A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

Gérard de Nerval – his peculiar position.

I have been accused (quite good-naturedly) of putting Rabelais in this history because I liked him, though he was not a novelist. My conscience is easy there; and I think I have refuted the peculiar charge beforehand. But I might have a little more difficulty (though I should still lose neither heart nor hope) in the case of the ill-fated but well-beloved writer whom gods and men call Gérard de Nerval, or simply Gérard, though librarians and bibliographers sometimes insist on his legal surname, Labrunie. It certainly would be difficult, from the same point of view of strict legality, to call anything of his exactly a novel. He was a poet, a dramatist, a voyage-and-travel writer, a bibliographer (strange trade, which associates the driest with the most "nectaweous" of men!) even sometimes a tale-teller by name, but even then hardly a novelist. Yet he managed to throw over the most unlikely material a novelish or at least a romantic character, which is sometimes – nay, very often – utterly wanting in professed and admitted masters of the business; and he combines with this faculty – or rather he exalts and transports it into – a strange and exquisite charm, which nobody else in French, except Nodier²³⁷ (who very possibly taught Gérard something), possesses, and which, though it is rather commoner in English and in the best and now almost prehistoric German, is rare anywhere, and, in Gérard's peculiar brand of it, almost entirely unknown.

For this "Anodos" – the most unquestionably entitled to that title of all men in letters; this wayless wanderer on the earth and above the earth; this inhabitant of mad-houses; this victim, finally, either of his own despair and sorrow or of some devilry on the part of others,²³⁸ unites, in the strange spell which he casts over all fit readers, what, but for him, one might have called the idiosyncrasies in strangeness of authors quite different from each other and – except at the special points of contact – from him. He is like Borrow or De Quincey (though he goes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gérard resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines "on the further side of the border between verse and music" – a remark which applies to his prose as well.²³⁹ He has himself admitted a kind of sorites of indebtedness to Diderot, Sterne, Swift, Rabelais, Folengo, Lucian, and Petronius. But this is merely on the comic and purely intellectual side of him, while it is further confined, or nearly so, to the trick of deliberate "promiscuousness." On the emotional-romantic if not even tragic score he may write off all imputed indebtedness – save once more in some degree, to Nodier. And the consequence is that those who delight in him derive their delight from sources of the most extraordinarily various character, probably never represented by an exactly similar group in the case of any two individual lovers, but quite inexhaustible. To represent him to those who do not know him is not easy; to represent him to those who do is sure, for this very reason, to arouse mild or not mild complaints of inadequacy. And it must be clear, from what has been already said, that some critic may very likely exclaim, in reference to any selected piece, "Why, this is neither a novel nor a romance, nor even in any legitimate sense a tale!" The inestimable rejoinder already quoted,²⁴⁰– episcopal, and dignifying even that order though it was made only by a bishop in partibus– is the only one here.

La Bohême Galante, Les Filles du Feu, and Le Rêve et la Vie.

The difficulty of discussing or illustrating, in short space and due proportion, the novel or roman element in such a writer must be sufficiently obvious. His longer travels in Germany and the East are steeped in this element; and the shorter compositions which bear names of novel-character are often "little travels" in his native province, the Isle of France, and that larger banlieue of Paris, towards Picardy and Flanders, which our Seventy Thousand saved, by dying, the other day. But it is impossible – and might even, if possible, be superfluous – to touch the first group. Of the second there are three subdivisions, which, however, are represented with not inconsiderable variation in different issues.²⁴¹ Their titles are La Bohême Galante, Les Filles du Feu, and Le Rêve et la Vie, the last of which contains only one section, Aurélia, never, if I do not mistake, revised by Gérard himself, and only published after his most tragic death. Its supra-title really describes the most characteristic part or feature of all the three and of Gérard's whole work.

Their general character.

