole scene to an abrupt end. The government was inclined to do us justice, but very naturally thought that the drenching of its cuirassiers might be pleaded in abatement of the insult to our national dignity; and so a nominal punishment of the offenders finally settled the question.

If asked whether inebriation and its accompaniments are as marked under the reign of beer as under that of the more fiery fluids used among us, I should feel bound to reply negatively. The common Bavarian beer has but about half the strength of the average malt liquors of our country, and seldom produces real intoxication except upon novices. It may stupefy, though this is by no means observable in the mental action of learned Bavarians. The charge of dulness, so sarcastically made against them, could be retorted with about as much show of reason against Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, or, indeed, any other people. The students, after their Kneips, have what they call Katzenjammer,—cat-sickness,—the effect of debauch, loss of rest, and general irregularities; and those who do most of the beer-drinking do least of the studying. I should, indeed, fear fatal effects from drinking half the quantity of water which some of them take of beer. The drunkenness produced by beer is at least a very different thing from that produced by distilled spirits. The one may be a stupor, the other is a brief and sudden insanity. Beer holds no one captive by such spell as that which seizes some natures on the first taste of ardent spirits, throwing them beyond their own control until their week's frolic is ended. The cases are rare, if they ever occur, in which the beer-drinker is enticed from the prosecution of his business, if he has one,—and beer furnishes the main substitute for business to those who have no other employment. If it causes men to pursue their avocations lazily or stupidly, it does not cause the irregularities and neglects of American inebriation. Cases of pawning clothes and impoverishing families from the appetite for beer may occur, just as from laziness, but not as from the bewitching appetite for ardent spirits.

The practice of Americans in Bavaria, even of those who never drink a drop of beer at home, is, so far as I know, to drink a little while in the country, acting from a supposed necessity in that climate, or impelled by the want of other beverages. Physicians advise it, and I suppose that American physicians would do the same in the case of their countrymen temporarily residing there. In my own family, it was taken every day at dinner as a kind of prescription, and the children were disciplined to drink their little glass daily with rather less urging than would have been necessary, had the dose been castor-oil; and they always felt that they deserved an expression of approbation as being "good children," if they drank their entire portion. Our taste for beer never increased, but rather the contrary; and should I again reside in that country, notwithstanding the general impression that its use is a kind of necessity, as a security against the fevers incident to the climate, I should feel just as secure without a drop. My little boy, born in Bavaria, and but four years old when we left the kingdom, liked the beer better than the other children, and so gave some support to the theory that the Bavarians take to beer by instinct. He shared, too, in the patriotic doubt of the people as to the possibility of successfully imitating the article in other countries. When, on our journey homeward, the train brought us into the little city of Koethen, we found evidence of one of those attempts so unsuccessfully made everywhere in North Germany to imitate the Bavarian beer. A man passed along by the train, crying at the top of his voice, "Baierisches bier!" upon which the little fellow, in the height of his indignation, cried out, "Baierisches Bier nicht!"—("Not Bavarian beer!")—and so the cry and response continued until the parties were out of each other's hearing, and all the passengers in the train had their attention called, and their main amusement furnished, by this childish outburst of patriotic indignation. At this point, my life, observation, and adventures in connection with Bavarian beer ceased, and almost the last echo of its magic name in the original tongue died on my ears. That the results may not be lost and forgotten, I now commit them to paper and to the public.

* * * * *

FRIAR JEROME'S BEAUTIFUL BOOK.

The Friar Jerome, for some slight sin, Done in his youth, was struck with woe. "When I am dead," quoth Friar Jerome, "Surely, I think my soul will go Shuddering through the darkened spheres, Down to eternal fires below! I shall not dare from that dread place To lift mine eyes to Jesus' face, Nor Mary's, as she sits adored At the feet of Christ the Lord. Alas! December's all too brief For me to hope to wipe away The memory of my sinful May!" And Friar Jerome was full of grief, That April evening, as he lay On the straw pallet in his cell. He scarcely heard the curfew-bell Calling the brotherhood to prayer; But he arose, for't was his care Nightly to feed the hungry poor That crowded to the Convent-door.

His choicest duty it had been: But this one night it weighed him down. "What work for an immortal soul, To feed and clothe some lazy clown! Is there no action worth my mood, No deed of daring, high and pure, That shall, when I am dead, endure, A well-spring of perpetual good?"

And straight he thought of those great tomes With clamps of gold,—the Convent's boast,— How they endured, while kings and realms Passed into darkness and were lost; How they had stood from age to age, Clad in their yellow vellum-mail, 'Gainst which the Paynim's godless rage, The Vandal's fire could nought avail: Though heathen sword-blows fell like hail, Though cities ran with Christian blood, Imperishable they had stood! They did not seem like books to him, But Heroes, Martyrs, Saints,—themselves The things they told of, not mere books Ranged grimly on the oaken shelves.

To those dim alcoves, far withdrawn, He turned with measured steps and slow, Trimming his lantern as he went; And there, among the shadows, bent Above one ponderous folio, With whose miraculous text were blent Seraphic faces: Angels, crowned With rings of melting amethyst; Mute, patient Martyrs, cruelly bound To blazing fagots; here and there, Some bold, serene Evangelist, Or Mary in her sunny hair: And here and there from out the words A brilliant tropic bird took flight; And through the margins many a vine Went wandering—roses, red and white, Tulip, wind-flower, and columbine Blossomed. To his believing mind These things were real, and the soft wind, Blown through the mullioned window, took Scent from the lilies in the book.

"Santa Maria!" cried Friar Jerome, "Whatever man illumined this, Though he were steeped heart-deep in sin, Was worthy of unending bliss, And no doubt hath it! Ah! dear Lord, Might I so beautify Thy Word! What sacristan, the convents through, Transcribes with such precision? who Does such initials as I do? Lo! I will gird me to this work, And save me, ere the one chance slips. On smooth, clean parchment I'll engross The Prophet's fell Apocalypse; And as I write from day to day, Perchance my sins will pass away."

So Friar Jerome began his Book. From break of dawn till curfew-chime He bent above the lengthening page, Like some rapt poet o'er his rhyme. He scarcely paused to tell his beads, Except at night; and then he lay And tossed, unrestful, on the straw, Impatient for the coming day,— Working like one who feels, perchance, That, ere the longed-for goal be won, Ere Beauty bare her perfect breast, Black Death may pluck him from the sun. At intervals the busy brook, Turning the mill-wheel, caught his ear; And through the grating of the cell He saw the honeysuckles peer; And knew't was summer, that the sheep In golden pastures lay asleep; And felt, that, somehow, God was near. In his green pulpit on the elm, The robin, abbot of that wood, Held forth by times; and Friar Jerome Listened, and smiled, and understood.

