'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay, immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart of nature?' [Footnote 3: He is writing of Andrea Sperelli in _Il Piacere_.] With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him. II GEORGES DARIEN Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Molière is always the first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the work entitled _Biribi_ were met by official obstruction and attempted suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by right of that literary liberty which the _esprit gaulois_ has always awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.