“Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt!  He is the one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you by treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you, and now he criticises me!  There is no greater proof of intellectual sterility, my friends, than the piling up of facts. Le Misanthrope, that supreme comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of building a palace on a needle’s point.  The gist of my idea is in the fairy wand which can turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds (precisely the time required to empty this glass).  Would you rather that I fired off at you like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief’s report?  We chat and laugh; and this journalist, a bibliophobe when sober, expects me, forsooth, when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to move at the dull jogtrot of a printed book.” (Here he affected to weep.) “Woe unto the French imagination when men fain would blunt the needle points of her pleasant humor! Dies iroe!  Let us weep for Candide.  Long live the Kritik of Pure Reason, La Symbolique, and the systems in five closely packed volumes, printed by Germans, who little suspect that the gist of the matter has been known in Paris since 1750, and crystallized in a few trenchant words—­the diamonds of our national thought.  Blondet is driving a hearse to his own suicide; Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures newspaper accounts of the last words of all the great men that die without saying anything!”

“Come, get on,” put in Finot.

“It was my intention to explain to you in what the happiness of a man consists when he is not a shareholder (out of compliment to Couture).  Well, now, do you not see at what a price Godefroid secured the greatest happiness of a young man’s dreams?  He was trying to understand Isaure, by way of making sure that she should understand him.  Things which comprehend one another must needs be similar.  Infinity and Nothingness, for instance, are like; everything that lies between the two is like neither.  Nothingness is stupidity; genius, Infinity.  The lovers wrote each other the stupidest letters imaginable, putting down various expressions then in fashion upon bits of scented paper:  ’Angel!  Aeolian harp! with thee I shall be complete!  There is a heart in my man’s breast!  Weak woman, poor me!’ all the latest heart-frippery.  It was Godefroid’s wont to stay in a drawing-room for a bare ten minutes; he talked without any pretension to the women in it, and at these times they thought him very clever.  In short, judge of his absorption; Joby, his horses and carriages, became secondary interests in his life.  He was never happy except in the depths of a snug settee opposite the Baroness, by the dark-green porphyry chimney-piece, watching Isaure, taking tea, and chatting with the little circle of friends that dropped in every evening between eleven and twelve in the Rue Joubert.  You could play bouillotte there safely. (I always won.) Isaure sat with one little foot thrust out in its black satin shoe; Godefroid would gaze and gaze, and stay till every one else was gone, and say, ‘Give me your shoe!’ and Isaure would put her little foot on a chair and take it off and give it to him, with a glance, one of those glances that—­in short, you understand.