sallow the _botte_,' said La Palferine, as coolly as if he had
been in the fencing-saloon; then as he riposted (sending the point home
this time), he added, 'There is the right thrust, monsieur!'

"His antagonist kept his bed for six months.

"This, still following on M. Sainte-Beuve's tracks, recalls the
_raffines_, the fine-edged raillery of the best days of the monarchy.
In this speech you discern an untrammeled but drifting life; a gaiety of
imagination that deserts us when our first youth is past. The prime of
the blossom is over, but there remains the dry compact seed with the
germs of life in it, ready against the coming winter. Do you not see
that these things are symptoms of something unsatisfied, of an unrest
impossible to analyze, still less to describe, yet not incomprehensible;
a something ready to break out if occasion calls into flying upleaping
flame? It is the _accidia_ of the cloister; a trace of sourness, of
ferment engendered by the enforced stagnation of youthful energies, a
vague, obscure melancholy."

"That will do," said the Marquise; "you are giving me a mental shower
bath."

"It is the early afternoon languor. If a man has nothing to do, he will
sooner get into mischief than do nothing at all; this invariably happens
in France. Youth at present day has two sides to it; the studious or
unappreciated, and the ardent or _passionne_."

"That will do!" repeated Mme. de Rochefide, with an authoritative
gesture. "You are setting my nerves on edge."

"To finish my portrait of La Palferine, I hasten to make the plunge into
the gallant regions of his character, or you will not understand the
peculiar genius of an admirable representative of a certain section
of mischievous youth--youth strong enough, be it said, to laugh at the
position in which it is put by those in power; shrewd enough to do no
work, since work profiteth nothing; yet so full of life that it fastens
upon pleasure--the one thing that cannot be taken away. And meanwhile a
bourgeois, mercantile, and bigoted policy continues to cut off all the
sluices through which so much aptitude and ability would find an outlet.
Poets and men of science are not wanted.

"To give you an idea of the stupidity of the new court, I will tell
you of something which happened to La Palferine. There is a sort of
relieving officer on the civil list. This functionary one day discovered
that La Palferine was in dire distress, drew up a report, no doubt, and