And then, when I think that I have met under the table, and elsewhere, too, a considerable number of these dragons of virtue, I return to a better opinion of myself, and I consider that, whatever faults I may have, they have another which is, in my eyes, the greatest and worst of all:--I refer to hypocrisy. By looking carefully one might perhaps find another little vice to add; but this is so hideous that I really hardly dare to name it. Come nearer and I will breathe its name into your ear:--it is envy. Envy, and nothing else. It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet. I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.--I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter. An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet--of him who does nothing to him who does something--of the drone to the bee--of the gelding to the stallion. You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain. I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk. He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.--He is a eunuch.--The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.--In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.