To one who always lived, as Paul de Saint-Victor put it in one of the best of those curious exercises of his mastery over words, "in the fringes²⁴² of the actual world," this confusion of place and no place, this inextricable blending of fact and dream, imagination and reality, was natural enough; and no one but a Philistine will find fault with the sometimes apparently mechanical and Sternian transitions which form part of its expression. There was, indeed, an inevitable mixedness in that strange nature of his; and he will pass from almost "true Dickens" (he actually admits inspiration from him) in accounts of the Paris Halles, or of country towns, to De Quinceyish passages, free from that slight touch of apparatus which is undeniable now and then in the Opium Eater. Here are longish excursions of pure family history; there, patches of criticism in art or drama; once at least an elaborate and – for the time – very well informed as well as enthusiastic sketch of French seventeenth-century poetry. It may annoy the captious to find another kind of confusion, for which one is not sure that Gérard himself was responsible, though it is consistent enough with his peculiarities. Passages are redistributed among different books and pieces in a rather bewildering manner; and you occasionally rub your eyes at coming across – in a very different context, or simply shorn of its old one – something that you have met before. To others this, if not exactly an added charm, will at any rate be admitted to "grace of congruity." It would be less like Gérard if it were otherwise.

Particular examples.

In fact it is in these mixed pieces that Gérard's great attraction lies. His regular stories, professedly of a Hoffmannesque kind, such as La Main Enchantée and Le Monstre Vert, are good, but not extraordinarily good, and classable with many other things of many other people. I, at least, know nothing quite like Aurélia and Sylvie, though the dream-pieces of Landor and De Quincey have a certain likeness, and Nodier's La Fée aux Miettes a closer one.

Aurélia.

Aurélia (which, whether complete in itself or not, was pretty clearly intended to be followed by other things under the general title of Le Rêve et la Vie) has, as might be expected, more dream than life in it. Or rather it is like one of those actual dreams which themselves mix up life – a dream in the composition. Aurélia is the book-name of a lady, loved (actually, it seems) and in some degree responsible for her lover's aberrations of mind. He thinks he loves another, but finds he does not. The two objects of his passion meet, and the second generously brings about a sort of reconciliation with the first. But he has to go to Paris on business, and there he becomes a mere John-a-Dreams, if not, in a mild way, a mere Tom of Bedlam. The chief drops into reality, indeed, are mentions of his actual visits to maisons de santé. But the thing is impossible to abstract or analyse, too long to translate as a whole, and too much woven in one piece to cut up. It must be read as it stands, and any person of tolerable intelligence will know in a page or two whether Gérard is the man for him or not. But when he was writing it he was already over even the fringe of ordinary sane life, and near the close of life itself. In Sylvie he had not drifted so far; and it is perhaps his best diploma-piece.²⁴³

And especially Sylvie.

For Sylvie, with its sub-title, "Souvenirs du Valois," surely exhibits Gérard, outside the pure travel-books, at his very best, as far as concerns that mixture of rêve and réalité– the far-off goal of Gautier's²⁴⁴ Chimère– which has been spoken of. The author comes out of a theatre where he has only seen Her, having never, though a constant worshipper, troubled himself to ask, much less to seek out, what She might be off the stage. And here we may give an actual piece of him.

We were living then in a strange kind of time,²⁴⁵ one of those which are wont to come after revolutions, or the decadences of great reigns. There was no longer any gallantry of the heroic kind, as in the time of the Fronde; no vice, elegant and in full dress, as in that of the Regency; no "Directory" scepticism and foolish orgies. It was a mixture of activity, hesitation, and idleness – of brilliant utopias; of religious or philosophical aspiration; of vague enthusiasms mingled with certain instincts of a sort of Renaissance. Men were weary of past discords; of uncertain hopes, much as in the time of Petronius or Peregrinus. The materialist part of us hungered for the bouquet of roses which in the hands of Isis was to regenerate it – the Goddess, eternally young and pure, appeared to us at night and made us ashamed of the hours we had lost in the day. We were not at the age of ambition, and the greedy hunt for place and honours kept us out of possible spheres of work. Only the poet's Ivory Tower remained for us, and we climbed it ever higher and higher to be clear of the mob. At the heights whither our masters guided us we breathed at last the pure air of solitude; we drank in the golden cup of legend; we were intoxicated with poetry and with love. But, alas! it was only love of vague forms; of tints roseal and azure; of metaphysical phantoms. The real woman, seen close, revolted our ingenuousness: we would have had her a queen or a goddess, and to draw near her was fatal.

