rass tray?" And B was saddened and could only plead, "It is coming
directly; but you know too much."

[208] They are both connected with the "orgie"-mania, and the last is a
deliberate burlesque of the originals of P. L. Jacob, Janin, Eugene Sue,
and Balzac himself.

[209] It is here that the famous return of a kiss _revu, corrige et
considerablement augmente_ is recorded.

[210] He (it is some excuse for him that this suggested a better thing
in certain _New Arabian Nights_) buys, furnishes, and subsequently
deserts an empty house to give a ball in, and put his friends on no
scent of his own abode; but he makes this "own abode" a sort of Crystal
Palace in the centre of a whole ring-fence of streets, with the old
fronts of the houses kept to avert suspicion of the Seraglio of Eastern
beauties, the menagerie and beast fights, and the slaves whom (it is
rather suggested than definitely stated) he occasionally murders. He
performs circus-rider feats when he meets a lady (or at least a woman)
in the Bois de Boulogne; he sets her house on fire when it occurs to him
that she has received other lovers there; and we are given to understand
that he blows up his own palace when he returns to the East. In fact, he
is a pure anticipated cognition of a Ouidesque super-hero as parodied by
Sir Francis Burnand (and independently by divers schoolboys and
undergraduates) some fifty years ago.

[211] I have seen an admirable criticism of this "thing" in one word,
"Cold!"

[212] On the cayenne-and-claret principle which Haydon (one hopes
libellously, in point of degree) attributed to Keats. (It was probably a
devilled-biscuit, and so quite allowable.)

[213] "Theo" has no repute as a psychologist; but I have known such
repute attained by far less subtle touches than this.

[214] For more on them, with a pretty full abstract of _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_, see the Essay more than once mentioned.

[215] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 279-286. Of course the duplication, _as
literature_, is positively interesting and welcome.

[216] I--some fifty years since--knew a man who, with even greater
juvenility, put pretty much the same doctrine in a Fellowship Essay. He
did not obtain that Fellowship.

[217] It might possibly have been shortened with advantage in
concentration of effect. But the story (pleasantly invented, if not
true) of Gautier's mother locking him up in his room that he might not
neglect his work (of the nature of which she was blis