“So it was that this great artist inspired in a beautiful, noble and wealthy young Russian woman, a devotion so passionate that because of him she never married.  She found a way to take care of him, day and night, in spite of his family, during his last illness, and at the present time, having bought from his heirs all of the poet’s personal belongings, she keeps the apartment where he lived just as it was at the time of his death.  That was years ago.  In her case she found in a man three times her own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried in her heart.  Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others!  To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.  In order that a sixty-year-old lover should appear neither ridiculous nor odious you must apply to him what the elder Corneille so proudly said of himself in his lines to the marquise: 

  “’Cependant, j’ai quelques charmes
  Qui sont assez eclatants
  Pour n’avoir pas trop d’alarmes
  De ces ravages du temps.’

“Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true.  The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.”

As he spoke the master had such a light of intellectual certainty in his eyes that to me he seemed the embodiment of one of those great characters he had been urging me to describe.  It made me feel that the theory of this man, himself almost a sexagenarian, that at any age one may inspire love, was not unreasonable!  The contrast between the world of ideas in which he moved and the atmosphere of the literary shop in which for the last few months I had been stifling was too strong.  The dreams of my youth were realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production of thirty volumes and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration of the beautiful saying:  “Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly.”  His slender figure bespoke the austerity of long hours of work; his firm mouth showed his decision of character; his brow, with its deep furrows, had the paleness of the paper over which he so often bent; and yet, the refinement of his hands, so well cared for, the sober elegance of his dress and an aristocratic air that was natural to him showed that the finer professional virtues had been cultivated in the midst of a life of frivolous temptations.  These temptations had been no more of a disturbance to his ethical and spiritual nature than the academic honors, the financial successes, the numerous editions that had been his.  Withal he was an awfully good fellow, for, after having talked at great length with me, he ended by saying, “Since you are staying in Nemours I hope to see you often, and to-day I cannot let you go without presenting you to my hostess.”