But he went from the play to his club, and there somebody asked him for what person (in such cases one regrets laquelle) he went so constantly to the same house; and, on the actress being named, kindly pointed out to him a third member of this club as the lady's lover-in-title. The peculiar etiquette of the institution demanded, it seems, that the fortunate gallant should escort the beloved home, but then go to the cercle and play (they were wise enough to play whist then) for great part of the night before exercising the remainder of his rights and privileges. In the interval, apparently, other cats might be grey. And, as it happened, Gérard saw in a paper that some shares of his, long rubbish, had become of value. He would be better off; he might aspire to a portion of the lady's spare hours. But this notion, it is not surprising to hear, did not appeal to our Gérard. He sees in the same paper that a fête is going to take place in his old country of the Valois; and when at last he goes home two "faces in the fire" rise for him, those of the little peasant girl Sylvie and of the châtelaine Adrienne – beautiful, triumphant, but destined to be a nun. Unable to sleep, he gets up at one in the morning, and manages to find himself at Loisy, the scene of the fête, in time.

One would fain go on, but duty forbids a larger allotment of space; and, after all, the thing itself may be read by any one in half an hour or so, and will not, at least ought not, to be forgotten for half a lifetime – or a whole one. The finding of Sylvie, no longer a little girl, but still a girl, still not married, though, as turns out, about to be so, is chequered with all sorts of things – sketches of landscape; touches of literature; black-and-white renderings of the Voyage à Cythère; verses to Adrienne; to the actress Aurélie (to become later the dream-Aurélia); and, lastly – in the earlier forms of the piece at any rate – snatches of folk-song, including that really noble ballad:

 
Quand Jean Renaud de la guerre revint,
 

which falls very little, if at all, short of the greatest specimens of English, German, Danish, or Spanish.

And over and through it all, and in other pieces as well, there is the faint, quaint, music – prose, when not verse – which reminds one²⁴⁶ somehow of Browning's famous Toccata-piece. Only the "dear dead women" are dear dead fairies; and the whole might be sung at that "Fairy's Funeral" which Christopher North imagined so well, though he did not carry it out quite impeccably.

Alfred de Vigny: Cinq-Mars.

The felicity of being enabled to know the causes of things, a recognised and respectable form of happiness, is also one which I have recently enjoyed in respect of Alfred de Vigny's Cinq-Mars. For Vigny as a poet my admiration has always been profound. He appears to me to have completed, with Agrippa d'Aubigné, Corneille, and Victor Hugo, the quatuor of French poets who have the secret of magnificence;²⁴⁷ and, scanty as the amount of his poetical work is, Éloa, Dolorida, Le Cor, and the finest passages in Les Destinées have a definite variety of excellence and essence which it would not be easy to surpass in kind, though it might be in number, with the very greatest masters of poetry. But I have never been able, frankly and fully, to enjoy his novels, especially Cinq-Mars. In my last reading of the chief of them I came upon an edition which contains what I had never seen before – the somewhat triumphant and strongly defiant tract, Réflexions sur la Vérité dans l'Art, which the author prefixed to his book after its success. This tractate is indeed not quite consistent with itself, for it ends in confession that truth in art is truth in observation of human nature, not mere authenticity of fact, and that such authenticity is of merely secondary importance at best. But in the opening he had taken lines – or at any rate had said things – which, if not absolutely inconsistent with, certainly do not lead to, this sound conclusion. In writing historical novels (he tells us) he thought it better not to imitate the foreigners (it is clear that this is a polite way of indicating Scott), who in their pictures put the historical dominators of them in the background; he has himself made such persons principal actors. And though he admits that "a treatise on the decline and fall of feudalism in France; on the internal conditions and external relations of that country; on the question of military alliances with foreigners; on justice as administered by parliaments, and by secret commissions on charges of sorcery," might not have been read while the novel was; the sentence suggests, with hardly a possibility of rebuttal, that a treatise of this kind was pretty constantly in his own mind while he was writing the novel itself. And the earlier sentence about putting the more important historical characters in the foreground remains "firm," without any necessity for argument or suggestion.

The faults in its general scheme.

