ou see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which
you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the
harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could
have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost
him to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a
higher quality.

Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
information about Balzac and those others.--["Now the style of M.
Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read
Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre
Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's
'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'? Has he read or heard the
plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans
of modern literature, whose names will be household words all over
the world for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre--this
kind-hearted, refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he
smell the violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he
goes in the far-away corner where the soil is prepared. Hear what he
says: 'I wish M. Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he
came. It is the only way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found
I was coming to Paris I read La Terre.'"]--All this in simple justice
to you--and to me; for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours
would be to wrong your head and heart, and at the same time convict
myself of being equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be
lodged.

And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from
which the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and
consider how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous
dimensions. If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would
know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified
some hundreds of times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to
creep in the back way. But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error.
When you say that I "retort by calling France a nation of bastards,"
it is an error. And not a small one, but a large one. I made no such