exhausting to men
as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess
exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her;
for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,--without rouge,
without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have
friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the
fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is
but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from
sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their
rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the
matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never
grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now
Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of
his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes
to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in
which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying
compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to
others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of
its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a
courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made
no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as
minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!" Many
men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration
of non-success in little doses.

These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of
absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech
and affected diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so--are
surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to
some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the
provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type.
Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his
form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the
duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if
you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything
everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France.
Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to t