Now I have more than once in this very book, and often elsewhere, contended, rightly or wrongly, that this "practice of the foreigners," in not making dominant historical characters their own dominant personages, is the secret of success in historical novel-writing, and the very feather (and something more) in the cap of Scott himself which shows his chieftainship. And, again rightly or wrongly, I have also contended that the hand of purpose deadens and mummifies story. Vigny's own remarks, despite subsequent – if not recantation – qualification of them, show that the lie of his land, the tendency of his exertion, was in these two, as I think, wrong directions. And I own that this explained to me what I had chiefly before noticed as merely a fact, without enquiring into it, that Cinq-Mars, admirably written as it is; possessing as it does, with a hero who might have been made interesting, a great person like Richelieu to make due and not undue use of; plenty of thrilling incident at hand, and some actually brought in; love interest ad libitum and fighting hardly less so; a tragic finish from history, and opportunity for plenty of lighter contrast from Tallemant and the Memoirs – that, I say, Cinq-Mars, with all this and the greatness of its author in other work, has always been to me not a live book, and hardly one which I can even praise as statuesque.²⁴⁸

It is no doubt a misfortune for the book with its later readers – the earlier for nearly twenty years were free from this – that it comes into closest comparison with Dumas' best work. Its action, indeed, takes place in the very "Vingt Ans" during which we know (except from slight retrospect) nothing of what D'Artagnan and the Three were doing. But more than one or two of the same historical characters figure, and in the chapters dealing with the obscure émeute which preceded the actual conspiracy, as well as in the scenes touching Anne of Austria's private apartments, the parallel is very close indeed.

And in its details.

Now of course Dumas could not write like Vigny; and though, as is pointed out elsewhere, to regard him as a vulgar fellow is the grossest of blunders as well as a great injustice, Vigny, in thought and taste and dianoia generally, was as far above him as in style.²⁴⁹ But that is not the question. I have said²⁵⁰ that I do not quite know D'Artagnan, though I think I know Athos, as a man; but as a novel-hero the Gascon seems to me to "fill all numbers." Cinq-Mars may be a succession or chain of type-personages – generous but headlong youth, spoilt favourite, conspirator and something like traitor, finally victim; but these are the "flat" characters (if one may so speak) of the treatise, not the "round" ones of the novel. And I cannot unite them. His love-affair with Marie de Gonzague leaves me cold. His friend, the younger De Thou, is hardly more than "an excellent person." The persecution of Urbain Grandier and the sufferings of the Ursuline Abbess seem to me – to use the old schoolboy word – to be hopelessly "muffed"; and if any one will compare the accounts of the taking of the "Spanish bastion" at Perpignan with the exploit at that other bastion – Saint-Gervais at Rochelle – he will see what I mean as well as in any single instance. The second part, where we come to the actual conspiracy, is rather better than the first, if not much; and I think Vigny's presentment of Richelieu has been too much censured. Armand Duplessis was a very great man; but unless you accept the older Machiavellian and the more modern German doctrines as to what a great man may do, he must also be pronounced a most unscrupulous one; while there is little doubt (unless you go back to Louis XI.) that Vigny was right in regarding him as the original begetter of the French Revolution. But he is not here made by any means wholly inhuman, and Vigny makes it justly clear that, if he had not killed Cinq-Mars, Cinq-Mars would have killed him. In such cases of course the person who begins may be regarded as the assassin; but it is doubtful whether this is distributive justice of the highest order. And I do not see much salvation for France in Henry d'Effiat.

This, however, is a digression from our proper subject, but one justifying itself after a fashion, inasmuch as it results from Vigny's own faulty handling of the subject itself and is appropriate to his line of argument in his Examen. He has written the novel not as he ought and as he ought not. The political and historical interests overshadow, confuse, and hamper the purely "fictional" (as people say now), and when he has got hold of a scene which is either purely "fictional," or historical with fictitious possibilities, he does not seem (to me) to know how to deal with it. There is one – of the extremest melodramatic character and opportunities – where, in a hut perched on the side of a Pyrenean gorge or cañon, Richelieu's villainous tool, the magistrate Laubardemont; his mad niece, the former Ursuline Abbess, who has helped to ruin Urbain Grandier; his outcast son Jacques, who has turned Spanish officer and general bravo; and a smuggler who has also figured in the Grandier business, forgather; where the mad Abbess dies in terror, and Jacques de Laubardemont by falling through the flimsy hut-boards into the gorge, his father taking from him, by a false pretence before his death, the treaty between the Cinq-Mars conspirators and Spain. All this is sufficiently "horrid," as the girls in Northanger Abbey would say, and divers French contemporaries of Vigny's from Hugo to Soulié would have made good horrors of it. In his hands it seems (to me) to miss fire. So, again, he has a well-conceived interview, in which Richelieu, for almost the last time, shows "the power of a strong mind over a weak one," and brings the King to abject submission and the surrender of Cinq-Mars, by the simple process of leaving his Majesty to settle by himself the problems that drop in from France, England, and where or whence not, during the time of the Cardinal's absence. It is less of a failure than the other, being more in Vigny's own line; but it is impossible not to remember several scenes – not one only – in Quentin Durward, and think how much better Scott would have done it; several in the Musketeer-trilogy, if not also in the Margot-Chicot series, and make a parallel reflection. And as a final parry by anticipation to the objection that such comparison is "rascally," let it be said that nothing of the kind ever created any prejudice against the book in my case. I failed to get on with it long before I took the least trouble to discover critical reasons that might excuse that failure.

