This duel, as you can well believe, has made a great commotion; Monsieur Dorlange has been the hero of the hour for the last two days; it is impossible to enter a single salon without finding him the one topic of conversation.  I heard more, perhaps, in the salon of Madame de Montcornet than elsewhere.  She receives, as you know, many artists and men of letters, and to give you an idea of the manner in which your friend is considered, I need only stenograph a conversation at which I was present in the countess’s salon last evening.

The chief talkers were Emile Blondet of the “Debats,” and Monsieur Bixiou, the caricaturist, one of the best-informed ferrets of Paris.  They are both, I think, acquaintances of yours, but, at any rate, I am certain of your intimacy with Joseph Bridau, our great painter, who shared in the talk, for I well remember that he and Daniel d’Arthez were the witnesses of your marriage.

“The first appearance of Dorlange in art,” Joseph Bridau was saying, when I joined them, “was fine; the makings of a master were already so apparent in the work he did for his examinations that the Academy, under pressure of opinion, decided to crown him—­though he laughed a good deal at its programme.”

“True,” said Bixiou, “and that ‘Pandora’ he exhibited in 1837, after his return from Rome, is also a very remarkable figure.  But as she won him, at once, the cross and any number of commissions from the government and the municipality, together with scores of flourishing articles in the newspapers, I don’t see how he can rise any higher after all that success.”

“That,” said Blondet, “is a regular Bixiou opinion.”

“No doubt; and well-founded it is.  Do you know the man?”

“No; he is never seen anywhere.”

“Exactly; he is a bear, but a premeditated bear; a reflecting and determined bear.”

“I don’t see,” said Joseph Bridau, “why this savage inclination for solitude should be so bad for an artist.  What does a sculptor gain by frequenting salons where gentlemen and ladies have taken to a habit of wearing clothes?”

“Well, in the first place, a sculptor can amuse himself in a salon; and that will keep him from taking up a mania, or becoming a visionary; besides, he sees the world as it is, and learns that 1839 is not the fifteenth nor the sixteenth century.”

“Has Dorlange any such delusions?” asked Emile Blondet.

“He? he will talk to you by the hour of returning to the life of the great artists of the middle ages with the universality of their studies and their knowledge, and that frightfully laborious life of theirs; which may help us to understand the habits and ways of a semi-barbarous society, but can never exist in ours.  He does not see, the innocent dreamer, that civilization, by strangely complicating all social conditions, absorbs for business, for interests, for pleasures, thrice as much time as a less advanced society required for the same purposes.  Look at the savage in his hut; he hasn’t anything to do.  Whereas we, with the Bourse, the opera, the newspapers, parliamentary discussions, salons, elections, railways, the Cafe de Paris and the National Guard—­what time have we, if you please, to go to work?”