I have known very good people who liked _Fortunio_; I care for it less than for any other of its author's tales. The fabulously rich and entirely heartless hero has not merely the extravagance but (which is very rare with Gautier) the vulgarity of Byronism; the opening orgie, by an oversight so strange that it may almost seem to be no oversight at all, reminds one only too forcibly of the ironic treatment accorded to that institution in _Les Jeune-France_, and suffers from the reminder; the blending of East and West and the _Arabian Night_ harems in Paris, "unbeknown" to everybody,[210] almost attain that _plusquam_-Aristotelian state of reprobation, the impossible which is also improbable; and the courtesan heroines--at least two of them, Musidora and Arabelle--are even more faulty in this respect. No doubt [Greek: pollai morphai ton ouranion], and the forms of the Pandemic as well as of the Uranian Aphrodite are numerous likewise. But among them one finds no probability or possibility of Gautier's Musidora of eighteen, who might be a young duchess gone to the bad. Neither is the end of the girl, suicide, in consequence of the disappearance of her lover, though quite possible and even probable, at all suitable to Gautier's own fashion of thinking and writing. Merimee could have done it perfectly well. Of almost no others of the delectable contents of the two volumes of _Nouvelles_ and of _Romans et Contes_ has one to speak in this fashion, while some of them come very nearly up to their companion _La Morte Amoureuse_ itself.