rol, he composed verses as beautiful
as De Vigny's. He was besides very poor, very lonely and very unhappy,
having lost one after another, his wife and his children. You remember the
words of Shakespeare's Moor: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
and I loved her that she did pity them.'

"So it was that this great artist inspired in a beautiful, noble and
wealthy young Russian woman, a devotion so passionate that because of him
she never married. She found a way to take care of him, day and night, in
spite of his family, during his last illness, and at the present time,
having bought from his heirs all of the poet's personal belongings, she
keeps the apartment where he lived just as it was at the time of his
death. That was years ago. In her case she found in a man three times her
own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried
in her heart. Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict
feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and
insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day. In
order that a sixty-year-old lover should appear neither ridiculous nor
odious you must apply to him what the elder Corneille so proudly said of
himself in his lines to the marquise:

"'Cependant, j'ai quelques charmes
Qui sont assez eclatants
Pour n'avoir pas trop d'alarmes
De ces ravages du temps.'

"Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall
be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there."

As he spoke the master had such a light of intellectual certainty in his
eyes that to me he seemed the embodiment of one of those great characters
he had been urging me to describe. It made me feel that the theory of this
man, himself almost a sexagenarian, that at any age one may inspire love,
was not unreasonable! The contrast between the world of ideas in which he
moved and the atmosphere of the literary shop in which for the last few
months I had been stifling was too strong. The dreams of my youth were
realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production
of thirty volumes and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration
of the beautiful saying: "Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly."
His slender figure bespoke the austerity of long hours of work; his firm
mouth showed his decision of character; his brow, with its deep furrows,
had the paleness of the paper o