Among the national institutions of France, the place of honour must undoubtedly be given to the Académie Française; not because of its utility, still less for the amount of respect and admiration it deserves. My own opinion is, that a more fantastic and ridiculous institution was never invented; and to-day it has no connexion between our democratic times and the monstrous period in which it was founded. Why forty respectable gentlemen who happen to have written books more or less good (and by no means always such as to justify their election), composed tolerable operas, written amusing or instructive plays, as the case may be, should not have been content with the applause and pence of their fellows, but must needs array themselves in an absurd uniform, with triumphant green palm-leaves embroidered over a modern coat, and a toy sword at their side, and play at immortality, is what I have never been able to understand. As if the votes of his contemporaries can possibly decide the question of a man’s immortality! Read over the lists of academicians since Richelieu’s time, and see how many among all those names you will ever have heard of. Intrigue and prejudice frequently settle the question of a day’s immortality. But in the case of a century’s fame it requires solid merit of a higher order than that which is often necessary to secure the election of a candidate to an armchair among the favoured Forty. Flaubert and Maupassant assuredly hold very different places in French literature from those occupied by the mild André Theuriet and the dull Paul Bourget; and it is as difficult to explain the absence of Balzac from this literary club half a century ago as it is to explain the presence there to-day of M. Henri Lavedan. The mystified foreigner notes that Balzac created the colossal _Comédie Humaine_, and that M. Lavedan wrote _Le Vieux Marcheur_, and is apt to tell himself gleefully that the judgment of the elect in France is no wiser, no more judicious, than that of the common herd elsewhere. But of course the institution, with its pretentious traditions, its mock air of the _ancien régime_, is only a club, whose members choose their society upon other than intellectual grounds. There is a great deal of wire-pulling, too, in the matter, chiefly done by women. In fact, when the noble dames of the Faubourg decide to run a candidate, he is pretty certain to be elected. Loti was run by those ladies, and the first thing he did was to scare the club by breaking with all its traditions and making a mockery of academic urbanity. Lavedan, as a reactionary candidate, was naturally the protected of clericals, aristocrats, and the flower of snobbery, and committed a still greater breach of academic etiquette than Loti, by a veiled and sneering attack upon the dead he was deputed to belaud. [Illustration: THE FRENCH ACADEMY]