cter of Raoul Nathan is of a
piece with his public career. He is a comedian in good faith, selfish as
if the State were himself, and a very clever orator. No one knows better
how to play off sentiments, glory in false grandeurs, deck himself with
moral beauty, do honor to his nature in language, and pose like Alceste
while behaving like Philinte. His egotism trots along protected by this
cardboard armor, and often almost reaches the end he seeks. Lazy to a
superlative degree, he does nothing, however, until he is prodded by
the bayonets of need. He is incapable of continued labor applied to the
creation of a work; but, in a paroxysm of rage caused by wounded vanity,
or in a crisis brought on by creditors, he leaps the Eurotas and
attains to some great triumph of his intellect. After which, weary, and
surprised at having created anything, he drops back into the marasmus
of Parisian dissipation; wants become formidable; he has no strength to
face them; and then he comes down from his pedestal and compromises.

Influenced by a false idea of his grandeur and of his future,--the
measure of which he reckons on the noble success of one of his
former comrades, one of the few great talents brought to light by the
revolution of July,--he allows himself, in order to get out of his
embarrassments, certain laxities of principle with persons who are
friendly to him,--laxities which never come to the surface, but are
buried in private life, where no one ever mentions or complains of them.
The shallowness of his heart, the impurity of his hand, which clasps
that of all vices, all evils, all treacheries, all opinions, have made
him as inviolable as a constitutional king. Venial sins, which excite a
hue and cry against a man of high character, are thought nothing of
in him; the world hastens to excuse them. Men who might otherwise be
inclined to despise him shake hands with him, fearing that the day may
come when they will need him. He has, in fact, so many friends that he
wishes for enemies.

Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and
cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he
disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday. He has neither the time nor
the patience to write carefully; he does not observe, but he listens.
Incapable of constructing a vigorously framed plot, he sometimes makes
up for it by the impetuous ardor of his drawing. He "does passion,"
to use a term of the literary argot; but in