be employed; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the
illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the "Assommoir" into
English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless
language, something--what shall I say?--the style of a modern Addison.

* * * * *

What, don't you know the story about Mendès?--when _Chose_ wanted to
marry his sister? _Chose's_ mother, it appears, went to live with a
priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up; he was broken-hearted;
and he went to Mendès, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make
a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great
deal of beating about the bush, and apologising, he got it out. You know
Mendès, you can see him smiling a little; and looking at _Chose_ with
that white cameo face of his he said,

"_Avec quel meillur homme voulez-vous que votre mère se mit? vous
n'avez donc, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux._"

Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain; his verse is mere decoration,
long tendrils and flowers; and the same thing over and over again.

How to be happy!--not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the
_Nouvelle Athènes_, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the _bourgeois_
over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense
consciousness of life,--to live in a sleepy country side, to have a
garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every
evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out
to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the
tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from