"Very well. And then if we have a poet we must have a critic--won't this
one do? he has a book; perhaps he is going to review it, or perhaps it is
his encyclopaedia to save him from making mistakes."

"If you like, he shall be the critic; only then you ought to tell me what
he is saying."

"He is saying: 'I despise everything because it is not something else.'"

"Bravo, bravo! That is better than what the poet said."

"O my dear Buffo, I am not going to admit that. Besides, it is not true
of all critics."

"What I said is not true of all poets."

"Well, if we don't like what we have made them say, let us have someone
to follow and show them where they are both wrong."

"All right. Let me see. That will be when they have had time to think
it over. That will be the Cold Dawn of the following morning. We will
now make the Aurora."

So we found a disengaged lady marionette and began to dress her in a
piece of cobwebby grey muslin from which the last few spangles had not
yet dropped. I said:

"I'm not at all sure that this is not going too far. Do you think we can
really show the Cold Dawn of the following morning escaping out of Paris
by the underground road?"

"She must go; she will be wanted at Montalbano to show some of the people
that they have saved the wrong things."

"Very true. Yes. That is what people so often do when they travel, they
leave behind them the things they want most and take a lot of other
things that are useless. Now, that resolution of the dominant seventh
was hardly worth saving--at least it was not really new."

"Where did you get it from?"

"I stole it out of the works of the musician whose bust was on your
maestro's piano the other day, the one with the Dutch name who lived in
Vienna."

"I hope you invented what the critic said?"

"Not exactly. Your poet reminded me of something in Walt Whitman and I
twisted it round and gave it to the critic."

"What's Walt Whitman? Is he another Dutchman?"

"He was an American poet, but his mother had a Dutch name."

"Did he come to the teatrino?"

"He never came to Europe. I wish he had been to the teatrino. He would
have liked your Escape from Paris, but perhaps he would not have cared so
much for the paladins. He wrote something about them."

"What did he say?"

"If he had seen the end of the story, when the angel takes Guido Santo's
soul out of his mouth, I believe he would have said that instead of
flying up t