more than she dreaded offending God, and strove harder to please him.  She did not wish him to marry her, because she thought that “it was wrong and deplorable that the one whom nature had created for all ... should be appropriated by one woman.”  She found, she said, “more happiness in the appellation of mistress or concubine, than in that of wife or empress,” and by humiliating herself in him, she hoped to gain a stronger hold over his heart.

* * * * *

The park is really delightful.  Alleys wind through the woods and clusters of trees bend over the meandering stream.  You can hear the bubbling water and feel the coolness of the foliage.  If we were irritated by the bad taste displayed here, it was because we had just left Clisson, which has a real, simple, and solid beauty, and after all, this bad taste is not that of our contemporaries.  But what is, in fact, bad taste?  Invariably it is the taste of the period which has preceded ours.  Bad taste at the time of Ronsard was represented by Marot; at the time of Boileau, by Ronsard; at the time of Voltaire, by Corneille, and by Voltaire in the day of Chateaubriand, whom many people nowadays begin to think a trifle weak.  O men of taste in future centuries, let me recommend you the men of taste of to-day!  You will laugh at their cramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, and the faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is served to them.  Everything that is beautiful will then appear ugly; everything that is graceful, stupid; everything that is rich, poor; and oh! how our delightful boudoirs, our charming salons, our exquisite costumes, our palpitating plays, our interesting novels, our serious books will all be consigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure!  O posterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, our Renaissance furniture, M. Pasquier’s discourses, the shape of our hats, and the aesthetics of La Revue des Deux Mondes!

While we were pondering upon these lofty philosophical considerations, our wagon had hauled us over to Tiffanges.  Seated side by side in a sort of tin tub, our weight crushed the tiny horse, which swayed to and fro between the shafts.  It was like the twitching of an eel in the body of a musk-rat.  Going down hill pushed him forward, going up hill pulled him backward, while uneven places in the road threw him from side to side, and the wind and the whip lashed him alternately.  The poor brute!  I cannot think of him now without a certain feeling of remorse.

The road down hill is curved and its edges are covered with clumps of sea-rushes or large patches of a certain reddish moss.  To the right, on an eminence that starts from the bottom of the dale and swells in the middle like the carapace of a tortoise, one perceives high, unequal walls, the crumbling tops of which appear one above another.