While summer wrapped the blissful land, What joy it was to labor so, To see the long-tressed Angels grow Beneath the cunning of his hand, Vignette and tail-piece deftly wrought! And little recked he of the poor That missed him at the Convent-door; Or, thinking of them, put the thought Aside. "I feed the souls of men Henceforth, and not their bodies!"—yet Their sharp, pinched features, now and then, Stole in between him and his Book, And filled him with a vague regret.

Now on that region fell a blight: The corn grew cankered in its sheath; And from the verdurous uplands rolled A sultry vapor fraught with death,— A poisonous mist, that, like a pall, Hung black and stagnant over all. Then came the sickness,—the malign Green-spotted terror, called the Pest, That took the light from loving eyes, And made the young bride's gentle breast A fatal pillow. Ah! the woe, The crime, the madness that befell! In one short night that vale became More foul than Dante's inmost hell. Men cursed their wives; and mothers left Their nursing babes alone to die, And wantoned, singing, through the streets, With shameless brow and frenzied eye; And senseless clowns, not fearing God,— Such power the spotted fever had,— Razed Cragwood Castle on the hill, Pillaged the wine-bins, and went mad. And evermore that dreadful pall Of mist hung stagnant over all: By day, a sickly light broke through The heated fog, on town and field; By night the moon, in anger, turned Against the earth its mottled shield.

Then from the Convent, two and two, The Prior chanting at their head, The monks went forth to shrive the sick, And give the hungry grave its dead,— Only Jerome, he went not forth, But hiding in his dusty nook, "Let come what will, I must illume The last ten pages of my Book!" He drew his stool before the desk, And sat him down, distraught and wan, To paint his darling masterpiece, The stately figure of Saint John. He sketched the head with pious care, Laid in the tint, when, powers of Grace! He found a grinning Death's-head there, And not the grand Apostle's face!

Then up he rose with one long cry: "'Tis Satan's self does this," cried he, "Because I shut and barred my heart When Thou didst loudest call to me! O Lord, Thou know'st the thoughts of men, Thou know'st that I did yearn to make Thy Word more lovely to the eyes Of sinful souls, for Christ his sake! Nathless, I leave the task undone: I give up all to follow Thee,— Even like him who gave his nets To winds and waves by Galilee!"

Which said, he closed the precious Book In silence with a reverent hand; And, drawing his cowl about his face, Went forth into the Stricken Land. And there was joy in heaven that day,— More joy o'er that forlorn old friar Than over fifty sinless men Who never struggled with desire!

What deeds he did in that dark town, What hearts he soothed with anguish torn, What weary ways of woe he trod, Are written in the Book of God, And shall be read at Judgment-Morn. The weeks crept on, when, one still day, God's awful presence filled the sky, And that black vapor floated by, And, lo! the sickness passed away. With silvery clang, by thorp and town, The bells made merry in their spires, Men kissed each other on the street, And music piped to dancing feet The livelong night, by roaring fires!

Then Friar Jerome, a wasted shape,—. For he had taken the Plague at last,— Rose up, and through the happy town, And through the wintry woodlands passed Into the Convent. What a gloom Sat brooding in each desolate room! What silence in the corridor! For of that long, innumerous train Which issued forth a month before, Scarce twenty had come back again!

Counting his rosary step by step, With a forlorn and vacant air, Like some unshriven church-yard thing, The Friar crawled up the mouldy stair To his damp cell, that he might look Once more on his beloved Book.

And there it lay upon the stand, Open!—he had not left it so. He grasped it, with a cry; for, lo! He saw that some angelic hand, While he was gone, had finished it! There't was complete, as he had planned! There, at the end, stood finis, writ And gilded as no man could do,— Not even that pious anchoret, Bilfrid, the wonderful,—nor yet The miniatore Ethelwold,— Nor Durham's Bishop, who of old (England still hoards the priceless leaves) Did the Four Gospels all in gold. And Friar Jerome nor spoke nor stirred, But, with his eyes fixed on that word, He passed from sin and want and scorn; And suddenly the chapel-bells Rang in the holy Christmas-Morn!

In those wild wars which racked the land, Since then, and kingdoms rent in twain. The Friar's Beautiful Book was lost,— That miracle of hand and brain: Yet, though its leaves were torn and tossed, The volume was not writ in vain!

* * * * *

LITERARY LIFE IN PARIS.

THE DRAWING-ROOM.

PART I.

We are no "lion-hunters." When we wish to learn something of eminent authors, we hasten to the nearest book-shop and buy their works. They put the best of themselves in their books. The old saw tells us how completely all great men give the best part of themselves to the public, while the valet-de-chambre picks up little else than food for contempt. Nevertheless, we are as inquisitive about everything that concerns eminent people as anybody can be. We would not blot a single line from Boswell. We protest against a word being effaced from the garrulous pages of Lady Blessington and Leigh Hunt. We "hang" the stars with which Earl Russell has milky-wayed Moore's Diary. But we are no "lion-hunters," (the name should be "lion-harriers,") simply because this chase is not the best way to take the game we desire. What does the lion-hunter secure? A commonplace observation upon the weather, an adroit or awkward parry of flattery, and some superficial compliment upon one's native place or present residence; for a great man at bay is nothing more nor less than a casual acquaintance extremely on his guard, and, commonly, extremely fatigued by admirers. True, one obtains an acquaintance with the great man's voice, and the hearth where he lives, and the right to boast with truth, "I have seen him." Voila tout! Now this is not what we want. We desire some good, clear, faithful account of these people, as they are, when they talk freely and easily to their contemporaries, to their peers. Boswell's picture of the Literary Club is invaluable, although, with the insatiable curiosity of the nineteenth century, we regret that the prince of reporters failed to sketch the persons and peculiarities of the dramatis personae whose conversations he has so faithfully recorded.

We wish to go behind the scenes, and to hear the conversation engaged in in the green-room. We expect to see some dirt, some grease-pots, stained ropes, and unpainted pulleys,—and, to tell the truth, we want to see these blemishes. They are encouraging. They lessen the distance between us and it by teaching us that even fairy-land knows no exemption from those imperfections which blur our purest natures.

A work has lately appeared in Europe which in some measure gratifies this desire. It exhibits in full light a good many scenes of literary life in Paris. They may be and probably are exaggerated, but exaggerations do not mar truth; if they did, we should be obliged to throw away the microscope, with nativities and divining-rods. We are tempted to give our readers a share of the pleasure we have found in perusing this picture of Paris life. We forewarn them that we have taken liberties innumerable with the book. We have compressed into these few leaves a volume of several hundred pages. We have discarded all the machinery of the author, and introduced him personally to the reader in the character of an autobiographer. We have not scrupled to make explanations and additions wherever we thought them necessary, without resorting to the artifice of notes or of quotation-marks. We repeat, that we have taken a great many liberties with the author; but we have made no statement, advanced no fact, indulged no reflection, which is not to be found in the work referred to, or in some trustworthy authority. And now we leave him the door without another observation.

