could not be lasting and had been only a mere flash. The young man saw
these Merovingians as they really were toward a man who succeeded, that
is, severe almost to cruelty. What! the first edition of Poems from
Nature was exhausted and Massif had another in press! What! the
bourgeoisie, far from being "astonished" at this book, declared
themselves delighted with it, bought it, read it, and perhaps had it
rebound! They spoke favorably of it in all the bourgeois journals,
that is to say, in those that had subscribers! Did they not say that
Violette, incited by Jocquelet, was working at a grand comedy in verse,
and that the Theatre-Francais had made very flattering offers to the
poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was--oh,
horror!--a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been
not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at
Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with
simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with
art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will be caught again!

As the poets' tables at the Cafe de Seville had been for some time
transformed into beds of torture upon which Amedee Violette's poems were
stretched out and racked every day from five to seven, the amiable Paul
Sillery, with a jeering smile upon his lips, tried occasionally to cry
pity for his friend's verses, given up to such ferocious executioners.
But these literary murderers, ready to destroy a comrade's book, are
more pitiless than the Inquisition. There were two inquisitors more
relentless than the others; first, the little scrubby fellow who claimed
for his share all the houris of a Mussulman's palace; another, the great
elegist from the provinces. Truly, his heartaches must have made him
gain flesh, for very soon he was obliged to let out the strap on his
waistcoat.

Of course, when Amedee appeared, the conversation was immediately
changed, and they began to talk of insignificant things that they had
read in the journals; for example, the fire-damp, which had killed
twenty-five working-men in a mine, in a department of the north; or of
the shipwreck of a transatlantic steamer in which everything was lost,
with one hundred and fifty passengers and forty sailors--events of no
importance, we must admit, if one compares them to the recent discovery
made by the poet inquisitors of two incorrect phrases and five weak
rhymes in their co