much assurance as Diana would her hound, or a Bacchante her tiger._

_See her apple-cheeks, her eyes like blue myosotis, her
lips--poppy-petals, and her ivy-like grace! Tell me if this way of
leaning against the green barrier of her garden-close, or of lying under
the murmurous arbor of mid-Summer, is not worth the starched manner,
that old magistrate de Vigny--with his neckcloth wound three times
around, and rigid in his trousers' straps--imposed upon his goddesses?
Madame Colette Willy is a live woman, a real woman, who has dared to be
natural and who resembles a little village bride far more than a
perverse woman of letters_.

* * * * *

_Read her book and you shall see how accurate are my assertions. It has
pleased Madame Colette Willy to embody in a couple of delightful
animals, the aroma of gardens, the freshness of the field, the heat of
state-roads,--the passions of men.... For through this girlish laughter
ringing in the forest, I tell you, I hear the sobbing of a well-spring.
One does not stoop to a poodle or tom-cat, without feeling the heart
wrung with dumb anguish. One is sensible, in comparing ourselves to
them, of all that separates and of all that unites us_.

* * * * *

_A dog's eyes hold the sorrow of having, since the earliest days of
creation, licked the whip of his incorrigible persecutor in vain. For
nothing has mollified man--not the prey brought him by a famishing
spaniel, nor the humble guilelessness of the shepherd-dog, guarding the
peace of the shadowy flocks under the stars_.