question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive
this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it
is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic
and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you
grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left
upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind
that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the
flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown
faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves,
the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the
infinite and the starry," etc., etc.

Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of
romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and
political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII,
and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the
legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of
them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the
Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived
the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service
of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing
the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it
chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to
embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He
shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his
discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the
romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates
his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the
"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style.