Stello less of a novel, but containing better novel-stuff.

But if any one be of taste sufficiently like mine to find disappointment of the unpleasant kind in Cinq-Mars, I think I can promise him an agreeable, if somewhat chequered, surprise when, remembering Cinq-Mars and basing his expectations upon it, he turns to Stello. It is true that the book is, as a whole, even less "precisely a novel" than Sainte-Beuve's Volupté. But for that very reason it escapes the display of the disabilities which Cinq-Mars, being, or incurring obligation to be, precisely a novel, suffers. It is true also that it exhibits that fancy for putting historical persons in the first "plan" which he had avowed, and over which heads have been shaken. The bulk of it, indeed, consists of romanticised histoires or historiettes (the narrator calls them "anecdotes") of the sad and famous fates of two French poets, Gilbert and André Chénier, and of our English Chatterton. But, then, no one of these can be called "a dominant historical personage," and the known facts permit themselves to be, and are, "romanticised" effectively enough. So the flower is in each case plucked from the nettle. And there is another flower of more positive and less compensatory kind which blooms here, which is particularly welcome to some readers, and which, from Cinq-Mars alone, they could hardly have expected to find in any garden of Alfred de Vigny's. For this springs from a root of ironic wit which almost approaches humour, which, though never merry, is not seldom merciful, and is very seldom actually savage, though often sad. Now irony is, to those who love it, the saving grace of everything that possesses it, almost equal in charm, and still more nearly equal in power, to the sheer beauty, which can dispense with it, but which sometimes, and not so very rarely, is found in its company.

Its framework and "anecdotes."

The substance, or rather the framework, of Stello, ou Les Diables Bleus, requires very little amplification of its double title to explain it. Putting that title in charade form, one might say that its first is a young poet who suffers from its second – like many other young persons, poetical and unpoetical, of times Romantic and un-Romantic. Having an excessively bad fit of his complaint, he sends for a certain docteur noir to treat the case. This "Black Doctor" is not a trout-fly, nor the sort of person who might be expected in a story of diablerie. It is even suggested that he derived the name, by which he was known to society, from the not specially individual habit of wearing black clothes. But there must have been something not quite ordinarily human about him, inasmuch as, having been resident in London at the time of Chatterton's death in 1770, he was – apparently without any signs of Old Parr-like age – a fashionable doctor at Paris in the year 1832. His visit ends, as usual, in a prescription, but a prescription of a very unusual kind. The bulk of it consists of the "anecdotes" – again perhaps not a very uncommon feature of a doctor's visit, but told at such length on the three subjects above mentioned that, with "links" and conclusion,²⁵¹ they run to nearly four hundred pages.

It is possible that some one may say "Connu!" both to the stories themselves and to the moral of real suffering, as opposed to mere megrim, which is so obviously deducible from them. But Stello was quite as clever as the objectors, and knew these things quite as well – perhaps, as far as the case of Gilbert is concerned, rather better than most Englishmen. It is in the manner of the Black Doctor's telling and handling that the charm lies.

The death of Gilbert.

