“There seems occasion for it,” said Madame Mignon.

“But mademoiselle is right,” said Canalis, rising and standing before the fireplace in one of the finest attitudes of his collection.  “God, in his providence, has given food and clothing to man, but he has not directly given him art.  He says to man:  ’To live, thou must bow thyself to earth; to think, thou shalt lift thyself to Me.’  We have as much need of the life of the soul as of the life of the body,—­hence, there are two utilities.  It is true we cannot be shod by books or clothed by poems.  An epic song is not, if you take the utilitarian view, as useful as the broth of a charity kitchen.  The noblest ideas will not sail a vessel in place of canvas.  It is quite true that the cotton-gin gives us calicoes for thirty sous a yard less than we ever paid before; but that machine and all other industrial perfections will not breathe the breath of life into a people, will not tell futurity of a civilization that once existed.  Art, on the contrary, Egyptian, Mexican, Grecian, Roman art, with their masterpieces—­now called useless!—­reveal the existence of races back in the vague immense of time, beyond where the great intermediary nations, denuded of men of genius, have disappeared, leaving not a line nor a trace behind them!  The works of genius are the ‘summum’ of civilization, and presuppose utility.  Surely a pair of boots are not as agreeable to your eyes as a fine play at the theatre; and you don’t prefer a windmill to the church of Saint-Ouen, do you?  Well then, nations are imbued with the same feelings as the individual man, and the man’s cherished desire is to survive himself morally just as he propagates himself physically.  The survival of a people is the work of its men of genius.  At this very moment France is proving, energetically, the truth of that theory.  She is, undoubtedly, excelled by England in commerce, industry, and navigation, and yet she is, I believe, at the head of the world,—­by reason of her artists, her men of talent, and the good taste of her products.  There is no artist and no superior intellect that does not come to Paris for a diploma.  There is no school of painting at this moment but that of France; and we shall reign far longer and perhaps more securely by our books than by our swords.  In La Briere’s system, on the other hand, all that is glorious and lovely must be suppressed,—­woman’s beauty, music, painting, poetry.  Society will not be overthrown, that is true, but, I ask you, who would willingly accept such a life?  All useful things are ugly and forbidding.  A kitchen is indispensable, but you take care not to sit there; you live in the salon, which you adorn, like this, with superfluous things.  Of what use, let me ask you, are these charming wall-paintings, this carved wood-work?  There is nothing beautiful but that which seems to us useless.  We called the sixteenth century the Renascence with admirable truth of language.  That century was the dawn of a new era.  Men will continue to speak of it when all remembrance of anterior centuries had passed away,—­their only merit being that they once existed, like the million beings who count as the rubbish of a generation.”