ameau, and tell me how it has come about that with the
faculty for feeling, retaining, and rendering the finest passages
in the great masters, with the enthusiasm that they inspire in you,
and that you transmit to others, you have done nothing that is
worth....

Instead of answering me, he shrugged his shoulders, and pointing to
the sky with his finger, he cried: The star! the star! When Nature
made Leo, Vinci, Pergolese, Duni, she smiled. She put on a grave
and imposing air in shaping my dear uncle Rameau, who for half a
score years they will have called the great Rameau, and of whom
very soon nobody will say a word. When she tricked up his nephew,
she made a grimace, and a grimace, and again a grimace. [And as he
said this, he put on all sorts of odd expressions: contempt,
disdain, irony; and he seemed to be kneading between his fingers a
piece of paste, and to be smiling at the ridiculous shapes that he
gave it; that done, he flung the incongruous pagod[225] away from
him, and said:] It was thus she made me, and flung me by the side
of the other pagods, some with huge wrinkled paunches, and short
necks, and great eyes projecting out of their heads, stamped with
apoplexy; others with wry necks; some again with wizened faces,
keen eyes, hooked noses. All were ready to split with laughing when
they espied me, and I put my hands to my sides and split with
laughter when I espied them, for fools and madmen tickle one
another; they seek and attract one another. If when I got among
them, I had not found ready-made the proverb about _the money of
fools being the patrimony of people with wits_, they would have
been indebted to me for it. I felt that nature had put my lawful
inheritance into the purses of the pagods, and I devised a thousand
means of recovering my rights.

[225] These little china images of gods, with nodding heads, were
then a fashionable toy in Paris.

_I._--Yes, I know all about your thousand means; you have told me
of them, and I have admired them vastly. But with so many
resources, why not have tried that of a fine work?...

_He._--When I am alone I take up my pen and intend to write; I bite
my nails and rub my brow; your humble servant, good-bye, the god is
absent. I had convinced myself that I had genius; at the end of the