A poet[365], mingling the proscriptions of the Muses with those of the laws, attacked the widow and the orphan in a vigorous improvisation. As these verses were by a writer of talent, they acquired a sort of authority which forbade me to let them pass in silence; I faced about to meet another enemy[366]. The reader would not understand my reply if he did not read the poet's lampoon; I invite you, therefore to cast your eyes over those verses: they are very fine and are to be found everywhere. My reply has not been published: it appears for the first time in these Memoirs. Wretched contentions in which revolutions end! See to what a struggle we come, the feeble successors of those men who, arms in hand, treated great questions of glory and liberty by shaking the universe! Pygmies to-day utter their little cry among the tombs of the giants buried beneath the mountains which they have overturned upon themselves. "PARIS, _Wednesday evening_, 9 _November_ 1831. "SIR, "I received this morning the last number of _Némésis_ which you have done me the honour to send me. To protect myself against the seduction of those praises awarded with so much brilliancy, grace and charm, I need to recall the obstacles that exist between us. We live in two worlds apart; our hopes and fears are not the same; you burn what I adore, and I burn what you adore. You, sir, have grown up amid a crowd of abortions of July; but, even as all the influence which you attribute to my prose will not, according to you, raise up a fallen House, so, according to me, will all the might of your poetry fail to abase that noble House. Can it be that both you and I are thus placed in two impossible positions? "You are young, sir, like the future which you dream of and which will trick you; I am old, like time, which I dream of and which escapes me. If you were to come to sit by my fireside, you obligingly say, you would reproduce my features with your graver: I should strive to make you a Christian and a Royalist. Since your lyre, at the first chord of its harmony, sang my Martyrs and my Pilgrimage, why should not you complete the course? Enter the holy place; time has stripped me only of my hair, as it strips a tree of its leaves in winter, but the sap remains in my heart: my hand is still firm enough to hold the torch which would guide your steps under the vaults of the sanctuary. [Sidenote: Letter to Barthélemy.]