“By Jove, I know well enough it isn’t you who think so. But, my dear fellow, it isn’t La Fontaine either. If he had only had that lightness, which, for that matter, he regretted and apologized for at the end of his life, he would never have been the artist we admire. That’s just what I said in my essay this morning, and I brought a great many quotations in support of my theory--for you know I’ve a fairly good memory. But I soon left La Fontaine, and taking as my text the justification these lines might afford to a certain class of superficial minds, I just let myself go in a tirade against the spirit of carelessness, of flippancy, of irony, of what is called ‘French wit,’ which some people think is the spirit of France, and which sometimes gives us such a deplorable reputation among foreigners. I said that we ought not to consider all this as even the smile of France, but as her grimace; that the real spirit of France was a spirit of investigation, of logic, of devotedness, of patient thoroughness; and if La Fontaine had not been animated by that spirit, he might have written his tales, but never his fables nor the admirable epistle (I showed that I knew it) from which the lines we had to comment upon were taken. Yes, old boy, a violent attack--perhaps I shall get ploughed for it. But I don’t care two straws; I had to say it.” Olivier had not particularly meant what he had said just before. He had yielded to his desire to be brilliant and to bring out, as it were carelessly, a sentence which he thought would tremendously impress his friend. But now that Bernard took it in this way, there was nothing for him to do but to beat a retreat. But his great weakness lay in the fact that he was in much more need of Bernard’s affection than Bernard of his. Bernard’s speech had humiliated, mortified him. He was vexed with himself for having spoken too soon. It was too late now to go back on it--to agree with Bernard, as he certainly would have done if he had let him speak first. But how could he have foreseen that Bernard, whom he remembered so scathingly subversive, would set up as a defender of feelings and ideas which Passavant had taught him could not be considered without a smile? But he really had no desire to smile now; he was ashamed. And as he could neither retract nor contradict Bernard, whose genuine emotion he couldn’t help respecting, his one idea was to protect himself--to slip out of it. “Oh! well, if you put that in your essay, it wasn’t against me that you were saying it.... I’m glad of that.” He spoke as though he were vexed--not at all in the tone he would have liked. “But it _is_ against you that I am saying it now,” retorted Bernard.