forced smile.

"Probably enough. He has the reputation of being very clever and very
wicked, and that is a sort of character which has the serpent's
fascination for the daughters of Eve."

"Is the reputation merited?"

"As to the cleverness, I am not a fair judge. I dislike that sort of
writing which is neither manlike nor womanlike, and in which young Rameau
excels. He has the knack of finding very exaggerated phrases by which to
express commonplace thoughts. He writes verses about love in words so
stormy that you might fancy that Jove was descending upon Semele; but
when you examine his words, as a sober pathologist like myself is
disposed to do, your fear for the peace of households vanishes,--they are
Fox et proeterea nihil; no man really in love would use them. He writes
prose about the wrongs of humanity. You feel for humanity; you say,
'Grant the wrongs, now for the remedy,'--and you find nothing but
balderdash. Still I am bound to say that both in verse and prose Gustave
Rameau is in unison with a corrupt taste of the day, and therefore he is
coming into vogue. So much as to his writings; as to his wickedness, you
have only to look at him to feel sure that he is not a hundredth part so
wicked as he wishes to seem. In a word, then, M. Gustave Rameau is a
type of that somewhat numerous class among the youth of Paris, which I
call 'the lost Tribe of Absinthe.' There is a set of men who begin to
live full gallop while they are still boys. As a general rule, they are
originally of the sickly frames which can scarcely even trot, much less
gallop without the spur of stimulants, and no stimulant so fascinates
their peculiar nervous system as absinthe. The number of patients in
this set who at the age of thirty are more worn out than septuagenarians