ng Canalis, who was swinging his
body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the
great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,--as all women
older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in
his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age
wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so
as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the
first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is
accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when
they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by the handsome
duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself
that they pleased that "grande dame," whose taste was law. Such shades
of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the
historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a
talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious
praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor
actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always
through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses;
lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of
the green-room, Canalis "dragged the time." He was fond of exchanging
glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of
self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors
call "balancoires,"--the picturesque phrase of an artistic people.
Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of
his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his
conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment
the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet
ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively
at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular
pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the
effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet
once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any
moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails
of his coats.

These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery
youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself
was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as