tyra! Satyra_ and nothing else to be seen everywhere, with a
paper slip round it, 'Just out.' Here and there, but very seldom, there
would be a poor miserable _God in Nature_ tucked away out of sight. When
no one was looking I put it on the top of the heap, well in view; but
people did not stop. One man did, though, in the Boulevard des Italiens,
a negro, a very intelligent-looking fellow. He turned over the pages for
five minutes, and then went away without buying the book. I should have
liked to present it to him.

Breakfasted in the corner of an English eating-house, and read the
papers. Not a word about me, not even an advertisement. Manivet is so
careless, very likely he has not so much as sent the orders, though he
declared he had. Besides, there are so many new books. Paris is deluged
with them. But for all that it is depressing to think that verses,
which ran like fire through one's fingers, which seemed, in the feverish
delight of writing them, beautiful enough to fill the world with
brightness, are more lost now that they are gone into circulation, than
when they were but a confused murmuring in the brain of their author.
It reminds one of a ball-dress. When it is tried on in the sympathetic
family circle, it is expected to outshine and eclipse every dress in
the room; but under the blaze of the gas it is lost in the crowd. Well,
Herscher is a lucky fellow. He is read and understood. I met ladies
carrying snugly under their arms the little yellow volume just issued.
Alas, for us poor poets! It is all very well for us to rank ourselves
above and beyond the crowd. It is for the crowd, after all, that we
write. When Robinson Crusoe was on his desert island, cut off from
all the world and without so much as the hope of seeing a sail on the
horizon, would he have written verses, even if he had been a poetic
genius? Thought about this a great deal as I tramped through the Champs
Elysees, lost, like my book, in an unregarding stream.

I was coming back to my hotel, pretty glum, as you may imagine, when on
the Quai d'Orsay, just in front of the grass-grown ruin of the Cour
des Comptes, I knocked against a big fellow, strolling along in a brown
study. 'Hullo, Freydet!' said he. 'Hullo, Vedrine!' said I. You'll
remember my friend Vedrine who, when he was working at Mousseaux, came
with his sweet young wife to spend an afternoon at Clos-Jallanges. He
is not a bit altered, except that he is a trifle grey at the temples.