I am Count Armand de Pontmartin. I was born of noble parents at Aix, in Provence, in 1820. I was educated at Paris, but the first twelve years after I left college were passed on my estate in the enjoyment of an income of three thousand dollars a year. Belonging to a Legitimist family, my principles forbade my serving the Orleans dynasty, and I should scarcely have known how to satisfy that thirst for activity which fevers youth, had I not for years burned with the ambition to acquire literary fame. Circumstances conspired to thwart these literary schemes, and it was not until I had reached my thirtieth year that I came to Paris with a heart full of emotion and hope, a trunk full of manuscripts, and some friends' addresses on my memorandum-book. Before I had been a week in town they had introduced me to three or four editors of newspapers or reviews, and to several publishers and theatrical managers. In less than a fortnight I breakfasted alone at Cafe Bignon with one of my favorite authors, the celebrated novelist, Monsieur Jules Sandeau.[D] I was confounded with astonishment and gratitude that he should allow me to sit at the same table and eat with him. I felt embarrassed to know where to find viands meet to offer him, and beverages not unworthy to pass his lips. There were in his works so many souls exiled from heaven, so many tearful smiles, so many melancholy glances constantly turned towards the infinite horizon, that it seemed to me something like sacrilege to offer to the creator of this noble and charming world a dish of rosbif aux pommes and a turbot a la Hollandaise and a claret wine. I could have invented for him some of those Oriental delicacies made by sultans during harem's heavy hours; rose-leaves kneaded with snow-water, dreams or perfumes disguised as sweetmeats, or citron and myrtle-flowers dew-diamonded in golden beakers. Of a truth, the personal appearance of my poetical guest did give something of a shock to the ideal I had formed. Many and many a time I had pictured him to myself tall and thin and pale, with large black eyes raised heavenwards, and hair curling naturally on a forehead shadowed by melancholy! In reality, Monsieur Jules Sandeau is a good stout fellow, with broad, stalwart shoulders, a tendency to premature obesity, small, bright, gentle, acute eyes, a head as bald as my knee, rather thick lips, and a rubicund complexion; he has an air of good-nature and simplicity which excludes everything like sentimental exaggeration; he wears a black cravat tied negligently around a muscular neck; in fine, he looks like a sub-lieutenant dressed in citizen's-clothes. I got over this shock, and hunted all through the bill of fare, (which, as you know, forms in Paris a duodecimo volume of a good many pages,) trying my best to discover some romantic dish and some supernal liqueur, until he cut short my chase by suggesting a dinner of the most vulgar solidity; and when I tried to retrieve this commonplace dinner by ordering for dessert some vapory liqueurs, such as uncomprehended women sip, he proposed a glass of brandy. This was my first literary deception.

A theatrical newspaper was lying on the table. It contained an account of a piece played the evening before. The writer spoke of the play as a masterpiece, and of the performance as being one of those triumphs which form an epoch in the history of dramatic art. I read this panegyric with avidity, and exclaimed,—

"Oh, what a glorious thing success is! How happy that author must be!"

"He!" replied Monsieur Sandeau, smiling; "he is mortified to death; his play is execrable, and it fell flat."

"You must be mistaken!"

"I was present at the performance; and I have no reason to be pleased at the miscarriage of the piece, for I am neither an enemy nor an intimate friend of the author."

Monsieur Jules Sandeau then went on to explain to me how the theatrical newspapers, which contain the lists of performers and of pieces in all the theatres of Paris, (play-bills being unknown,) enter into a contract, which is the condition precedent of their sale in the theatres, stipulating that they will never speak otherwise than in praise of the pieces brought out. The report of the new piece is often written and set up before the performance takes place.

I blushed and said,—

"That is deplorable! But, thank Heaven! these are only the Grub-Street writers, the mere penny-a-liners; the influential reporters of the great morning papers, fortunately, are animated by a love of truth and justice."

Monsieur Sandeau looked at me, and smiled as be remarked,—

"Oh! as for them, they don't care a whit for piece or author or public. They think of nothing but showing off themselves. Monsieur Theophile Gautier has no care except to display the wealth of a palette which mistook its vocation when it sought to obtain from pen, ink, and paper those colors which pencil and canvas alone can give. He discards sentiments, ideas, characters, dialogue, probability, intellectual delicacy, everything which raises man above wood or stone. He would be the very first writer of the age, if the world would agree to suppress everything like heart and soul. He is never more at ease than when he has to report a piece whose literary beauties are its splendid scenery and costumes. He will dismiss the subject, the plot, the characters, and the details in five lines; while fifteen columns will not suffice for all the wonders of the decorations. If you ask him to send you to some person most familiar with contemporary dramatic art, instead of sending you to Alexandre Dumas, the elder or the younger, to Ponsard, or to Augier, he will send you to the celebrated scene-painters, to Ciceri or Sechan or Cambon. As for Monsieur Jules Janin, of whom I am very fond, he is—You have sometimes been to concerts where virtuosos play variations on the sextuor of "Lucie," or the trio of "William Tell," or the duet of "Les Huguenots"? You listen attentively, and do at first detect a phrase here and a phrase there which vaguely recall the work of Donizetti, or of Rossini, or of Meyerbeer; but in an instant the virtuoso himself forgets all about them. You have nothing but volley after volley of notes, a musical storm, tempest, avalanche; the primitive idea is fathoms deep under water, and when it is caught again it is drowned. Now Monsieur Jules Janin has had for the last five-and-twenty years the business of executing brilliant variations upon the piano of dramatic criticism. He acts like the virtuosos you hear at concerts. He writes, for conscience' sake, the name of the author and the title of the play at the head of his dramatic report, and then off he goes, heels over head, with variation and variation, and variation and variation again, in French and in Latin, until at last no human being can tell what he is after, where he is going, what he is talking about, or what he means to say. He will tell you the whole story of the Second Punic War, speaking of a sentimental comedy played at the Gymnase Theatre, and a low farce of the Palais Royal Theatre will furnish him the pretext to quote ten lines of Xenophon in the original Greek. Monsieur Jules Janin is, notwithstanding all this, an excellent fellow, and a man of great talents; but you must not ask him to work miracles; in other words, you must not ask him to express briefly and clearly what he thinks of the play he criticizes, nor to remember to-day the opinion he entertained yesterday. These are miracles he cannot work. He hears a piece; he is delighted with it; he says to the author, 'Your piece is charming. You will be gratified by my criticism upon it.' He comes home; he sits at his desk. What happens? Why, the wind which blew from the north blows from the south; the soap-bubble rose on the left, it floats away towards the right. His pen runs away with him; praise is thrown out by the first hole in the road; epigram jumps in; and at last the poor dramatic author, who was lauded to the skies yesterday, complimented this morning, finds himself cut to pieces and dragged at horses' tails in to-morrow's paper. Don't blame Monsieur Jules Janin for it. 'Tis not his fault. The fault lies with his inkhorn; the fault lies with his pen, which mistook the mustard-pot for the honey-jar; 'twill be more careful next time. 'Tis the fault of the hand-organ which would grind away while he was writing; 'tis the fault of the fly which would keep buzzing about the room and bumping against the panes of glass; 'tis the fault of the idea which took wings and flew away. The poor dramatic author is mortified to death; but, Lord bless your soul! Monsieur Jules Janin is not guilty."

