fault-finding; nor do they torment you with the waspish solicitude of
excessive affection that must know all things and rule all things----"

"This comes home," said Blondet, "but my dear fellow, this is not
telling a story, this is _blague_----"

"Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the
one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you
by treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you,
and now he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual
sterility, my friends, than the piling up of facts. _Le Misanthrope_,
that supreme comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of
building a palace on a needle's point. The gist of my idea is in the
fairy wand which can turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds
(precisely the time required to empty this glass). Would you rather
that I fired off at you like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief's
report? We chat and laugh; and this journalist, a bibliophobe when
sober, expects me, forsooth, when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to
move at the dull jogtrot of a printed book." (Here he affected to
weep.) "Woe unto the French imagination when men fain would blunt the
needle points of her pleasant humor! _Dies iroe_! Let us weep for
_Candide_. Long live the _Kritik of Pure Reason_, _La Symbolique_, and
the systems in five closely packed volumes, printed by Germans, who
little suspect that the gist of the matter has been known in Paris
since 1750, and crystallized in a few trenchant words--the diamonds of
our national thought. Blondet is driving a hearse to his own suicide;
Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures newspaper accounts of the last
words of all the great men that die without saying anything!"

"Come, get on," put in Finot.