Montcornet toward the close of the winter of 1833, a man of rising
fame in literature and politics appeared in her salon, brought there
by one of the wittiest, but also one of the laziest writers of that
epoch, Emile Blondet, celebrated behind closed doors, highly praised
by journalists, but unknown beyond the barriers. Blondet himself was
well aware of this; he indulged in no illusions, and, among his other
witty and contemptuous sayings, he was wont to remark that fame is a
poison good to take in little doses.

From the moment when the man we speak of, Raoul Nathan, after a long
struggle, forced his way to the public gaze, he had put to profit the
sudden infatuation for form manifested by those elegant descendants of
the middle ages, jestingly called Young France. He assumed the
singularities of a man of genius and enrolled himself among those
adorers of art, whose intentions, let us say, were excellent; for
surely nothing could be more ridiculous than the costume of Frenchmen
in the nineteenth century, and nothing more courageous than an attempt
to reform it. Raoul, let us do him this justice, presents in his
person something fine, fantastic, and extraordinary, which needs a
frame. His enemies, or his friends, they are about the same thing,
agree that nothing could harmonize better with his mind than his
outward form.

Raoul Nathan would, perhaps, be more singular if left to his natural
self than he is with his various accompaniments. His worn and haggard
face gives him an appearance of having fought with angels or devils;
it bears some resemblance to that the German painters give to the dead
Christ; countless signs of a constant struggle between failing human
nature and the powers on high appear in it. But the lines in his
hollow cheeks, the projections of his crooked, furrowed skull, the