Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain, in an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en Amerique'--an elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age. The savage charm and real simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in appeal, even to her sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to amuse a young nation of people like the Americans who do not, like the French, pique themselves upon being blase. According to her judgment, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner are lacking in the requisite mental grasp for the “stupendous task of interpreting the great tableau of the American scene.” Nor does she regard their effort at collaboration as a success from the standpoint of art. The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly escapes her; she cannot understand the almost loving appreciation with which this cheaply gross forerunner of the later American industrial brigand was greeted by the American public. The book repels her by “that mixture of good sense with mad folly--disorder”; but she praises Mark Twain's accuracy as a reporter. The things which offend her sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of the characters, and the jests which are so elaborately constructed that “the very theme itself disappears under the mass of embroidery which overlays it.” “The audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temerities of a Mark Twain, still astonish us,” she concludes; “but soon we shall become accustomed to an American language whose savoury freshness is not to be disdained, awaiting still more delicate and refined qualities that time will doubtless bring.”