with the Mantua-Makers’ Journal of Fashions.  Cleopatra spouted long speeches upon archaeology, hieroglyphics, the sun, climate, and virtue; Antony was guilty of concetti in the style of Seneca; Octavia prattled like a respectable Parisian lady, who takes care of her children when they have the measles, and hides from them their father’s bad habits.  It was neither antique nor Roman, nor classic nor romantic, nor good nor bad nor indifferent; it was a tragical wager won by a smart woman at the expense of her audience.  The latter, nevertheless, bravely did their duty.  Neither “Le Cid,” nor “Polyeucte,” nor “Andromaque,” nor “Athalie”—­Corneille and Racine’s masterpieces—­ever produced such rapturous enthusiasm.  Monsieur Mery dashed off extemporaneously, in Marseillais accent, admiring paradoxes which lacked nothing but splendid rhyme.  Monsieur Theophile Gautier, who looked like an obese Turk habited in European clothes, laid aside his Moslem placidity to cry that the tragedy was marvellous.  Monsieur Alfred de Musset, lolling in his arm-chair in an attitude which seemed a compromise between sleep and Kief, smiled beatifically.  Monsieur Victor Hugo vowed that nothing half so fine had ever before been written in any age or in any country or in any language—­except (aside) “my own ‘Burgraves’”!  Monsieur de Lamartine, like a god descended upon earth and astounded to find himself at home, let fall from his divine lips compliments perfumed with ambrosia, sparkling with poetry, and glittering with indifference.  Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, that little bit of a fellow, the fly of the political and literary coach, went first to one and then to another, his eye-glass incrusted in his eyebrow, stiffening his wee form as long as he could make it, rattling his high-heeled boots as loudly as he could contrive, stretching out his round, dogmatic face, puffing and blowing to give himself importance, dying to be the Coryphaeus of the company, and mortified to see himself reduced to sing his enthusiasm in the chorus; he frisked about the room, and seemed to be handing around his rapture on a waiter, as domestics hand around cake and ices at parties.

The tragedy fatigued me.  This comedy of adulation disgusted me.  My very humble and obscure position in the midst of all these illustrious shareholders of the Mutual-Admiration Society, organized by the vanity of all to the profit of the vanity of each, kindled in me a desire to show myself frank and independent.  I murmured, loud enough to be heard by all my neighbors,—­“Of a truth, the Country’s Muse is not Melpomene!” Madame Emile de Girardin, when Mademoiselle Delphine Gay and in the most brilliant period of her poetical youth, had styled herself “the Country’s Muse”; her admirers had adopted the title, and it had remained her poetical alias.  The exclamation was, therefore, if not very brilliant, at least very plain and quite just.  It soon went around the room as rapidly as every ill-natured phrase