Even for those gluttons of matter who do not care much for manner there is a good deal in the three stories. The first avails itself – as Vigny had unwisely not availed himself in Cinq-Mars, though he was well acquainted with Shakespeare and lesser English masters – of the mixture of comic and tragic. The suffering²⁵² of the unfortunate youth who was partly a French Chatterton and partly a French Clare, his strange visit to the benevolent but rather ineffectual Archbishop of Paris, and the scene at his death-bed, exhibit, at nearly its best, the tragic power which Vigny possessed in a very high, though not always well exercised, degree. And the passage of the poet's death is of such macabre power that one must risk a translation:

(The doctor has been summoned, has found the patient in his garret, bare of all furniture save a bed with tattered clothes and an old trunk.)

His face was very noble and very beautiful; he looked at me with fixed eyes, and between them and the nose, above the cheeks, he showed that nervous contraction which no ordinary convulsion can imitate, which no illness gives, but which says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a practised sailor recognises the tempest in the whistle of the wind that precedes it.

"Always the same, to all thou comest," I said to Death, he himself speaking low enough for my lips to make, in dying ears, only an indistinct murmur. "I know thee always by thine own hollow voice, lent to youth and age alike. How well I know thee and thy terrors, which are no longer such to me!²⁵³ I feel the dust that thy wings scatter in the air as thou comest; I breathe the sickly odour of it; I see its pale ashes fly, invisible as they may be to other men's sight. O! thou Inevitable One, thou art here, verily thou comest to save this man from his misery. Take him in thine arms like a child; carry him off; save him; I give him to thee. Save him only from the devouring sorrow that accompanies us ever on the earth till we come to rest in thee, O Benefactor and Friend!"

I had not deceived myself, for Death it was. The sick man ceased to suffer, and began suddenly to enjoy the divine moment of repose which precedes the eternal immobility of the body. His eyes grew larger, and were charged with amazement; his mouth relaxed and smiled; his tongue twice passed over his lips as if to taste once more, from some unseen cup, a last drop of the balm of Life. And then he said with that hoarse voice of the dying which comes from the inwards and seems to come from the very feet:

 
At the banquet of life a guest ill-fated.²⁵⁴
 

The satiric episode – contrast.

But this death-bed, and the less final but hardly less tragic wanderings of the victim in his visit to the Archbishop (by whom also the doctor has been summoned), are contrasted and entangled, very skilfully indeed, with a scene – the most different possible – in which he still appears. The main personages in this, however, are his Majesty Louis XV. and the reigning favourite, Mademoiselle de Coulanges, a young lady who, from the account given of her, might justify the description, assigned earlier to one of her official predecessors in a former reign, of being "belle comme un ange, et bête comme un panier."²⁵⁵ At first the lovers (if we are to call them so) are lying, most beautifully dressed and quite decorously, on different sofas, both of them with books in their hands, but one asleep and the other yawning. Suddenly the lady springs up shrieking, and the polite and amiable monarch (apart from his Solomonic or Sultanic weaknesses, and the perhaps graver indifference with which he knowingly allowed France to go to the devil, Louis le Bien-Aimé was really le meilleur fils du monde) does his best to console his beloved and find out the reason of her woes. It appears at last that she thinks she has been bitten by a flea, and as the summer is very hot, and there has been much talk of mad dogs, she is convinced that the flea was a mad flea, and that she shall die of hydrophobia. (As it happens, the flea is not a flea at all, but a grain of snuff.) However, the Black Doctor is sent for, and finds the King as affable as usual, but Mlle. de Coulanges coiled up on a sofa – like something between a cat and a naughty child afraid of being scolded – and hiding her face. On being coaxed with the proper medical manner, she at last bursts out laughing, and finally they all laugh together, till his Majesty spills his coffee on his gold waistcoat, and then pulls the doctor down on a sofa to talk Paris gossip. And now the Black One clears himself from any connection with the serpent as far as wisdom is concerned, though he has plenty of a better kind. Fresh from Gilbert's appeal to the Archbishop, he tries to interest this so amiable Royalty in the subject. But the result is altogether unfortunate. The lady is merely contemptuous and bored. The King gets angry, and displays that indifference to anybody else's suffering which moralists (whether to an exaggerated extent or not, is another question) are wont to connect with excessive attention to a man's own sensual enjoyments. After some by no means stupid but decidedly acid remarks on Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, he takes (quite good-naturedly in appearance) the doctor's arm, walks with him to the end of the long apartment, opens the door, quotes certain satiric verses on literary and scientific "gents," and – shuts it on his medical adviser and guest.