and, above all, too uselessly uttered. The tomb of these unfortunates
has been converted into a pulpit, from whence has been preached the
martyrdom of art and poetry,

"Farewell mankind, ye stony-hearted host,
Flint-bosomed earth and sun with frozen ray,
From out amidst you, solitary ghost
I glide unseen away."

This despairing song of Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had
been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the
"Marseillaise" of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing
their names on the martyrology of mediocrity.

For these funereal apotheoses, these encomiastic requiems, having all
the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many
of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the
half of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert
died, hoping that they would become poets, as he did a quarter of an
hour before dying, and believing that it was an obligatory stage in
order to arrive at glory.

Too much blame cannot be attached to these immortal falsehoods, these
deadly paradoxes, which turn aside from the path in which they might
have succeeded so many people who come to a wretched ending in a career
in which they incommode those to whom a true vocation only gives the
right of entering on it.

It is these dangerous preachings, this useless posthumous exaltations,
that have created the ridiculous race of the unappreciated, the whining