"What do you think of Monsieur Sainte-Beuve? Is he as unfaithful a critic as Monsieur Theophile Gautier and Monsieur Jules Janin?" I asked, rather timidly.

"Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has received from Heaven (which he has ceased to believe in) an exquisite taste, an extraordinary delicacy of tact, admirable talents of criticism, relieved, and, as it were, fertilized, by rare poetical faculties. He possesses and exercises in the most masterly manner the art of shading, of hints, of hesitations, of insinuations, of infiltrations, of evolutions, of circumlocutions, of precautions, of ambuscades, of feline gambols, of ground and lofty tumbling, of strategy, and of literary diplomacy. He excels in the art of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the poison delicious and the perfume venomous. His prose is as attractive and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by what she shows and by what she conceals. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a pilgrim, which is faith. He has circumnavigated, merely in the character of amateur, every doctrine of the century; but though he has never adopted one of them for his creed, when he abandoned them he seemed to have betrayed them. Accused unjustly of treachery and apostasy, he has done his best to confirm his reputation, and has ended by becoming the enemy of those from whom at first he had only deserted. His error has been in adulterating that which he might have put, with singular grace, talents, and natural superiority, pure into currency,—in acting as if literature were a war of treachery, where one was constantly obliged to keep a sword in the hand and a poniard in the pocket. They say he is at great pains to provide himself with an immense arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, that he may be able to crush those he loves to-day and may detest to-morrow, and those he hates to-day and wishes to wreak vengeance on hereafter. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve might have been the most indisputable of authorities: he is only the most delightful of literary curiosities."

Such was the language of Monsieur Jules Sandeau. He spoke in the same strain of many another eminent literary man. Around these illustrious planets gravitated satellites. When new pieces were brought out, he told me one could see between the acts the lieutenants go up to the captain-critics and receive instructions from them; the consequence was, the theatrical criticisms were either collective apotheoses or collective executions. One day it was Mademoiselle Rachel they put on the black list for three months, and they raised up against her Madame Ristori, declaring that she was as superior to Rachel as Alfieri was to Racine. Then 'twas the Gymnase Theatre they put in Coventry, for having spoken disrespectfully of newspaper-writers. Another day Monsieur Scribe was their victim, to punish him for fatiguing with his dramatic longevity the young men, the new-comers, who are neither young men, nor new men, nor men of talents. Monsieur Jules Sandeau had passed through the thorny paths, the steppes, and the waste frontiers of literary life in Paris, without losing his honor, but without retaining a particle of illusion. He told me of his days of harsh and pernicious poverty, the abyss of debt, the constable at the door, the agony of hunting after dollar by dollar, "copy" hastily written to meet urgent wants, and the sweet toil of literary exertion changed into torture. I questioned him about Madame George Sand. What child of twenty has not been fired by that free, proud poetry which refused to accept the cold chains of commonplace life and justified the paradoxes of revolt by the eloquence of the pleading and the beauty of the dream? I soon discovered that the ideal and the real are two hostile brothers. De Balzac's works had kindled sincere enthusiasm in my breast. Monsieur Jules Sandeau showed me the dash of madness and of ingenuous depravity mixed with incontestable genius in that powerful mind. He told me of De Balzac's insane vanity, of his furious passion for wealth and luxury, of his readiness to plunge and to drag others after him into the most hazardous adventures, and of his insensibility to commercial honor.

After parting from Monsieur Jules Sandeau, I strolled towards a circulating-library. I was asking the mistress of the establishment some questions about the latest publications, when all of a sudden the glass door opened in the most violent manner, and who should come in but Monsieur Philoxene Boyer, rushing forward like a whirlwind, a last lock of hair dancing on top of a bald pate, a livid complexion, a feverish eye, a sack-overcoat friable as tinder, a hat reddened by the rain, trousers falling in lint upon boots run down at the heel: such was the appearance presented by Monsieur Philoxene Boyer, our old classmate at college, and now a critic, a romantic, an uncomprehended man of genius, and a literary man. I had already seen at the Exchange the martyrs of money; I now saw a martyr of letters. Monsieur Philoxene Boyer is neither a fool nor a foundling; he was educated with care; he belongs to an excellent family of Normandy; he might have been at this very hour an excellent gentleman-farmer, honored by his neighbors, and leading a quiet, useful life, while cultivating his paternal acres, and making a respectable woman happy. But when he graduated at the Law School, the demon of literature seized and refused to release him. His patrimonial estate was worth thirty thousand dollars; ignorant of business, he sold it below its true value, and, instead of placing the capital out at interest, he put it in his pocket and dissipated it in those taxes, as varied as old feudal burdens, which the poor, uncomprehended men of genius levy on their wealthy brethren. One day it went in dinners given to brethren who deliver diplomas of genius; another day it went in money lent to Grub-Street penny-a-liners who were starving; again it went to found petty newspapers established to demolish old reputations and raise new ones, and to die of inanition at their fifth number for want of a sixth subscriber. In fine, before three years had passed away, not a cent was left of Monsieur Philoxene Boyer's estate, and in return he had acquired neither talents nor fame. He is scarcely thirty years old: he looks like a man of sixty. I know no man in the world who, for the hope of half a million of dollars and a place in the French Academy, would consent to bear the burden of tortures, privations, and humiliations which make up Monsieur Philoxene Boyer's existence. He undergoes the torments of the damned; he fasts; he flounders in all the sewers of Paris. But he is riveted to this horrible existence as the galley-slave to his chain; he can breathe no other air than this mephitic atmosphere; he can lead no other life. When I saw him on the threshold of that sombre and humid reading-room, muddied, wet, pale, thin, almost in rags, I could not help thinking of this wretched galley-slave of literary ambition as he might have been at home in his old Norman mansion, cozily stretched before a blazing fire, with a cellar full of cider and a larder groaning beneath the fat of that favored land, smiling at a young wife on whose lap merry children were gambolling. He was in the vein of bitter frankness. He had not dined the preceding day. He seized me by the arm, and, dragging me out of the circulating-library, said to me, in a voice as abrupt as a feverish pulsation,—

"Don't listen to that old hag! All the books she offers you are miserable stuff, fit at best for the pastry-cooks. Oh! you don't know how success is won nowadays. I'll tell you. There is an assurance society between the book, the piece, and the judge. Praise me, and I'll praise you. If you will praise us, we will praise you. The public buys."

