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“It is all so horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.

“And so,” said Blondet, “our ‘perfect lady’ lives between English hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century–a bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures shrink into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am fully convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence, the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.”

“And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “would you class the female author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman /comme il faut/?”

“When she has no genius, she is a woman /comme il n’en faut pas/,” Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen glance, which might make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille Maupin. “This epigram is not mine, but Napoleon’s,” he added.

“You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score,” said Canalis, with an emphatic tone and gesture. “It was one of his weaknesses to be jealous of literary genius–for he had his mean points. Who will ever explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented with his arms folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest force ever known, the most concentrated, the most mordant, the most acid of all forces; a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every direction without fixing it anywhere; a man who could do everything because he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, conquering an illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die of disease in bed after living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man with a code and a sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted spirit that foresaw everything but his own fall; a capricious politician who risked men by handfuls out of economy, and who spared three heads– those of Talleyrand, of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire, and who seemed to him of greater weight than thousands of soldiers; a man to whom nature, as a rare privilege, had given a heart in a frame of bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight amid women, and next morning manipulating Europe as a young girl might amuse herself by splashing water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous; loving tawdriness and simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the arts; and in spite of these antitheses, really great in everything by instinct or by temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty; and then, like my grocer buried in Pere Lachaise, a good husband and a good father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings, codes, verses, a romance–and all with more range than precision. Did he not aim at making all Europe France? And after making us weigh on the earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us; while he, who had taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the frontier of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man all thought and all action, who comprehended Desaix and Fouche.”

“All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!” said de Marsay.

“Ah! vat a pleashre it is to dichest vile you talk,” said Baron de Nucingen.

“But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common one?” asked Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the charms of conversation as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune would be inadequate! There is no second performance of the same flash of wit.”