verable, now wanders and
whirls; and many things are abolished, for the present, of more value
than Belleisle!--

For my own share, being, as it were, forced accidentally to look at him
again, I find in Belleisle a really notable man; far superior to the
vulgar of noted men, in his time or ours. Sad destiny for such a man!
But when the general Life-element becomes so unspeakably phantasmal as
under Louis XV., it is difficult for any man to be real; to be other
than a play-actor, more or less eminent, and artistically dressed. Sad
enough, surely, when the truth of your relation to the Universe, and the
tragically earnest meaning of your Life, is quite lied out of you, by a
world sunk in lies; and you can, with effort, attain to nothing but to
be a more or less splendid lie along with it! Your very existence all
become a vesture, a hypocrisy, and hearsay; nothing left of you but this
sad faculty of sowing chaff in the fashionable manner! After Friedrich
and Voltaire, in both of whom, under the given circumstances, one finds
a perennial reality, more or less,--Belleisle is next; none FAILS to
escape the mournful common lot by a nearer miss than Belleisle.

Beyond doubt, there are in this man the biggest projects any French head
has carried, since Louis XIV. with his sublime periwig first took to
striking the stars. How the indolent Louis XV. and the pacific Fleury
have been got into this sublimely adventurous mood? By Belleisle
chiefly, men say;--and by King Louis's first Mistresses, blown upon by
Belleisle; poor Louis having now, at length, left his poor Queen to
her reflections, and taken into that sad line, in which by degrees he
carried it so far. There are three of them, it seems;--the first female
souls that could ever manage to kindle, into flame or into smoke:
in this or any other kind, that poor torpid male soul: those Mailly
Sisters, three in number (I am shocked to hear), successive, nay in part
simultaneous! They are proud women, especially the two younger; with
ambition in them, with a bravura magnanimity, of the theatrical or
operatic kind; of whom Louis is very fond. "To raise France to its
place, your Majesty; the top of the Universe, namely!" "Well; if it
could be done,--and quite without trouble?" thinks Louis. Bravura
magnanimity, blown upon by Belleisle, prevails among these high Improper
Females, and generally in the Younger Circles of the Court; so that poor
old Fleury has had no choice but to obey i