en we have the air of being so profoundly penetrated, so
true.

_I._--Yet you must once, at any rate, have sinned against the
principles of art, and let slip, by an oversight, some of those
bitter truths that wound; for, in spite of the wretched, abject,
vile, abominable part you play, I believe you have at bottom some
delicacy of soul.

_He._--I! not the least in the world. Deuce take me if I know what
I am! In a general way, I have a mind as round as a ball, and a
character fresh as a water-willow. Never false, little interest as
I have in being true; never true, little interest as I have in
being false. I say things just as they come into my head; sensible
things, then so much the better; impertinent things, then people
take no notice. I let my natural frankness have full play. I never
in all my life gave a thought, either beforehand, what to say, or
while I was saying it, or after I had said it. And so I offend
nobody.

_I._--Still that did happen with the worthy people among whom you
used to live, and who were so kind to you.

_He._--What would you have? It is a mishap, an unlucky moment, such
as there always are in life; there is no such thing as unbroken
bliss: I was too well off, it could not last. We have, as you
know, the most numerous and the best chosen company. It is a school
of humanity, the renewal of hospitality after the antique. All the
poets who fall, we pick them up; all decried musicians, all the
authors who are never read, all the actresses who are hissed, a
parcel of beggarly, disgraced, stupid, parasitical souls, and at
the head of them all I have the honour of being the brave chief of
a timorous flock. It is I who exhort them to eat the first time
they come, and I who ask for drink for them--they are so shy. A few
young men in rags who do not know where to lay their heads, but who
have good looks; a few scoundrels who bamboozle the master of the
house, and put him to sleep, for the sake of gleaning after him in
the fields of the mistress of the house. We seem gay, but at bottom
we are devoured by spleen and a raging appetite. Wolves are not
more famishing, nor tigers more cruel. Like wolves when the ground
has been long covered with snow, we raven over our food, and
whatever succeeds we rend like tigers. Never