Coblentz, has had to renounce a diplomatic career,
after passing brilliantly his admission examination. The wives of several
of my colleagues, when Madame Schmoll calls on them, display with
intention, under her eyes, anti-Semitic newspapers. And would you believe
that the Minister of Public Instruction has refused to give me the cross
of the Legion of Honor for which I have applied? There's ingratitude!
Anti-Semitism is death--it is death, do you hear? to European
civilization."

The little man had a natural manner which surpassed all the art in the
world. Grotesque and terrible, he threw the table into consternation by
his sincerity. Madame Martin, whom he amused, complimented him on this:

"At least," she said, "you defend your co-religionists. You are not,
Monsieur Schmoll, like a beautiful Jewish lady of my acquaintance who,
having read in a journal that she received the elite of Jewish society,
went everywhere shouting that she had been insulted."

"I am sure, Madame, that you do not know how beautiful and superior to
all other moralities is Jewish morality. Do you know the parable of the
three rings?"

This question was lost in the murmur of the dialogues wherein were
mingled foreign politics, exhibitions of paintings, fashionable scandals,
and Academy speeches. They talked of the new novel and of the coming
play. This was a comedy. Napoleon was an incidental character in it.

The conversation settled upon Napoleon I, often placed on the stage and
newly studied in books--an object of curiosity, a personage in the
fashion, no longer a popular hero, a demi-god, wearing boots for his
country, as in the days when Norvins and Beranger, Charlet and Raffet
were composing his legend; but a curious personage, an amusing type in
his living infinity, a figure whose style is pleasant to artists, whose
movements attract thoughtless idlers.

Garain, who had founded his political fortune on hatred of the Empire,
judged sincerely that this return of national taste was only an absurd
infatuation. He saw no danger in it and felt no fear about it. In him
fear was sudden and ferocious. For the moment he was very quiet; he
talked neither of prohibiting performances nor of seizing books, of
imprisoning authors, or of suppressing anything. Calm and severe, he saw
in Napoleon only Taine's 'condottiere' who kicked Volney in the stomach.
Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon. Count Martin, in the face
of the imperial centrep