higher quality.

Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
information about Balzac and those others.--["Now the style of M.
Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read
Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre
Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's
'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'? Has he read or heard the
plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of
modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world
for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre--this kind-hearted,
refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the
violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the
far-away corner where the soil is prepared. Hear what he says: 'I wish M.
Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came. It is the only
way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was coming to
Paris I read La Terre.'"]--All this in simple justice to you--and to me;
for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong
your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being
equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.

And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which
the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and consider
how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.
If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that
anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of
times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back