‘Were those the merits,’ I asked, ’which opened to him the doors of the Academy?’

‘Certainly,’ answered Z.  ’As a man of letters he is nothing, as a statesman not much.  We elected him in honour of his courage and his honesty, and perhaps with some regard to his fortune.  We are the only independent body left, and we value in a candidate no quality more than independence.’

‘I am told,’ I said, ‘that Falloux is now an ultra-Legitimist.’

‘That is not true,’ said Z.  ’He is a Legitimist, but a liberal one.  He would tolerate no Government, whatever were its other claims, that was not constitutional.’

‘Your Academic ceremonies,’ I said ’seem to me not very well imagined.  There is something fade, almost ridiculous, in the literary minuet in which the recipiendaire and the receiver are trotted out to show their paces to each other and to the Academy.  The new member extolling the predecessor of whom he is the unworthy successor, the old member lauding his new colleague to his face, and assuring him that he, too, is one of the ornaments of the Society.’

‘Particularly,’ said ——­, ’when, as was the case the other day, it is notorious that neither of them has any real respect for the idol which he is forced to crown.  Then the political innuendoes, the under-currents of censure of the present conveyed in praise of the past, become tiresome after we have listened to them for five years.  We long to hear people talk frankly and directly, instead of saying one thing for the mere purpose of showing that they are thinking of another thing.  The Emperor revenged himself on Falloux by his antithesis:  “que le desordre les avait uni, et que l’ordre les avait separe.’”

‘How did Falloux reply to it?’ I asked.

‘Feebly,’ said ——.  ’He muttered something about l’ordre having no firmer adherent than himself.  In these formal audiences our great man has the advantage.  He has his mot ready prepared, and you cannot discuss with him.’

We talked of the French spoken by foreigners.  ‘The best,’ said Circourt, ‘is that of the Swedes and Russians, the worst that of the Germans.’

‘Louis Philippe,’ said Z., ’used to maintain that the best test of a man’s general talents was his power of speaking foreign languages.  It was an opinion that flattered his vanity, for he spoke like a native French, Italian, English, and German.’

‘It is scarcely possible,’ said Tocqueville, ’for a man to be original in any language but his own; in all others he is forced to say what he can, and that is generally something that he recollects.’

‘I was much struck by that,’ said Z., ’when conversing with Narvaez.  He had been talking sensibly but rather dully in French, I begged him to talk Spanish, which I understand though I cannot speak.  The whole man was changed.  It was as if a curtain had been drawn up from between us.  Instead of hammering at commonplaces, he became pointed, and spirited, and eloquent.’