ice as furious as before.

"Ah, monseigneur," cried Lucien, hoping to break thick heads with his
golden sceptre, "but ordinary people have neither your intellect nor
your charity. No one heeds our sorrows, our toil is unrecognized. The
gold-digger working in the mine does not labor as we to wrest metaphors
from the heart of the most ungrateful of all languages. If this is
poetry--to give ideas such definite and clear expressions that all the
world can see and understand--the poet must continually range through
the entire scale of human intellects, so that he can satisfy the demands
of all; he must conceal hard thinking and emotion, two antagonistic
powers, beneath the most vivid color; he must know how to make one
word cover a whole world of thought; he must give the results of whole
systems of philosophy in a few picturesque lines; indeed, his songs are
like seeds that must break into blossom in other hearts wherever they
find the soil prepared by personal experience. How can you express
unless you first have felt? And is not passion suffering. Poetry is only
brought forth after painful wanderings in the vast regions of thought
and life. There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive
to us than men and women who have lived and died--Richardson's Clarissa,
Chenier's Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto's Angelica, Dante's
Francesca, Moliere's Alceste, Beaumarchais' Figaro, Scott's Rebecca the
Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes,--do we not owe these deathless
creations to immortal throes?"

"And what are you going to create for us?" asked Chatelet.

"If I were to announce such conceptions, I should give myself out for
a man of genius, should I not?" answered Lucien. "And besides, such
sublime creations demand a long experience of the world and a study of
human passion and interests which I could not possibly have made; but
I have made a beginning," he added, with bitterness in his tone, as
he took a vengeful glance round the circle; "the time of gestation is
long----"

"Then it will be a case of difficult labor," interrupted M. du Hautoy.

"Your excellent mother might assist you," suggested the Bishop.

The epigram, innocently made by the good prelate, the long-looked-for
revenge, kindled a gleam of delight in all eyes. The smile of satisfied
caste that traveled from mouth to mouth was aggravated by M. de
Bargeton's imbecility; he burst into a laugh, as usual, some moments
later.

"Monseigneur,