others, and launched it into a world estranged from the solitude in which
it was born and formed. I can almost conceive that, to a writer like
you, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth chills your own
love for it. The characters you created in a fairyland, known but to
yourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm when you hear
them discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if they were really
the creatures of streets and salons.

I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do such
other authors as I have known. M. Savarin, for instance, sets down in
his tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest scribbler
who wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is food,
dispraise is poison. Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me I break
on the wheel." M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energetic
administrator to his own reputation. He deals with it as if it were a
kingdom,--establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers to
fight for it. He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which each
is bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those territories
united constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin. Don't think me an
ungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our brilliant friend. It
is not I who here speak; it is himself. He avows his policy with the
_naivete_ which makes the charm of his style as writer. "It is the
greatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk of the Republic of
Letters. Every author who wins a name is a sovereign in his own domain,
be it large or small. Woe to any republican who wants to dethrone me!"
Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel as if he were
betraying the cause of, genius. I cannot bring myself to regard
literature as a craft,--to me it is a sacred mission; and in hearing this
"sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his state, I seem
to listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion he professes