Often dusk would have fallen before we reached the hotel. Timidly I would quote to Mme. de Villeparisis, pointing to the moon in the sky, some memorable expression of Chateaubriand or Vigny or Victor Hugo: “Shedding abroad that ancient secret of melancholy” or “Weeping like Diana by the brink of her streams” or “The shadows nuptial, solemn and august.”
“And so you think that good, do you?” she would ask, “inspired, as you call it. I must confess that I am always surprised to see people taking things seriously nowadays which the friends of those gentlemen, while doing ample justice to their merits, were the first to laugh at. People weren’t so free then with the word ‘inspired’ as they are now, when if you say to a writer that he has mere talent he thinks you’re insulting him. You quote me a fine passage from M. de Chateaubriand about moonlight. You shall see that I have my own reasons for being refractory. M. de Chateaubriand used constantly to come to see my father. He was quite a pleasant person when you were alone with him, because then he was simple and amusing, but the moment he had an audience he would begin to pose, and then he became absurd; when my father was in the room, he pretended that he had flung his resignation in the King’s face, and that he had controlled the voting in the Conclave, forgetting that it was my father whom he had asked to beg the King to take him back, and that my father had heard him make the most idiotic forecasts of the Papal election. You ought to have heard M. de Blacas on that famous Conclave; he was a very different kind of man from M. de Chateaubriand. As to his fine phrases about the moon, they became part of our regular programme for entertaining our guests. Whenever there was any moonlight about the house, if there was anyone staying with us for the first time he would be told to take M. de Chateaubriand for a stroll after dinner. When they came in, my father would take his guest aside and say: ‘Well, and was M. de Chateaubriand very eloquent?’—‘Oh, yes.’ ‘He’s been talking about the moon?’—‘Yes, how did you know?’—‘One moment, didn’t he say—’ and then my father would quote the passage. ‘He did; but how in the world … ?’—‘And he spoke to you of the moonlight on the Roman Campagna?’—‘But, my dear sir, you’re a magician.’ My father was no magician, but M. de Chateaubriand had the same little speech about the moon which he served up every time.”
At the mention of Vigny she laughed: “The man who said: ‘I am the Comte Alfred de Vigny!’ One either is a Comte or one isn’t; it is not of the slightest importance.” And then perhaps she discovered that it was after all, of some slight importance, for she went on: “For one thing I am by no means sure that he was, and in any case he was of the humblest origin, that gentleman who speaks in his verses of his ‘Esquire’s crest.’ In such charming taste, is it not, and so interesting to his readers! Like Musset, a plain Paris cit, who laid so much stress on ‘The golden falcon that surmounts my helm.’ As if you would ever hear a real gentleman say a thing like that! And yet Musset had some talent as a poet. But except Cinq-Mars I have never been able to read a thing by M. de Vigny. I get so bored that the book falls from my hands. M. Molé, who had all the cleverness and tact that were wanting in M. de Vigny, put him properly in his place when he welcomed him to the Academy. Do you mean to say you don’t know the speech? It is a masterpiece of irony and impertinence.” She found fault with Balzac, whom she was surprised to see her nephews admire, for having pretended to describe a society “in which he was never received” and of which his descriptions were wildly improbable. As for Victor Hugo, she told us that M. de Bouillon, her father, who had friends among the young leaders of the Romantic movement, had been taken by some of them to the first performance of Hernani, but that he had been unable to sit through it, so ridiculous had he found the lines of that talented but extravagant writer who had acquired the title of “Major Poet” only by virtue of having struck a bargain, and as a reward for the not disinterested indulgence that he showed to the dangerous errors of the Socialists.
We had now come in sight of the hotel, with its lights, so hostile that first evening, on our arrival, now protecting and kind, speaking to us of home. And when the carriage drew up outside the door, the porter, the pages, the lift-boy, attentive, clumsy, vaguely uneasy at our lateness, were numbered, now that they had grown familiar, among those beings who change so many times in the course of our life, as we ourself change, but by whom, when they are for the time being the mirror of our habits, we find something attractive in the feeling that we are being faithfully reflected and in a friendly spirit. We prefer them to friends whom we have not seen for some time, for they contain more of what we actually are. Only the outside page, exposed to the sun all day, had been taken indoors for protection from the cold night air and swaddled in thick woollen garments which, combined with the orange effulgence of his locks and the curiously red bloom of his cheeks, made one, seeing him there through the glass front of the hall, think of a hothouse plant muffled up for protection from the frost. We got out of the carriage, with the help of a great many more servants than were required, but they were
