well adapted by his beetle-crushers to stamp out the
vermin. Perhaps, it is needless to add, that the snake-like form issues
from a hole in distant Prussia, meandering through many nations, causing
great consternation, and that M. Thiers is finishing off the French
section in admirable style.]

LI.

What has Monsieur Courbet to do among these people? He is a painter, not
a politician. A few beery speeches uttered at the Hautefeuille Cafe
cannot turn his past into a revolutionary one, and an order refused for
the simple reason that it is more piquant for a man to have his
button-hole without ornament than with a slip of red ribbon in it, when
it is well known that he disdains whatever every one else admires, is
but a poor title to fame. To your last, Napoleon Gaillard![57] To your
paint-brushes, Gustave Courbet! And if we say this, it is not only from
fear that the meagre lights of Monsieur Courbet are insufficient, and
may draw the Commune into new acts of folly,--(though we scarcely know,
alas! if there be any folly the Commune has left undone,)--but it is,
above all, because we fear the odium and ridicule that the false
politician may throw upon the painter. Yes! whatever may be our horror
for the nude women and unsightly productions with which Monsieur
Courbet[58] has honoured the exhibitions of paintings, we remember with
delight several, admirably true to nature, with sunshine and summer
breezes playing among the leaves, and streams murmuring refreshingly
over the pebbles, and rocks whereon climbing plants cling closely; and,
besides these landscapes, a good picture here and there, executed, if
not by the hand of an artist--for the word artist possesses a higher
meaning in our eyes--at least by the hand of a man of some power, and we
hate that this painter should be at the Hotel de Ville at the moment
when the spring is awakening in forest and field, and when he would do
so much better to go into the woods of Meudon or Fontainebleau to study
the waving of the branches and the eccentric twists and turns of the
oak-tree's huge trunk, than in making answers to Monsieur
Lefrancais--iconoclast in theory only as yet--and to Monsieur Jules
Valles, who has read Homer in Madame Dacier's translation, or has never
read it at all. That one should try a little of everything, even of
polities, when one is capable of nothing else, is, if not excusable,
at any rate comprehensible; but when a man can make excellent boots