Their style was not less mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every country under the sun--pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious, prurient, and low--a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: but they were clever enough, and they manufactured their goods in imitation of Paris. If the stone was not always of the first water, and if the setting was always strange and overdone, at least it shone in artificial light, and that was all it was meant to do. They were intelligent, keen, though short-sighted observers--their eyes had been dulled by centuries of the life of the counting-house--turning the magnifying-glass on human sentiments, enlarging small things, not seeing big things. With a marked predilection for finery, they were incapable of depicting anything but what seemed to their upstart snobbishness the ideal of polite society: a little group of worn-out rakes and adventurers, who quarreled among themselves for the possession of certain stolen moneys and a few virtueless females. And yet upon occasion the real nature of these Jewish writers would suddenly awake, come to the surface from the depths of their being, in response to some mysterious echo called forth by some vivid word or sensation. Then there appeared a strange hotch-potch of ages and races, a breath of wind from the Desert, bringing over the seas to their Parisian rooms the musty smell of a Turkish bazaar, the dazzling shimmer of the sands, the mirage, blind sensuality, savage invective, nervous disorder only a hair's-breadth away from epilepsy, a destructive frenzy--Samson, suddenly rising like a lion--after ages of squatting in the shade--and savagely tearing down the columns of the Temple, which comes crashing down on himself and on his enemies. Christophe blew his nose and said to Sylvain Kohn: "There's power in it: but it stinks. That's enough! Let's go and see something else." "What?" asked Sylvain Kohn. "France." "That's it!" said Kohn. "Can't be," replied Christophe. "France isn't like that." "It's France, and Germany, too." "I don't believe it. A nation that was anything like that wouldn't last for twenty years: why, it's decomposing already. There must be something else." "There's nothing better." "There must be something else," insisted Christophe. "Oh, yes," said Sylvain Kohn. "We have fine people, of course, and theaters for them, too. Is that what you want? We can give you that." He took Christophe to the Théâtre Français. * * * * * That evening they happened to be playing a modern comedy, in prose, dealing with some legal problem.