“This comes home,” said Blondet, “but my dear fellow, this is not telling a story, this is _blague_----” “Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you by treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you, and now he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual sterility, my friends, than the piling up of facts. _Le Misanthrope_, that supreme comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of building a palace on a needle’s point. The gist of my idea is in the fairy wand which can turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds (precisely the time required to empty this glass). Would you rather that I fired off at you like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief’s report? We chat and laugh; and this journalist, a bibliophobe when sober, expects me, forsooth, when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to move at the dull jogtrot of a printed book.” (Here he affected to weep.) “Woe unto the French imagination when men fain would blunt the needle points of her pleasant humor! _Dies iroe_! Let us weep for _Candide_. Long live the _Kritik of Pure Reason_, _La Symbolique_, and the systems in five closely packed volumes, printed by Germans, who little suspect that the gist of the matter has been known in Paris since 1750, and crystallized in a few trenchant words--the diamonds of our national thought. Blondet is driving a hearse to his own suicide; Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures newspaper accounts of the last words of all the great men that die without saying anything!” “Come, get on,” put in Finot.