nder."

"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.

"And so," said Blondet, "our 'perfect lady' lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century--a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures shrink
into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am fully
convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born
close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the
encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the
important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the
angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence,
the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the
diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady."

"And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn," said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, "would you class the female
author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman _comme il faut_?"

"When she has no genius, she is a woman _comme il n'en faut pas_,"
Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen glance, which might
make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille Maupin. "This epigram
is not mine, but Napoleon's," he added.

"You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score," said Canalis,
with an emphatic tone and gesture. "It was one of his weaknesses to be
jealous of literary genius--for he had his mean points. Who will ever
explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented with his arms
folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest force ever known,
the most concentrated, the most mordant, the most acid of all forces;
a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every direction
without fixing it anywhere; a man who could do everything because
he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, conquering an
illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die of disease in bed after
living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man with a code and a
sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted spirit that foresaw
everything but his own fall; a capricious politician who risked men
by handfuls out of economy, and who spared three heads--those of
Talleyrand, of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomatists whose
death would have saved t