lated. Hence it is,
perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving
people--almost maddening them. Perhaps Dick suspected something of this,
for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may
have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but
all. I'm much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for
galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are
aware of that? It is, perhaps, what constitutes the ethereal condition of
love. I'll write an essay on that, or, better still, I'll write a review of
an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than
we are, and I'll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way
in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities--whether it be
to know something, or to do something, or to be something--on the species
he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on
the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able
to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great
fun. I'll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then
demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for
eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work--the work I am then
reviewing? For four days--but stay--if I starve him to death, I cannot tear
his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour,
a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiegne.'

Without perceiving it, he had now taken his pipe, lighted it, and was
smoking away. 'By the way, how those same Imperialists have played the
game!--the two or three middle-aged men that Kinglake says, "put their
heads together to plan for a livelihood." I wish they had taken me into the
partnership. It's the sort of thing I'd have liked well; ay, and I could
have done it, too! I wonder,' said he aloud--'I wonder if I were an emperor
should I marry Letty Clancy? I suspect not. Letty would have been flippant
as an empress, and her cousins would have made atrocious princes of the
imperial family, though, for the matter of that--Hullo! Here have I been
smoking without knowing it! Can any one tell us whether the sins we do
inadvertently count as sins, or do we square them off by our inadvertent
good actions? I trust I shall not be called on to catalogue mine. There,
my courage is out!' As he said