ently placed in the front rank,
this really artistic work he was never weary of calling the finest book
of the period, the novel of the century.

Raoul complained bitterly of the exigencies of art. He was one of those
who contributed most to bring all created work, pictures, statues,
books, building under the single standard of Art. He had begun his
career by committing a volume of verse, which won him a place in the
pleiades of living poets; among these verses was a nebulous poem that
was greatly admired. Forced by want of means to keep on producing, he
went from the theatre to the press, and from the press to the theatre,
dissipating and scattering his talent, but believing always in his vein.
His fame was therefore not unpublished like that of so many great minds
in extremity, who sustain themselves only by the thought of work to be
done.

Nathan resembled a man of genius; and had he marched to the scaffold,
as he sometimes wished he could have done, he might have struck his brow
with the famous action of Andre Chenier. Seized with political
ambition on seeing the rise to power of a dozen authors, professors,
metaphysicians, and historians, who encrusted themselves, so to speak,
upon the machine during the turmoils of 1830 and 1833, he regretted that
he had not spent his time on political instead of literary articles. He
thought himself superior to all those parvenus, whose success inspired
him with consuming jealousy. He belonged to the class of minds ambitious
of everything, capable of all things, from whom success is, as it were,
stolen; who go their way dashing at a hundred luminous points, and
settling upon none, exhausting at last the good-will of others.

At this particular time he was going from Saint-Simonism into
republicanism, to return, very likely, to ministerialism. He looked for
a bone to gnaw in all corners, searching for a safe place where he
could bark secure from kicks and make himself feared. But he had the
mortification of finding he was held to be of no account by de Marsay,
then at the head of the government, who had no consideration whatever
for authors, among whom he did not find what Richelieu called a
consecutive mind, or more correctly, continuity of ideas; he counted as
any minister would have done on the constant embarrassment of Raoul's
business affairs. Sooner or later, necessity would bring him to accept
conditions instead of imposing them.

The real, but carefully concealed chara