Then he went on with his bitter voice to utter a furious philippic against our celebrated literary men. He attacked them all, with scarcely an exception. This one sold his pen to the highest bidder; that one levied contributions of all sorts on the vanity of authors and artists; another was a mere actor; a fourth was nothing but a mountebank; a fifth was a mere babbler; and so on he went through the whole catalogue of authors. The illustrious literary democrats were Liberals and Spartans only for the public eye. They cared as much about liberty as about old moons: this one speculated on a title; that one on a vice; a third, to possess a carriage and dine at Vefour's, had become the thrall of a wealthy stockjobber who paid his virtues by the month and his opinions by the line. He spoke in this way for an hour, bitter, excessive, nervous, extravagant, and sometimes eloquent. All at once he stopped,—and pressing my hand with a mixture of bitterness and cynicism, he said,—"Old boy, I have now given you a dollar's worth of literature; lend me ten dimes." I hastily drew from my pocket three or four gold coins, and, blushing, slipped them into his hand; it trembled a little; he thanked me with a glance, and, muttering something like "Good bye," disappeared around the next corner.

The next time I met Monsieur Jules Sandeau he said to me,—"I want you to go with me to Madame Emile de Girardin's to-morrow evening. She is to read a tragedy she has written in five acts and in verse. You will meet a good many of our celebrated literary men there. You must remember that the watchword at that house is, Admiration, more admiration, still more admiration. You must excite enthusiasm to ecstasy, compliments to lyrical poetry, and carry flattery to apotheosis. But before we go there I beg you to allow me to return your aristocratic breakfast by a poor literary man's dinner, which we will eat, not in Bignon's sumptuous private room, but outside the walls of Paris, at 'Uncle' Moulinon's, which is the rendezvous of the supernumeraries of art and literature. The wine, roast, and salad are cheaper than you find them on the Boulevard des Italiens, and it is advisable that a fervent neophyte like you should take all the degrees in our freemasonry as soon as possible. 'Uncle' Moulinon's dining-saloon is to Madame Emile de Girardin's drawing-room what a conscripts' barrack is to the official mansion of a French marshal."

I gratefully accepted the invitation, and at the appointed time I joined Monsieur Jules Sandeau. We left Paris by the Barriere des Martyrs, climbed Montmartre hill, and entered "Uncle" Moulinon's dining-saloon when it was full of its usual frequenters. I had never seen such a sight before. Imagine a gourmand obliged to witness with gaping mouth all, even the most prosaic details of the culinary preparations for a grand dinner. The dining-saloon was a long, narrow room, low-pitched and sombre; it was filled with small tables, where in unequal groups were seated young men between eighteen and fifty-five, anticipating glory by tobacco-smoke. Here were beardless chins accompanied by long locks; there were bushy beards which covered three-quarters of the owners' cadaverous, wasted faces; yonder were premature bald heads, leaden eyes, feverish glances: look where you would, you saw everywhere that uneasy, startled air which bore witness to a disordered life. To the sharp aroma of tobacco were joined the stale and rancid odors peculiar to fifth-rate eating-houses. I sought in vain upon all those faces youth's gentle and poetical gayety, the exuberance of gifted natures, the amiable cordiality of travelling-companions pressing on together in different paths. The most salient characteristics of this bizarre assembly were sickly smiles, an incredible mixture of triviality and affectation, motions of wild beasts trying their teeth and claws, starving attitudes, words tortured to make them look like ideas, a brutal familiarity, and the evident desire to devour all their superiors that they might next crush all their equals. I was glad when dinner was over, for I felt ill at ease,—the sight before me differed so much from that I had dreamed.

Monsieur Jules Sandeau gave me his arm, and we walked towards the Avenue des Champs Elysees. It was nine o'clock when we reached the Rue de Chaillot, where Madame Emile de Girardin resided. She lived in a sort of Greek temple, built about thirty feet below the level of the street, and down to which we had to go as if we were entering a cellar. The house was full of columns, statues, flowers, paintings, candelabra, and servants in black dress-coats and short breeches; but everything about the place looked so accidental and ephemeral that the Comte de Saint-Brice, a very witty frequenter of the house, used to say,—"Whenever I visit the place, I am always afraid of finding the horses sold, the servants dismissed, the husband run away, the drawing-room closed, and the house razed." The Comte de Saint-Brice's fears must have been allayed on this evening. Everything was in its place,—horses, servants, husband, drawing-room, house. Madame Emile de Girardin was in full dress; the manuscript tragedy was in her lap. I found in the drawing-room Monsieur Victor Hugo, Monsieur de Lamartine, Monsieur Alfred de Musset, the three stars of our poetical heavens; Monsieur Theophile Gautier, Monsieur Mery, Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, the secondary planets; Madame George Sand, the great Amazon novelist; some doctors, some artists, two or three actors from the French Comedy, and some other gentlemen. At this period of time Madame Emile de Girardin was forty-five years old. Her flatterers still spoke of her beauty. Her conversation was dazzling, but it lacked charm: her talents forced themselves upon one; her bons mots took you by storm. Strength had overcome everything like grace, and two hours' conversation with Madame Emile de Girardin left one with a sick-headache or exhausted by fatigue. Nevertheless, one of her most fervent admirers has uttered this singular paradox about her: "She would be the first woman of the age, if she had always talked and never written a line."

Her husband, Monsieur Emile de Girardin, was present, with his pale face, lymphatic complexion, glassy eye, and forehead checkered with a Napoleon-like lock. He was then, and has remained ever since, the most exact personification of a pasteboard man of genius lighted by histrionic foot-lights. He was a compound of the dandy, the sophist, and the agitator. His talents lay in making people believe him in possession of ideas, when he had none,—just as speculators disseminate the illusion of their capital, when in reality they are worse than bankrupt. He began what others have since completed,—that is, he made trade and advertisements the sovereign masters of literature and newspapers. Abetted by the spirit of the age, he introduced into the intellectual world the risks and unexpected hazards of stock-jobbing circles. He made a great deal of money in this trade, and, besides, it gave him the pleasure of making a great deal of noise in the world, of overturning governments, of dreaming of being minister, nay, prime-minister, when the day may come in which good, sense is to be challenged and France made bankrupt. Everybody around him, even his wife, seemed to accept his superiority for something unquestionable. Their union was not one of those affectionate, faithful, and tender marriages, such as commonplace folk hope to enjoy, but it was a copartnership of two smart people, aided by two bunches of quills. Each pretended to admire the other with an extravagance of show which made it hard for the bystander to repress doubts and smiles.

