‘Tocqueville,’ I said, ’told me that he did not think that he could now read Lamartine.’

‘Tocqueville,’ said Ampere, ’could taste, like every man of genius, the very finest poetry, but he was not a lover of poetry.  He could not read a hundred bad lines and think himself repaid by finding mixed with them ten good ones.’

‘Ingres,’ said Beaumont, ’perhaps our greatest living painter, is one of the clever cultivated men who do not read.  Somebody put the “Misanthrope” into his hands, “It is wonderfully clever,” he said, when he returned it; “how odd it is that it should be so totally unknown."’

‘Let us read it to-night,’ I said.

‘By all means,’ said Madame de Tocqueville; ’though we know it by heart it will be new when read by M. Ampere.’  Accordingly Ampere read it to us after dinner.

‘The tradition of the stage,’ he said, ’is that Celimene was Moliere’s wife.’

‘She is made too young,’ said Minnie.  ’A girl of twenty has not her wit, or her knowledge of the world.’

‘The change of a word,’ said Ampere, ’in two or three places would alter that.  The feeblest characters are as usual the good ones.  Philinte and Eliante.

’Alceste is a grand mixture, perhaps the only one on the French stage, of the comic and the tragic; for in many of the scenes he rises far above comedy.  His love is real impetuous passion.  Talma delighted in playing him.’

‘The desert,’ I said, ’into which he retires, was, I suppose, a distant country-house.  Just such a place as Tocqueville.’

‘As Tocqueville,’ said Beaumont, ’fifty years ago, without roads, ten days’ journey from Paris, and depending for society on Valognes.’

‘As Tocqueville,’ said Madame de Tocqueville, ’when my mother-in-law first married.  She spent in it a month and could never be induced to see it again.’

‘Whom,’ I asked, ‘did Celimene marry?’

‘Of course,’ said Ampere, ’Alceste.  Probably five years afterwards.  By that time he must have got tired of his desert and she of her coquetry.’

‘We know,’ I said, ’that Moliere was always in love with his wife, notwithstanding her legerete.  What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene.  She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles.  Her satire is good-natured.  Arsinoe is her foil, introduced to show what real evil-speaking is.’

‘All the women,’ said Ampere, ’are in love with Alceste, and they care about no one else.  Celimene’s satire of the others is scarcely good-natured.  It is clear, at least, that they did not think so.’

‘If Celimene,’ said Minnie, ’became Madame Alceste, he probably made her life a burthen with his jealousy.’

‘Of course he was jealous,’ said Madame de Beaumont, ’for he was violently in love.  There can scarcely be violent love without jealousy.’