r fame within a space no bigger than your
hat. It would be something if it gave talent, but those who have talent
lose it when once they get inside and are chilled by the air of the
place. The Academie is a club, you know; so there is a tone that must be
adopted, and things which must be left unsaid, or watered down. There's
an end to originality, an end to bold neck-or-nothing strokes. The
liveliest spirits never move for fear of tearing their green coats. It
is like putting children into their Sunday clothes and saying
"Amuse yourselves, my dears, but don't get dirty." And they do amuse
themselves, I can tell you. Of course, they have the adulation of the
Academical taverns, and their fair hostesses. But what a bore it is!
I speak from experience, for I have let myself be dragged there
occasionally. I can say with old Rehu, "That's a thing I have seen."
Silly pretentious women have favoured me with ill-digested scraps from
magazine articles, coming out of their little beaks like the written
remarks of characters in a comic paper. I have heard fat, good natured
Madame Ancelin, a woman as stupid as anything, cackle with admiration at
the epigrams of Danjou, regular stage manufacture, about as natural as
the curling of his wig.'

Here was a shock for Freydet: Danjou, the shepherd of Latium, had a wig!

'A half-wig, what they call a _breton_. At Madame Astier's,' he went
on, 'I have gone through lectures on ethnology enough to kill a
hippopotamus; and at the table of the Duchess, the severe and haughty
Duchess, I have seen that old monkey Laniboire, seated in the place of
honour, do and say things for which, if he had not been a "deity," he
would have been turned out of the house, with a good-bye in her Grace's
characteristic style. And the joke is, that it was she who got him into
the Academie. She has seen that very Laniboire at her feet, begging
humbly, piteously, importunately, to get himself elected, "Elect him,"
she said to my cousin Loisillon, "elect him, do; and then I shall be rid
of him." And now she looks up to him as a god; he is always next her
at table; and her contempt has changed into an abject admiration. It is
like a savage, falling down and quaking before the idol he has carved.
I know what Academic society is, with all its foolish, ludicrous, mean
little intrigues. You want to get into it! What for, I should like to
know? You have the happiest life in the world. Even I, who am not set
upon anything, w