Monsieur Jules Sandeau had informed Madame Emile de Girardin that he intended to bring me with him. I do not know how she found out that I had, in the very heart of the Faubourg Saint Germain, an old aunt, a real duchess, who was recognized as an authority whose dicta could not be disputed by any noble family to be found from the Quai Voltaire to the Rue de Babylone, which, as all the world knows, are the frontiers of that, the most aristocratic quarter of Paris. Madame de Girardin knew that my aunt was in a position to open to vanity the portals of some noble houses which talents and fame alone could not open. Now Madame Emile de Girardin's monomania was to be received in the noble faubourg,—to live there perfectly at home, as if it were her native sphere,—to be able to say, "My friend, the little Marchioness," or, "I have just come from our dear Jeanne's house, my charming Countess, you know: she is suffering dreadfully from her neuralgia." She reckoned a triumph of this sort a thousand times preferable to the applause of her readers and her friends. All the dull pleasantries with which she adorned her over-praised "Letters" owed their origin solely to the unequivocal veto placed by two or three courageous noble ladies on the attempts made by Madame Emile de Girardin to force her entrance vi et armis into their mansions. For my aunt's sake, she received me with especial courtesy, which I was ingenuous enough to attribute to my own personal merit. However, I had not time to indulge in analysis: she was about to begin to read her tragedy.

The tragedy was that "Cleopatre" in which Mademoiselle Rachel appeared, after wrangling for some time with the authoress to induce the latter to give Antony some other name, vowing that Antoine was entirely too vulgar to be uttered on the stage. The great tragic actress had never heard of the illustrious Roman, and knew no other Antony but the Antoine who scrubbed her floors and brought her water. It was a woman's tragedy, but written by a woman in man's attire, determined to write a very masculine, vigorous work, but succeeding in producing only a plated piece, in which everything was puerile, artificial, and conventional, from the first word to the last line. It was an olla podrida, in which Shakspeare hobnobbed with Campistron, Theophile Gautier locked arms with Dorat, Plutarch was dovetailed with the Mantua-Makers' Journal of Fashions. Cleopatra spouted long speeches upon archaeology, hieroglyphics, the sun, climate, and virtue; Antony was guilty of concetti in the style of Seneca; Octavia prattled like a respectable Parisian lady, who takes care of her children when they have the measles, and hides from them their father's bad habits. It was neither antique nor Roman, nor classic nor romantic, nor good nor bad nor indifferent; it was a tragical wager won by a smart woman at the expense of her audience. The latter, nevertheless, bravely did their duty. Neither "Le Cid," nor "Polyeucte," nor "Andromaque," nor "Athalie"—Corneille and Racine's masterpieces—ever produced such rapturous enthusiasm. Monsieur Mery dashed off extemporaneously, in Marseillais accent, admiring paradoxes which lacked nothing but splendid rhyme. Monsieur Theophile Gautier, who looked like an obese Turk habited in European clothes, laid aside his Moslem placidity to cry that the tragedy was marvellous. Monsieur Alfred de Musset, lolling in his arm-chair in an attitude which seemed a compromise between sleep and Kief, smiled beatifically. Monsieur Victor Hugo vowed that nothing half so fine had ever before been written in any age or in any country or in any language—except (aside) "my own 'Burgraves'"! Monsieur de Lamartine, like a god descended upon earth and astounded to find himself at home, let fall from his divine lips compliments perfumed with ambrosia, sparkling with poetry, and glittering with indifference. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, that little bit of a fellow, the fly of the political and literary coach, went first to one and then to another, his eye-glass incrusted in his eyebrow, stiffening his wee form as long as he could make it, rattling his high-heeled boots as loudly as he could contrive, stretching out his round, dogmatic face, puffing and blowing to give himself importance, dying to be the Coryphaeus of the company, and mortified to see himself reduced to sing his enthusiasm in the chorus; he frisked about the room, and seemed to be handing around his rapture on a waiter, as domestics hand around cake and ices at parties.

The tragedy fatigued me. This comedy of adulation disgusted me. My very humble and obscure position in the midst of all these illustrious shareholders of the Mutual-Admiration Society, organized by the vanity of all to the profit of the vanity of each, kindled in me a desire to show myself frank and independent. I murmured, loud enough to be heard by all my neighbors,—"Of a truth, the Country's Muse is not Melpomene!" Madame Emile de Girardin, when Mademoiselle Delphine Gay and in the most brilliant period of her poetical youth, had styled herself "the Country's Muse"; her admirers had adopted the title, and it had remained her poetical alias. The exclamation was, therefore, if not very brilliant, at least very plain and quite just. It soon went around the room as rapidly as every ill-natured phrase will go; for everybody is glad to borrow such remarks from his neighbor without paying the price of them himself. I soon saw one of Madame Emile de Girardin's intimate friends whisper something into her ear. She blushed. Her thin lips became thinner. Her nose and her chin, which always seemed as if about to wage war on each other, became more menacing than ever; her bright, clear eyes turned from her friend and gave me a glance ten times more tragic than the five acts of her tragedy. I saw that my exclamation had been repeated to her, and that a universal anathema was thundered at the rustic boor, at the barbarian impudent enough to dare to be witty by Monsieur Mery's side, and to affect to be insensible to the sublime beauties of "Cleopatre." However, all was not yet lost; I had unconsciously another way of conquering Madame de Girardin's favor. Her countenance became wreathed in smiles, she advanced towards me, and said, in a honeyed tone,—"Well, Count, give me some tidings of our excellent Duchess de ——, your aunt, I believe?"

In the mood of mind I was then in, nothing could have been more disagreeable to me than this way of recalling my aristocratic titles at the very moment when I sought to be nothing but a literary man. I replied with a careless, indifferent, plebeian air, as if noble titles were nothing in my opinion,—"The Duchess de ——! Gracious me! I never see her, and I could not tell you for the life of me whether she is my aunt or my cousin. Her drawing-room is the stupidest place on earth. They played whist there at two cents a point. Every door was wadded to keep draughts and ideas out. I long ago ceased to go there, and now I would not dare show my face again."

"Admirable! The Provinces are not devoid of sprightliness!" dryly replied Madame Emile de Girardin.

That was enough. I was weighed in the balance and found sadly wanting by an ill-natured remark plus and a duchess minus. Fifteen minutes afterwards we took leave of Madame de Girardin. She gave Monsieur Jules Sandeau a fraternal and virile shake of the hand in the English style; I received only a very cold and very dry nod, which was as much as to say,—"You are an ill-bred fellow and a fool; I have no fancy for you; return here as rarely as possible."

Soon after this memorable evening, Monsieur Jules Sandeau's friendly offices acquainted literary circles that a young man of the best society, devoted to literature, the author of some remarkable sketches in the newspapers and reviews, was about to appear as the literary critic of "L'Assemblee Nationale," the well-known dally newspaper, which has been since suppressed by the government. A month afterwards my signature might have been read at the foot of a feuilleton of fifteen columns. About the same period of time a fashionable publisher brought out a volume of tales by me. This was my literary honey-moon. I was astonished at the number of friends and admirers that rose on every side of me. I could scarcely restrain myself from parodying Alceste's phrase,—"Really, Gentlemen, I did not think myself the fellow of talents I find I am!" But, of all surprises, the human heart finds this the easiest to grow accustomed to. I soon found it perfectly natural that people should look upon me as a genius, and I ingenuously reproached myself for not having sooner made the discovery. Everybody praised my little book as if it were a masterpiece. I might have made a volume with the packets of praises sent to me; but I must add, for truth's sake, that most of my panegyrists took care to slip under the envelope which covered their letter of praise a volume of their works. I have kept several of these letters. Here are copies of three of them.

