Rougon, however, had resumed his paternal manner, and told her that she must spare him another five minutes. He had got tired of the work he was doing when she came in, he said; it was a report to be presented to the Senate on certain petitions. Then he began to talk to her about the Empress, for whom she professed enthusiastic devotion. The Empress, said he, had been at Biarritz for the last week. At this the girl again leant back in her arm-chair and began to chatter. She knew Biarritz very well; she had once spent a season there, before it had become such a fashionable watering-place; and she very much regretted that she was unable to revisit it while the Court was there. Then she went on to describe a meeting of the Academy to which M. de Plouguern had taken her on the previous day. An author had been admitted as a member, and she made many jokes at the expense of his baldness. She had a horror of books, she declared. Whenever she tried to read, she had to go off to bed, suffering from terrible nervous attacks. She could not understand what she read. Then, on Rougon telling her that the author received at the Academy on the previous day was an enemy of the Emperor's, and that his discourse had swarmed with abominable allusions, she seemed quite astounded. 'Why, he looked such a nice man!' she exclaimed. But Rougon also had begun to inveigh against books. A novel had just been published, he said, which had aroused his utmost indignation. It was a work of the most depraved kind, which, while claiming to portray the exact truth, dragged the reader through all the wild fancies of an hysterical woman.[8] The word hysterical seemed to please him, for he repeated it three times; but when Clorinde asked him to explain what he meant by it, he refused to answer, suddenly becoming very prudish. 'Everything may be said,' he continued, 'only there is a fitting way of saying it. In administrative matters, for instance, we are frequently obliged to tackle very delicate subjects. I have read, for example, reports upon certain matters which have been very precise, very detailed; but they have been written in a clear, simple, straightforward style, so that there was nothing unchaste or impure about the document. But our present-day novelists have adopted a style which is full of suggestiveness, a manner of describing things which makes it appear as if they were actually going on before you. They call that art. To me it seems to be simply indecency and bad taste.'