divine Cadmus, still sways the
vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little
children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the magic sway
of fame; and if he close his lips, "The gaiety of nations is eclipsed,"
and the world seems empty and silent, like a wood in which the birds are
all dead.

_IN A WINTER CITY._

The Duc found no topic that suited her. It was the Corso di Gala that
afternoon, would she not go?

No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.

The Veglione on Sunday--would she not go to that?

No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d'Orleans, who
invented them, but they were only now as stupid as they were vulgar;
anybody was let in for five francs.

Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?

No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days--only
personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and
Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of
Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere,
called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society--had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never
had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had
described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in
the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the _petite entree_; they
were always full of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"

No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a
Censorship of the Press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un
tas d'ordures soigneusement enveloppe."

She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient
for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be
blamed--it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were
noxious, the fungus was bad.

The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.

She said that when there was one it had let pass Crebillon, the
Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed
Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could
be expected to be wiser than all his generation.