“That may be.” * * * * * “When Peyrat and Duclerc were discussing,” comments their hostess, “arguments flew so rapidly from side to side that we listened without interrupting. Moreover, there was not the slightest chance of getting in a phrase or even a word edgeways.” Though politics held the first place in Juliette’s salon, as we have said, literature and art were by no means neglected. The hostess herself, an ardent romanticist and idealist, if ever there were one, had no sympathy with the realism which in the middle sixties was beginning to invade French art and literature. Manet’s “Olympia,” when it was exhibited in the Salon, filled her with loathing. When she first saw it, she knew not whether to laugh or to cry. “_Quelle horreur et aussi quels rires_,” she exclaims. “_Voici l’Olympia de Manet. Nue, étendue, accoudée sur un drap blanc. Derrière elle une negresse tient un bouquet. Sur le drap blanc un chat noir déteint et laisse la trace de ses pattes sales. Germinie Lacerteux en littérature, le chat noir aux pattes sales en peinture, c’est complet! O idéal, idéal! Je vais revoir Picardia._” The de Goncourts’ novel, _Germinie Lacerteux_, on its recent appearance, had been vehemently discussed in the Rue de Rivoli. “It is Lucrèce Borgia _graillonnante_,” exclaimed Lamartine’s niece, Mme. de Pierreclos. And most of her fellow-guests as well as her hostess were up in arms at once when some one described the de Goncourts and Flaubert as the leaders of the realistic school. Flaubert, they contended, would never have condescended to wallow in the mud which seemed as much the de Goncourts’ natural element as it was to be that of their disciple Zola. For the author of _La Terre_ and for all his tribe Juliette has ever manifested an extreme aversion. From the de Goncourts’ realism our passionate idealist turned with relief to the classicism of her Grecian friends, Ronchaud, Saint-Victor, Ménard, and to those poets of the new Parnassian school who shared her enthusiasm for the gods and ideals of antiquity.[94]