Certainly, certainly. I do not contradict this; but it suits my inclination to wander past the conquerors of the day to the shadows in the back premises, into the remote and also, as to equipment, significantly neglected halls of the Century Exhibition, to the great vault in which is collected that which was to make plain the development of French art from the Revolution to Carnot, the grandson. What remains when the human being who gives dinners, haunts antechambers, has cousins in the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whispers malice in one’s ear, ceases to acknowledge greetings, and writes flattering letters, has fallen to dust; when rivals and parasites have disappeared; when the puffs of toadies, and the no less valuable ones of envious men and poison-boilers, are hushed and forgotten? Not much, and there lies the melancholy humour of such wanderings through the realm of shadows. The only feature that always wounded me somewhat in the “Divine Comedy,” is that Dante awards his curses and execrations on the departed according to the rank they occupied among the living. The invectives on the poor soul of a pope have three stripes, those on a prince, two, and on a lord, one. That is an inartistic forgetfulness of the frame chosen by Dante for his poem. If he remained always mindful of his programme of death and hell, he would not be able to distinguish crowns or purple mantles in the red illumination of the under-world. The laughing and sighing philosophy of Hamlet—alas, poor Yorick!—stands higher than the resentful fury of the passionate Italian, who makes the hierarchy overstep the threshold of the grave. It is perhaps the most profound usage of the French language that they deprive the dead of the “Monsieur,” to which every living man, with the exception of those criminally prosecuted and condemned, has a claim. The dead has no longer a title—so much more sorry a fate for him, if, when he was alive, he was nothing more than a title.