honeysuckle? No, he goes in the
far-away corner where the soil is prepared. Hear what he says: 'I wish M.
Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came. It is the only
way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was coming to
Paris I read La Terre.'"]--All this in simple justice to you--and to me;
for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong
your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being
equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.

And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which
the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and consider
how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.
If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that
anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of
times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back
way. But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error. When you say that
I "retort by calling France a nation of bastards," it is an error. And
not a small one, but a large one. I made no such remark, nor anything
resembling it. Moreover, the magazine would not have allowed me to use
so gross a word as that.

You told an anecdote. A funny one--I admit that. It hit a foible of our
American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me sharply.
It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French kings in the
gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:

"He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his grandfather?"
That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.

Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but
it hits exceedingly hard.

I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you. In one of your
chapters I found this chance:

"In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts
and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of
the French soul."

You see? Your "higher Parisian" class--not everybody, not the nation,
but only the top crust of the Ovation--applies to debauchery all the
powers of its soul.

I argued to myself that that energy must produce results. So I built an
anecdote out of your remark. In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me
--but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and curtailed)
in paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I r