r slipper sends all the
painted, laureled, cothurned, lyre-carrying Muses--that, from Monselet
to Renan, have roused the aspirations of classes in Rhetoric--rolling,
from the top to the bottom of Parnassus._

_How charming she is thus--presenting her bull-dog and her cat with as
much assurance as Diana would her hound, or a Bacchante her tiger._

_See her apple-cheeks, her eyes like blue myosotis, her
lips--poppy-petals, and her ivy-like grace! Tell me if this way of
leaning against the green barrier of her garden-close, or of lying under
the murmurous arbor of mid-Summer, is not worth the starched manner,
that old magistrate de Vigny--with his neckcloth wound three times
around, and rigid in his trousers' straps--imposed upon his goddesses?
Madame Colette Willy is a live woman, a real woman, who has dared to be
natural and who resembles a little village bride far more than a
perverse woman of letters_.

* * * * *

_Read her book and you shall see how accurate are my assertions. It has
pleased Madame Colette Willy to embody in a couple of delightful
animals, the aroma of gardens, the freshness of the field, the heat of
state-roads,--the passions of men.... For through this girlish laughter
ringing in the forest, I tell you, I hear the sobbing of a well-spring.
One does not stoop to a poodle or tom-cat, without feeling the heart
wrung with dumb anguish. One is sensible, in comparing ourselves to
them, of all that separates and of all that unites us_.

* * * * *

_A dog's eyes hold the sorrow of having, since the earliest days of
creation, licked the whip of his incorrigible persecutor in vain. For
nothing has mollified man--not the prey brought him by a famishing
spaniel, nor the humble guilelessness of the shepherd-dog, guarding the
peace of the shadowy flocks under the stars_.

_A tragic fear shines in the cat's eyes. "What are you going to do to me
now?" it seems to ask, lying on a rubbish-heap, a prey to mange and
hunger--and feverishly it waits the new torture that will shatter its
nervous system_.

_But have no fear ... Madame Colette Willy is very kind. She quickly
dispels the hereditary dread of Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure. She
meliorates the race, so that dogs and cats will learn in the end that it
is less dull to frequent a poet than an unhappy College de France
candidate--had this candidate proven more copiously still, that the
author of