ls.' Their friends among men, the only persons who might have
slandered the sisters, championed them; for the extraordinary liberty
permitted in the d'Aldriggers' salon made it unique in Paris. Vast
wealth could scarcely have procured such evenings, the talk was good on
any subject; dress was not insisted upon; you felt so much at home there
that you could ask for supper. The sisters corresponded as they pleased,
and quietly read their letters by their mother's side; it never occurred
to the Baroness to interfere in any way; the adorable woman gave the
girls the full benefits of her selfishness, and in a certain sense
selfish persons are the easiest to live with; they hate trouble, and
therefore do not trouble other people; they never beset the lives of
their fellow-creatures with thorny advice and captious fault-finding;
nor do they torment you with the waspish solicitude of excessive
affection that must know all things and rule all things----"

"This comes home," said Blondet, "but my dear fellow, this is not
telling a story, this is _blague_----"

"Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the
one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you by
treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you, and now
he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual sterility,
my friends, than the piling up of facts. _Le Misanthrope_, that supreme
comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of building a palace
on a needle's point. The gist of my idea is in the fairy wand which can
turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds (precisely the time
required to empty this glass). Would you rather that I fired off at you
like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief's report? We chat and laugh;
and this journalist, a bibliophobe when sober, expects me, forsooth,
when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to move at the dull jogtrot of
a printed book." (Here he affected to weep.) "Woe unto the French
imagination when men fain would blunt the needle points of her pleasant
humor! _Dies iroe_! Let us weep for _Candide_. Long live the _Kritik of
Pure Reason_, _La Symbolique_, and the systems in five closely packed
volumes, printed by Germans, who little suspect that the gist of the
matter has been known in Paris since 1750, and crystallized in a few
trenchant words--the diamonds of our national thought. Blondet is
driving a hearse to his own suicide; Blondet, forsooth! who