mattered. For that made it possible to offer the patrons of the theater
damaged goods under cover of the delights of luxury. So tricked out, it was
displayed in the market, to the joy of old gentlemen and young women. And
it all reeked of death and the seraglio.

Their style was not less mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a
composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every
country under the sun--pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious,
prurient, and low--a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and
wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted
with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: but they were
clever enough, and they manufactured their goods in imitation of Paris. If
the stone was not always of the first water, and if the setting was always
strange and overdone, at least it shone in artificial light, and that was
all it was meant to do. They were intelligent, keen, though short-sighted
observers--their eyes had been dulled by centuries of the life of the
counting-house--turning the magnifying-glass on human sentiments, enlarging
small things, not seeing big things. With a marked predilection for finery,
they were incapable of depicting anything but what seemed to their upstart
snobbishness the ideal of polite society: a little group of worn-out rakes
and adventurers, who quarreled among themselves for the possession of
certain stolen moneys and a few virtueless females.

And yet upon occasion the real nature of these Jewish writers would
suddenly awake, come to the surface from the depths of their being, in
response to some mysterious echo called forth by some vivid word or
sensation. Then there appeared a strange hotch-potch of ages and races, a
breath of wind from the Desert, bringing over the seas to their Parisian
rooms the musty smell of a Turkish bazaar, the dazzling shimmer of the
sands, the mirage, blind sensuality, savage invective, nervous disorder