and mannerisms, gramophones reproducing their voices, and the newspapers
their opinions on art and politics. They had special newspapers devoted
to them. They published their heroic and domestic Memoirs. These big
self-conscious children, who spent their time in aping each other, these
wonderful apes reigned and held sway over the Parisians: and the dramatic
authors were their chief ministers. Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to
conduct him into the kingdom of shadows and reflections.

* * * * *

But Sylvain Kohn was no safer as a guide in that world than in the world
of books, and, thanks to him, Christophe's first impression was almost as
repulsive as that of his first essay in literature. It seemed that there
was everywhere the same spirit of mental prostitution.

The pleasure-mongers were divided into two schools. On the one hand there
was the good old way, the national way, of providing a coarse and unclean
pleasure, quite frankly; a delight in ugliness, strong meat, physical
deformities, a show of drawers, barrack-room jests, risky stories, red
pepper, high game, private rooms--"a manly frankness," as those people
say who try to reconcile looseness and morality by pointing out that,
after four acts of dubious fun, order is restored and the Code triumphs
by the fact that the wife is really with the husband whom she thinks
she is deceiving--(so long as the law is observed, then virtue is all
right):--that vicious sort of virtue which defends marriage by endowing it
with all the charm of lewdness:--the Gallic way.

The other school was in the modern style. It was much more subtle and much
more disgusting. The Parisianized Jews and the Judaicized Christians who
frequented the theater had introduced into it the usual hash of sentiment