ay;
these fine friendships cooled: 't is the fate of these factitious
tendernesses. With winter my second volume appeared, and Monsieur Louis
Ulbach set to work again; but this time he found me merely "ingenious."
It was a good deal more than I merited, and I would willingly have
contented myself with this phrase. Unfortunately, I could not forget the
austere counsel of Monsieur Louis Veuillot, and at this very epoch,
Monsieur Louis Ulbach, who as a novelist could merit a great deal of
praise, took it into his head to publish a thick volume of
transcendental criticism, in which he attacked everything I admired and
lauded everything I detested. I confess that I felt extremely
embarrassed: those nice little words "fascinating" and "ingenious" stuck
in my mind. Monsieur Louis Ulbach himself extricated me from my
perplexity. I had insufficiently praised his last novel. He wrote a
third article on my third work. Alas! the honeymoon had set. The
"fascinating" prose of 1855, the "ingenious" prose of 1856, had become
in 1857, in the opinion of the same judge, and in the language of the
same pen, "pretentious and tiresome." This sudden change of things and
epithets restored me to liberty. I walked abroad in all my strength and
independence, and I dissected Monsieur Louis Ulbach's thick volume with
a severity which was still tempered by the courteous forms and the
dimensions of my few newspaper-columns. A year passed away. My fourth
work appeared. Note that these several volumes were not different works,
but a series of volumes expressing the same opinions in the very same
style; in fine, they were but one work. Note, too, that Monsieur
Ulbach's "Revue de Paris" and "L'Assemblee Nationale," in which I wrote,
were both suppressed by the government on the same day, which
established between us a fraternity of martyrdom. All this was as
nothing. Louis Ulbach, this very same Louis Ulbach, was employed by a
newspaper where he was sure to please by insulting me, and the very
first thing he did was to give me a kick, such a kick as twenty horses
covered with sleigh-bells could not give. He called me "ignoramus," and
wondered what "this fellow" meant by his literary drivelling. The most
curious part of the whole business is, that he did not write the
article, all he did was to sign it! Four years, and a scratch given his
vanity, had proved enough to produce this change!

* * * * *

Shall I speak to you no