But it is too easy to construct a man out of his work. It is more interesting to compare the man of this world with the man he would have liked to be, and the man he chose to express. Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. He was a Porthos, and the Gautier of his stories, that gorgeous barbaric figure, was his boast, cherished as Porthos cherished his dignity. The traits he loved in himself were those that gave colour to his fiction. His olive skin, his strength, his vitality, his scorn of the religion of sacrifice--these were the details he caressed. He was never tired of insisting on everything that helped in this Oriental and Antique projection of himself. His hero in _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ exclaims: 'I am a man of the Homeric times; the world where I live does not belong to me, and I do not understand the society about me. Christ has not yet come for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.... I find the earth as beautiful as heaven, and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I love a statue better than a phantom, and full noon better than twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendour, solidity, colour.' When a reviewer described him as a being, 'fat, jovial, and sanguinary,' he quotes the description with gratitude, and explains gleefully that it refers to his taste for bull-fights. He begins a book: 'People have often caricatured us, dressed like a Turk, cross-legged on cushions.... The caricature is only an exaggeration of the truth.' That was how he liked to think of himself, and how he would like to be imagined. It is interesting to know that he was a kindly bear of a man, who was always called by his Christian name, and delighted in astonishing his friends with outbursts of genius served up in a joyous obscenity.