These qualities are partly acquired, and partly the result of birth.  Born in 1823, the son of a naval officer, from his earliest years he devoted himself to literature.  His birthplace, Moulins, an old provincial town on the banks of the Allier, where he spent a happy childhood, made little impression on him.  Still almost a child he went to Paris, where he led a life without events,—­without even a marriage or an election to the Academy; he died March 13th, 1891.  His place was among the society people and the artists; the painter Courbet and the writers Muerger, Baudelaire, and Gautier were among his closest friends.  He first attracted attention in 1848 by the publication of a volume of verse, ‘The Caryatids.’  In 1857 came another, ‘Odes Funambulesque,’ and later another series under the same title, the two together containing his best work in verse.  Here he stands highest; though he wrote also many plays, one of which, ‘Gringoire,’ has been acted in various translations.  ‘The Wife of Socrates’ also holds the stage.  Like his other work, his drama is artificial, refined, and skillful.  He presents a marked instance of the artist working for art’s sake.  During the latter years of his life he wrote mostly prose, and he has left many well-drawn portraits of his contemporaries, in addition to several books of criticism, with much color and charm, but little definiteness.  He was always vague, for facts did not interest him; but he had the power of making his remote, unreal world attractive, and among the writers of the school of Gautier he stands among the first.

LE CAFE

From ‘The Soul of Paris’

Imagine a place where you do not endure the horror of being alone, and yet have the freedom of solitude.  There, free from the dust, the boredom, the vulgarities of a household, you reflect at ease, comfortably seated before a table, unincumbered by all the things that oppress you in houses; for if useless objects and papers had accumulated here they would have been promptly removed.  You smoke slowly, quietly, like a Turk, following your thoughts among the blue curves.

If you have a voluptuous desire to taste some warm or refreshing beverage, well-trained waiters bring it to you immediately.  If you feel like talking with clever men who will not bully you, you have within reach light sheets on which are printed winged thoughts, rapid, written for you, which you are not forced to bind and preserve in a library when they have ceased to please you.  This place, the paradise of civilization, the last and inviolable refuge of the free man, is the cafe.

It is the cafe; but in the ideal, as we dream it, as it ought to be.  The lack of room and the fabulous cost of land on the boulevards of Paris make it hideous in actuality.  In these little boxes—­of which the rent is that of a palace—­one would be foolish to look for the space of a vestiary.  Besides, the walls are decorated with stovepipe hats and overcoats hung on clothes-pegs—­an abominable sight, for which atonement is offered by multitudes of white panels and ignoble gilding, imitations made by economical process.