"Sir,—Your appearance among us is an honor in which every literary man feels he has a share. You will regenerate criticism, as you have purified novel-writing. One becomes better as he reads your works, and feels an irresistible desire to do better that he may be more worthy of your esteem. The days your criticisms appear are our red-letter days, and every line you give our poor little books is worth to them the sale of a hundred copies. I take the liberty to send you herewith a humble volume. You may, perhaps, find in it some over-crude tones, some raw shades; but do not forbear to exercise your critical perspicuity. I submit myself in advance to your reproaches and to your reservations; to be censured by you is even a piece of good fortune, as your reprimands themselves are adorned with courtesy and grace."

"Sir,—I admire you the more because our opinions are not the same; they may be said to be contrary; but extremes meet, and we join hands on a great many points: are we not both of us vanquished? Chateaubriand sympathized, nay, more, fraternized, with Armand Carrel. I am not Carrel, but you may be Chateaubriand before a very long while. I would beg to lay before you the book which goes with this note; some passages of it may, perhaps, wound your honorable regrets, your chivalrous respects, but they are sincere; and this sincerity I have never better understood and practised than when I assure you that I am your most assiduous reader and most fervent admirer."

"Sir,—Do not judge me, I pray you, from the newspapers in which, to my great regret, I write: imperious circumstances, old acquaintance, and—why shall I not confess it?—the necessities of Parisian life, have driven me to appear to have enlisted on the side of the most numerous battalions. But I have in the Provinces a good old mother who reads no newspaper but yours; one of my uncles is a Chevalier de Saint Louis; another served in Conde's army; my Aunt Veronica is a pious woman, who would forever look kindly upon me, if she should ever perceive through her spectacles her nephew's name followed by praise from your pen. For I need not say that you are her favorite author, as, of a truth, you are of everybody; for who can remain insensible to those treasures of.... [Here my modesty refuses to copy the text before me]. There is but one opinion upon this subject. Royalists and democrats, disciples of tradition or fanatics of fancy, voltigeurs of the old monarchy or reformers of the future, are all unanimous in saluting, as a rising glory of our literature, the pure and noble talent which.... [Here my modesty again refuses to copy the text before me].

"P.S. I send you herewith two copies of my works, which I submit to your able and kind criticism."

Nor were appeals like these the only sort of seduction to which I was exposed when I became the literary critic of "L'Assemblee Nationale." The eminent men, sublime philosophers like Monsieur Victor Cousin and Monsieur de Remusat, incomparable historians like Monsieur Guizot, Monsieur Thiers, Monsieur de Barante, admirable literary men like Monsieur Villemain and Monsieur de Salvandy, (all of whom had spent their lives in laying down political maxims, and in expressing their astonishment that French heads were too hard or French nature too fickle to conform French life to the profound maxims which they, the former, had weighed and meditated in the silence of their study,) who had for eighteen years ruled France, found themselves, one February morning in 1848, stripped of power and of place. They returned to their favorite studies, and produced new works, to the delight of lettered men everywhere. But, as the human heart, even in the beat of men, has its weaknesses, these eminent men, who could not for a single instant doubt either their talents or their success or the universal admiration in which they were held, were a little too fond of hearing these agreeable truths told them in articles devoted especially to their works. Now to heighten the zeal of the authors of these articles, the eminent retired statesmen held in their hands an infallible method: They would take these trumpeters of fame aside, and, without contracting any positive engagement, would distinctly hint to these critics, (a word to the wise is sufficient!) that, after a few years of these excellent and useful services in the daily press or in the periodicals, they, the former, would elect the latter members of the French Academy. A seat in the French Academy was the object of the most ardent ambition. No sooner was the breath out of the body of one of the forty members of the French Academy than twenty candidates entered the lists, and canvassed, canvassed, canvassed the nine-and-thirty living Academicians, without losing a minute in eating, drinking, or sleeping, until the election took place.

You may now see the various sorts of seductions which assailed me during this short and brilliant period of my literary life. The world lay smiling before me, and I felt quite happy,—when I met Monsieur Louis Veuillot, the eminent editor of "L'Univers," which the government has since suppressed.

We had exchanged visiting-cards several times, and a few letters, but I did not as yet know him. I was attracted to him by the very contrasts which existed between us. My elegant and delicate nature (as the newspapers then styled it: they now call it my weak and morbid nature) seemed in absolute contradiction to that robust frame, that oaken solidity, which revealed beneath its rugged bark its virile juices. His masculine and potent ugliness reminded me of Mirabeau, of a plebeian Mirabeau with straight black hair, of a Mirabeau who had found at the foot of the altar calmness for his tempest-tossed soul. His conversation delighted and fascinated me. One felt (despite some coarseness in minor details, and which almost seemed to be assumed) that there glowed within him the energetic convictions of an honest man and a Christian, who had at command the most stinging language that ever wrung the withers of Voltaire's pale successors. No man among our contemporaries has been more hated than Monsieur Louis Veuillot. He has flagellated, kicked, cuffed, jeered, mocked, humiliated, exasperated, better than anybody else, the writers I most detest. He has given them wounds which will forever rankle. He has indelibly branded these miserable actors who play upon the theatre of their vices the comedy of their vanity. We together examined the pages where I had expressed my opinion upon contemporary authors.

"Are these," said Monsieur Louis Veuillot, speaking severely to me, "are these all your sacrifices to the truth? Praises to that one, flattery to this one, soft words to him, compliments to another? You blame them just enough to incite people to buy their books. Is that what you call serving our noble and austere cause? Oh, Sir! Sir!" ...

He lectured me long and well. He spoke with the edification of a sermon and the brilliancy of a satire. At last, ashamed of my weakness, electrified by his language, burning to repair lost time, I said to him, pressing his hands in mine,—

"I am dwelling amid the luxuries of Capua; when next you hear from me, I shall be in the midst of the field of battle."

I at once began my campaign. I made war upon Voltaire, Beranger, Eugene Sue, De Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Quinet; and as for the small fry of literature, I showed them no mercy. War was soon declared on me,—war without quarter.

My first adversary was little Monsieur Paulin Limayrac. He has become the most accomplished specimen of the job-editor. As firmly convinced of the supremacy of the Articles of War as the best disciplined private soldier who ever showed how perfect an automaton man may become by thorough discipline, his political opinions are something more than a creed: they are a watchword which be observes with a most supple obstinacy. The cabinet-minister he calls master is a corporal who has the right to think for him; and were the corporal to contradict himself ten times in the course of a single day, imperturbable little Paulin Limayrac would demonstrate to him that he was ten times in the right. But then (that is, in 1855) Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was a Republican, a Socialist; and his weakness lay in imagining not only that people read his articles in "La Presse," but that they remembered them for a whole sennight after reading them. When you met him, he always commenced conversation:—

"Ah, ha! what did I tell you? Am I not an excellent prophet? You remember the prophecy I made the other day? It has come to pass just as I predicted it!"

