honor, but also injury. This was why the old system of
education obliged young people to keep silence and study life in a
probationary period beside their elders. Formerly, as you know,
nobility, like art, had its apprentices, its pages, devoted body
and soul to the masters who maintained them. To-day youth is
forced in a hot-house; it is trained to judge of thoughts,
actions, and writings with biting severity; it slashes with a
blade that has not been fleshed. Do not make this mistake. Such
judgments will seem like censures to many about you, who would
sooner pardon an open rebuke than a secret wound. Young people are
pitiless because they know nothing of life and its difficulties.
The old critic is kind and considerate, the young critic is
implacable; the one knows nothing, the other knows all. Moreover,
at the bottom of all human actions there is a labyrinth of
determining reasons on which God reserves for himself the final
judgment. Be severe therefore to none but yourself.

Your future is before you; but no one in the world can make his
way unaided. Therefore, make use of my father's house; its doors
are open to you; the connections that you will create for yourself
under his roof will serve you in a hundred ways. But do not yield
an inch of ground to my mother; she will crush any one who gives
up to her, but she will admire the courage of whoever resists her.
She is like iron, which if beaten, can be fused with iron, but
when cold will break everything less hard than itself. Cultivate
my mother; for if she thinks well of you she will introduce you
into certain houses where you can acquire the fatal science of the
world, the art of listening, speaking, answering, presenting
yourself to the company and taking leave of it; the precise use of
language, the something--how shall I explain it?--which is no more
superiority than the coat is the man, but without which the
highest talent in the world will never be admitted within those
portals.

I know you well enough to be quite sure I indulge no illusion when
I imagine that I see you as I wish you to be; simple in manners,
gentle in tone, proud without conceit, respectful to the old,
courteous without servility, above all, discreet. Use your wit but
never display it for the amusement of others; for be sure that if
your brilliancy annoys an inferior man, he will retire from the
field and say of