Passavant...? best not speak of him, I think. Nothing spreads more ruin or receives more applause than men of his stamp--unless it be women like Lady Griffith. At the beginning, I must confess, she rather took me in. But I soon recognized my mistake. People like her are cut out of a cloth which has no thickness. America exports a great many of them, but is not the only country to breed them. Fortune, intelligence, beauty--they seem to possess everything, except a soul. Vincent, we may be sure, will soon find it out. No past weighs upon them--no constraint; they have neither laws, nor masters, nor scruples; by their freedom and spontaneity, they make the novelist’s despair; he can get nothing from them but worthless reactions. I hope not to see Lady Griffith again for a long time to come. I am sorry she has carried off Vincent, who interested me more, but who becomes commonplace by frequenting her. Rolling in her wake, he loses his angles. It’s a pity; he had rather fine ones. If it ever happens to me to invent another story, I shall allow only well-tempered characters to inhabit it--characters that life, instead of blunting, sharpens. Laura, Douviers, La Pérouse, Azaïs ... what is to be done with such people as these? It was not I who sought them out; while following Bernard and Olivier I found them in my path. So much the worse for me; henceforth it is my duty to attend them. THIRD PART PARIS _When we are in possession of a few more local monographs--then, and only then, by grouping their data, by minutely confronting and comparing them, we shall be able to re-consider the subject as a whole, and take a new and decisive step forward. To proceed otherwise, would be merely to start, armed with two or three rough and simple ideas, on a kind of rapid excursion. It would be, in most cases, to pass by everything that is particular, individual, irregular--that is to say, everything, on the whole, that is most interesting_. LUCIEN FÈBVRE: _La Terre et L’Evolution Humaine_. I EDOUARD’S JOURNAL: OSCAR MOLINIER _Son retour à Paris ne lui causa point de plaisir._ FLAUBERT: _L’Education Sentimentale_. _Sept. 22nd._--Hot; bored. Have come back to Paris a week too soon. My eagerness always makes me respond before I am summoned. Curiosity rather than zeal; desire to anticipate. I have never been able to come to terms with my thirst. Took Boris to see his grandfather. Sophroniska, who had been the day before to prepare him, tells me that Madame de La Pérouse has gone into the home. Heavens! What a relief!