Poor Paulin Limayrac really thought himself a prophet, when in good truth he was not even a conjurer. Stiffening himself up on his stumpy legs, he stared as hard as he could through his eye-glass, and from his giant's height of four feet ten, at everybody who pretended to believe there was a God in heaven. His occupation just at that time was to toss the incense-burning censer in honor of Madame, Emile de Girardin under her aquiline nose. He had become the page, the groom, the dwarf of this celebrated woman, who had, alas! only a few months more to live. He opened the fire against me. To gratify Madame Emile de Girardin, he one day wrote on the corner of her table twenty harsh lines against me, (he took good care not to sign them,) in which he said of me exactly the contrary of what he had written to me. As these lines were anonymous, I did not care to pretend to recognize the author; besides, can you feel anger towards such a whipper-snapper? I met him a short time afterwards, and he gave me a more cordial shake-hands than ever. Now comes the cream of the fellow's conduct: for all this that I have mentioned is as nothing, so common of occurrence is it in Paris. Note that Madame Emile de Girardin was dying: I was ignorant of it, but Monsieur Paulin Limayrac knew it well. Note further, that for weeks before this he had celebrated in the tenderest sentimental strains the loving friendship which existed between Madame George Sand and Madame Emile de Girardin. Note lastly, that Monsieur Paulin Limayrac had good reason to think that I knew perfectly well who was really the author of the malicious attack on me in "La Presse," which was his paper. Remember all this while I repeat to you the dialogue which took place between us under an arcade of the Rue Castiglione. I said to him,—

"Ah! my dear Sir, Madame George Sand must be gratified this time! Your article this morning upon her autobiography really did hit the bull's-eye, plumb! What fire! what enthusiasm! what lyric strains!"

"I could not help myself," replied he. "It is one of the fatigues of my place, I was obliged to write it."

"Well, between you and me, the truth is that your admiration is a little exaggerated. The work is less dull since Madame George Sand has reached the really interesting periods of her life; but how fatiguing the first part of it was! What stuff she thrust into it! What particulars relating to her family and her mother, which were, to say the least of it, useless!"

"Why, my dear fellow," replied Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, with a knowing look, "don't you know the secret?"

"What secret?"

"Ah! you have not yet shaken off provincial dust! Madame George Sand, with that carelessness one almost always finds in great artists, sent to Monsieur Emile de Girardin that enormous packet of four-and-twenty volumes, at the same time authorizing him to retrench at least one-third of the manuscript, if he thought fit. But Madame de Girardin (who is extremely astute) thought, that, if the work were published without the numerous dull chapters of the first part, it would command too brilliant a success; and Her Most Gracious Majesty determined that the whole four-and-twenty volumes should appear without the omission of a single line,—which is all the more noble, grand, and generous, as we pay a high price for the 'copy,' and it has curtailed our subscription-list a good deal."

"I thought Madame George Sand and Madame Emile de Girardin were upon the footing of a most affectionate friendship."

"'Tis a woman's friendship. 'Tis a poet's love for a poet. Each adores the other; but then what is more vulgar than to love one's friends when they are successful? Every hind can do that; while none but delicate and sensitive souls can shed torrents of tears over a friend's reverses."

A fortnight after this conversation took place, Madame Emile de Girardin died. There was a flood of panegyrics and of tears. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was chief pall-bearer, and demonstrated in the columns of "La Presse" that Madame Emile de Girardin had herself alone more genius than Sappho, Corinne, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, and Madame George Sand, all put together.

* * * * *

THE LITTLE COUNTRY-GIRL.

CHAPTER I.

My father's old friend, Captain Joseph, came down by the morning train, to inquire concerning a will placed in my keeping by Farmer Hill, lately deceased.

This is his first visit since our marriage.

He declares himself perfectly satisfied with—a certain person, and insists on my revealing the reason, or reasons, of her choosing—a certain person, when she might, no doubt, have done better.

And he is equally charmed with our locality,—is glad to find such a paradise.

I like Captain Joseph. He doesn't croak. Some old men would look dismal, and say, perhaps,—"Happiness is not for earth," or, "In prosperity prepare for adversity." As if anybody could!

"A beautiful spot," says Captain Joseph. And truly it is a pleasant place here, close by the sea,—a place made on purpose to live in. It is a sort of valley, shut in on the east and on the west by high wooded hills, which stretch far out into the sea, and so make for us a charming little bay. There are only a few houses here: the town proper, where I have my law-office, is a mile off.

I found this nook quite accidentally, while sketching the islands off in the harbor, and the water, and the deep shading on the woods beyond. The people here took me to board. That was ten years ago.

Then the family was large. There was old Mr. Lane, his wife, their five grown-up boys, Emily, the sick one, and Miss Joey. The eldest son went out to China, and there died. The next three, at different times, started for California. Two died of the fever, and the third was supposed to have been murdered in crossing the Plains.

David remained. He was a tall, well-made youth, with plenty of health and good looks, willing to work on the farm, but devoted mainly to his little sloop-boat. People called him odd. He was both odd and even. He was odd in being somewhat different in his habits from other young men; but then he had an even way of his own, which he kept. With him, the sea and his little sloop-boat and the daily paper supplied the place of balls, concerts, parties, and young women.

"Why don't you dress up, and go gallivantin' about 'mong the gals?" his old mother used to say. But he would only laugh, and pshaw, and walk off to the shore. And I, watching his erect gait and firm tread, would wonder how it was that one good-looking young man should be so different from all other good-looking young men. Still, there was a sort of sheepishness about the eyes, and that was probably why he never turned them, when meeting the girls, but strode along, looking straight ahead, as if they had been so many fence-posts.

Fanny J—— once laid a wager with me that she would make him bow. She contrived a plan to meet him as he returned from the Square. I hid behind the stone wall, and peeped through the chinks. Just as they met, she almost let the wind blow her bonnet off, hoping to catch his eye. But he looked so straight forward into the distance that I was alarmed, thinking there might be a loose horse coming, or a house afire. That was in the first of my staying there. We were afterwards great friends. He liked me, because I was good to the old folks, and to Emily,—and had a sort of respect for me, because I was the oldest, and because I could talk, and because of the great thick books in my room. I respected him, because I had seen the world and its shams, and knew him to be good all the way through, and because he couldn't talk, and also, perhaps, because he was so much bigger and handsomer than I. In fact, I should have felt quite downhearted about my own looks, if I hadn't learned from books—not the thick ones—that sallow-looking men, with dark eyes, are interesting.