We laughed at the enemies of M. de Fontanes, who tried to pass him off for a deep and dissembling politician: he was simply an irascible poet, frank to the pitch of anger, with a mind hedged in by contrariety, and as little able to conceal its opinion as to accept that of others. The literary principles of his friend Joubert were not his: the latter found some good everywhere and in every writer; Fontanes, on the contrary, held such and such a doctrine in abhorrence, and could not hear the names mentioned of certain authors. He was the sworn enemy of the principles of modern composition: to place before the reader's eyes material action, the crime at work or the gibbet with its rope, seemed to him so many enormities; he maintained that objects should never be seen except amid poetic surroundings, as though under a crystal globe. Sorrow spending itself mechanically through the eyes seemed to him a sensation fit only for the Cirque or the Grève; he understood the tragic sentiment only as ennobled by admiration and changed, through the medium of art, into "a charming pity." I quoted the Greek vases to him: in the arabesques of those vases one sees Hector's body drawn behind the car of Achilles, while a little figure, flying in the air, represents the shade of Patrocles, consoled by the vengeance of the son of Thetis. "Well, Joubert," cried Fontanes, "what do you say to that metamorphosis of the muse? How those Greeks respected the soul!" Joubert thought himself attacked, and placed Fontanes in contradiction with himself by reproaching him with his indulgence for me. These discussions, highly comical as they often were, never came to an end: one evening, at half-past eleven, when I lived on the Place Louis XV., in the attic floor of Madame de Coislin's house, Fontanes climbed up my eighty-four stairs again to come furiously, with many raps of his cane, to finish an argument which he had left interrupted: it concerned Picard[403], whom at that moment he placed far above Molière; he would have taken good care not to have written a single word of what he said: Fontanes talking and Fontanes pen in hand were two different men. It was M. de Fontanes, I like to repeat, who encouraged my first attempts: it was he who announced the publication of the _Génie du Christianisme_; it was his muse which, full of astonished devotion, directed mine in the new paths along which it had precipitated itself: he taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of throwing light upon them; to put classic language into the mouths of my romantic characters as far as in me lay. In former days there were men who were guardians of taste, like the dragons who watched over the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides; they did not allow youth to enter until it was able to touch the fruit without spoiling it. [Sidenote: And other literary friends.]