We had exchanged visiting-cards several times, and a few letters, but I did not as yet know him.  I was attracted to him by the very contrasts which existed between us.  My elegant and delicate nature (as the newspapers then styled it:  they now call it my weak and morbid nature) seemed in absolute contradiction to that robust frame, that oaken solidity, which revealed beneath its rugged bark its virile juices.  His masculine and potent ugliness reminded me of Mirabeau, of a plebeian Mirabeau with straight black hair, of a Mirabeau who had found at the foot of the altar calmness for his tempest-tossed soul.  His conversation delighted and fascinated me.  One felt (despite some coarseness in minor details, and which almost seemed to be assumed) that there glowed within him the energetic convictions of an honest man and a Christian, who had at command the most stinging language that ever wrung the withers of Voltaire’s pale successors.  No man among our contemporaries has been more hated than Monsieur Louis Veuillot.  He has flagellated, kicked, cuffed, jeered, mocked, humiliated, exasperated, better than anybody else, the writers I most detest.  He has given them wounds which will forever rankle.  He has indelibly branded these miserable actors who play upon the theatre of their vices the comedy of their vanity.  We together examined the pages where I had expressed my opinion upon contemporary authors.

“Are these,” said Monsieur Louis Veuillot, speaking severely to me, “are these all your sacrifices to the truth?  Praises to that one, flattery to this one, soft words to him, compliments to another?  You blame them just enough to incite people to buy their books.  Is that what you call serving our noble and austere cause?  Oh, Sir!  Sir!” ...

He lectured me long and well.  He spoke with the edification of a sermon and the brilliancy of a satire.  At last, ashamed of my weakness, electrified by his language, burning to repair lost time, I said to him, pressing his hands in mine,—­

“I am dwelling amid the luxuries of Capua; when next you hear from me, I shall be in the midst of the field of battle.”

I at once began my campaign.  I made war upon Voltaire, Beranger, Eugene Sue, De Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Quinet; and as for the small fry of literature, I showed them no mercy.  War was soon declared on me,—­war without quarter.

My first adversary was little Monsieur Paulin Limayrac.  He has become the most accomplished specimen of the job-editor.  As firmly convinced of the supremacy of the Articles of War as the best disciplined private soldier who ever showed how perfect an automaton man may become by thorough discipline, his political opinions are something more than a creed:  they are a watchword which be observes with a most supple obstinacy.  The cabinet-minister he calls master is a corporal who has the right to think for him; and were the corporal to contradict himself ten times in the course of a single day, imperturbable little Paulin Limayrac would demonstrate to him that he was ten times in the right.  But then (that is, in 1855) Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was a Republican, a Socialist; and his weakness lay in imagining not only that people read his articles in “La Presse,” but that they remembered them for a whole sennight after reading them.  When you met him, he always commenced conversation:—­