the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady."

"And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn," said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, "would you class the female
author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman _comme il faut_?"

"When she has no genius, she is a woman _comme il n'en faut pas_,"
Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen glance, which
might make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille Maupin. "This
epigram is not mine, but Napoleon's," he added.

"You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score," said Canalis,
with an emphatic tone and gesture. "It was one of his weaknesses to be
jealous of literary genius--for he had his mean points. Who will ever
explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented with his
arms folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest force ever
known, the most concentrated, the most mordant, the most acid of all
forces; a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every
direction without fixing it anywhere; a man who could do everything
because he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will,
conquering an illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die of disease in
bed after living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man with a code
and a sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted spirit that
foresaw everything but his own fall; a capricious politician who
risked men by handfuls out of economy, and who spared three heads
--those of Talleyrand, of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich,
diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire, and who
seemed to him of greater weight than thousands of soldiers; a man to
whom nature, as a rare privilege, had given a heart in a frame of
bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight amid women, and next morning