_souffre-douleur_ rather than a makeshift."

"Well," says she, "have you found those letters of which you spoke
yesterday? You said that you could not tell me all about _him_ without
them?"

"Yes, I have them."

"It is your turn to speak; I am listening like a child when his mother
begins the tale of _Le Grand Serpentin Vert_."

"I count the young man in question in that group of our acquaintances
which we are wont to style our friends. He comes of a good family; he is
a man of infinite parts and ill-luck, full of excellent dispositions and
most charming conversation; young as he is, he is seen much, and while
awaiting better things, he dwells in Bohemia. Bohemianism, which by
rights should be called the doctrine of the Boulevard des Italiens,
finds its recruits among young men between twenty and thirty, all of
them men of genius in their way, little known, it is true, as yet,
but sure of recognition one day, and when that day comes, of great
distinction. They are distinguished as it is at carnival time, when
their exuberant wit, repressed for the rest of the year, finds a vent in
more or less ingenious buffoonery.

"What times we live in! What an irrational central power which allows
such tremendous energies to run to waste! There are diplomatists in
Bohemia quite capable of overturning Russia's designs, if they but felt
the power of France at their backs. There are writers, administrators,
soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every kind of brain is
represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the Czar would buy Bohemia
for a score of millions and set its population down in Odessa--always
supposing that they consented to leave the asphalt of the
boulevards--Odessa would be Paris with the year. In Bohemia, you find
the flower doomed to wither and come to nothing; the flower of the
wonderful young manhood of France, so sought after by Napoleon and Louis
XIV., so neglected for the last thirty years by the modern Gerontocracy
that is blighting everything else--that splendid young manhood of whom
a witness so little prejudiced as Professor Tissot wrote, 'On all sides
the Emperor employed a younger generation in every way worthy of him; in
his councils, in the general administration, in negotiations bristling
with difficulties or full of danger, in the government of conquered
countries; and in all places Youth responded to his demands upon it.
Young men were for Napoleon the _missi hominici_ of Charlemag