Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Set a hedge here set oaks there,-trees behind trees above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. The solitary river was not solitary enough the sun and moon put him out. He left the city he hid himself in pastures. For himself he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend.
He coveted Mirabeau's don terrible de la familiarité believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear. He envied everyĭrover and lumberman in the tavern their manly speech. His consciousness of the fault made it worse.
There was some paralysis on his will, such that when he met men on common terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a flighty girl.
He had good abilities, a genial temper and no vices but he had one defect,-he could not speak in the tone of the people. "Do you not see," he said, "the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks that followed we became better acquainted. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. I FELL in with a humorist on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses.
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