rhetorical."

"A pretorium virtue," said Christophe, "and the prize goes to the best
talker. I hate lawyers. Have you no poets in France?"

Sylvain Kohn took him to the poetic drama.

* * * * *

There were poets in France. There were even great poets. But the theater
was not for them. It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what
the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: _Sicut amori lupanar._

Christophe saw Princesses who were virtuously promiscuous, who prostituted
themselves for their honor, who were compared with Christ ascending
Calvary:--friends who deceived their friends out of devotion to
them:--glorified triangular relations:--heroic cuckoldry: (the cuckold,
like the blessed prostitute, had become a European commodity: the example
of King Mark had turned the heads of the poets: like the stag of Saint
Hubert, the cuckold never appeared without a halo.) And Christophe saw
also lovely damsels torn between passion and duty: their passion bade them
follow a new lover: duty bade them stay with the old one, an old man who
gave them money and was deceived by them. And in the end they plumped
heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid
interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them:
they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word
for it.

The summit of art was reached and the greatest pleasure was given when,
most paradoxically, sexual immorality and Corneillian heroics could be