em. I can
comprehend that a work which has long been all in all to its author,
concentrating his thoughts, gathering round it the hopes and fears of
his inmost heart, dies, as it were, to him when he has completed
its life for others, and launched it into a world estranged from the
solitude in which it was born and formed. I can almost conceive that, to
a writer like you, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth
chills your own love for it. The characters you created in a fairyland,
known but to yourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm
when you hear them discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if
they were really the creatures of streets and salons.

I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do
such other authors as I have known. M. Savarin, for instance, sets
down in his tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest
scribbler who wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is
food, dispraise is poison. Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me
I break on the wheel." M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energetic
administrator to his own reputation. He deals with it as if it were a
kingdom,--establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers
to fight for it. He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which
each is bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those
territories united constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin.
Don't think me an ungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our
brilliant friend. It is not I who here speak; it is himself. He avows
his policy with the naivete which makes the charm of his style as
writer. "It is the greatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk
of the Republic of Letters. Every author who wins a name is a sovereign
in his own domain, be it large or small. Woe to any republican who wants
to dethrone me!" Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel
as if he were betraying the cause of, genius. I cannot bring myself
to regard literature as a craft,--to me it is a sacred mission; and in
hearing this "sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his
state, I seem to listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion
he professes to teach. M. Savarin's favourite eleve now is a young
contributor to his journal, named Gustave Rameau. M. Savarin said the
other day in my hearing, "I and my set were Young France; Gustave Rameau
and his set are New Par