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She was tired at last, but she mentioned to me that she couldn’t afford to pause. She continued to speak of Leolin’s work as the great hope of their future (she had saved no money) though the young man wore to my sense an aspect more and more professional if you like, but less and less literary. At the end of a couple of years there was something monstrous in the impudence with which he played his part in the comedy. When I wondered how she could play HER part I had to perceive that her good faith was complete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagant fondness. She loved the young impostor with a simple, blind, benighted love, and of all the heroes of romance who had passed before her eyes he was by far the most brilliant.

He was at any rate the most real–she could touch him, pay for him, suffer for him, worship him. He made her think of her princes and dukes, and when she wished to fix these figures in her mind’s eye she thought of her boy. She had often told me she was carried away by her own creations, and she was certainly carried away by Leolin. He vivified, by potentialities at least, the whole question of youth and passion. She held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelist should feel the whole flood of life; she acknowledged with regret that she had not had time to feel it herself, and it was a joy to her that the deficiency might be supplied by the sight of the way it was rushing through this magnificent young man. She exhorted him, I suppose, to let it rush; she wrung her own flaccid little sponge into the torrent. I knew not what passed between them in her hours of tuition, but I gathered that she mainly impressed on him that the great thing was to live, because that gave you material. He asked nothing better; he collected material, and the formula served as a universal pretext. You had only to look at him to see that, with his rings and breastpins, his cross-barred jackets, his early embonpoint, his eyes that looked like imitation jewels, his various indications of a dense, full-blown temperament, his idea of life was singularly vulgar; but he was not so far wrong as that his response to his mother’s expectations was not in a high degree practical. If she had imposed a profession on him from his tenderest years it was exactly a profession that he followed. The two were not quite the same, inasmuch as HIS was simply to live at her expense; but at least she couldn’t say that he hadn’t taken a line. If she insisted on believing in him he offered himself to the sacrifice. My impression is that her secret dream was that he should have a liaison with a countess, and he persuaded her without difficulty that he had one. I don’t know what countesses are capable of, but I have a clear notion of what Leolin was.

He didn’t persuade his sister, who despised him–she wished to work her mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl’s judgment of him didn’t make me like her better. It was because it didn’t save her after all from a mute agreement with him to go halves. There were moments when I couldn’t help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up. Not a little tacit conversation passed between us in this way, but he had always the best of it. If I said: “Oh, come now, with ME you needn’t keep it up; plead guilty, and I’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, the most candid expression, in the depths of which I could read: “Oh, yes, I know it exasperates you–that’s just why I do it.” He took the line of earnest inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens DID exaggerate and Thackeray OUGHT to be called a pessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother’s suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to “go.” He was not resigned to the usual pruderies–he suffered under them already. He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, for nobody had ever tried. Did I think HE might safely try–would it injure his mother if he did? He would rather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one ought to try. Wouldn’t I try–couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look at it as a duty? Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed– he was worried, haunted by the question. He patronised me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur, a helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly vieux jeu and had not had the advantage of an early training. I had not been brought up from the germ, I knew nothing of life–didn’t go at it on HIS system. He had dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time to read anything and could only be vivid with her pen. If I didn’t kick him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on her at the bottom.