nation, tired of living, but afraid of dying;
believing some in priests, and some in physiologists, but none at all in
virtue; sent to sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters and raw
meat; bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the harness
of pleasure rather than drop out of the race and live naturally;
pricking their sated senses with the spur of lust, and fancying it love;
taking their passions as they take absinthe before dinner; false in
everything, from the swell of their breast to the curls at their
throat;--beside them the guilty and tragic figures of old, the Medea,
the Clytemnaestra, the Phaedra, look almost pure, seem almost noble.

When one thinks that they are the only shape of womanhood which comes
hourly before so many men, one comprehends why the old Christianity
which made womanhood sacred dies out day by day, and why the new
Positivism, which would make her divine, can find no lasting root.

The faith of men can only live by the purity of women, and there is both
impurity and feebleness at the core of the dolls of Worth, as the canker
of the phylloxera works at the root of the vine.

* * *

"What an actress was lost in your mother!" he added with his rough
laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of society with that
of the comedian of the stage, and they are very dissimilar. The latter
almost always forgets herself in her part; the former never.

* * *

The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all
scorn.

* * *

"The fame of the singer can never be but a breath, a sound through a
reed. When our lips are once shut, there is on us for ever eternal
silence. Who can remember a summer breeze when it has passed by, or
tell in any after-time how a laugh or a sigh sounded?"

* * *

"When the soldier dies at his post, unhonoured and unpitied, and out of
sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?" he said one night to
his companions. "When the sister of charity hides her youth and her sex
under a grey shroud, and gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to
sickness and pain, is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints
a spluttering candle, a greasy cloth, a mouldy cheese, a pewter can;
'How real!' they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light of
the summer sea, the flame of arctic nights, of tropic woods, they are
called unreal, though they