"Bah! the English doctor? Another instance of the Anglomania enslaving us! Have you ever witnessed inanity so grotesque as this servile imitation? And the claim that 'tis the English who have imparted to the world the ideas of cleanliness and hygiene! The reign of the water, indeed! Have we forgotten the ablutions of the Greeks and Romans, their cult of health, their purifying hot baths? And the fad of eating meat raw bloody! I tell you it was the eating of beefsteak that set my gout rampant. The only commendable thing about the English is that they kicked the Corsican off the throne. But what is the news, Monsieur Superintendent?" "The news is good, your Majesty. We have succeeded in collecting the rest of the dispersed documents pertaining to the creole. All of these we have burned, in compliance with your Majesty's instructions. And a wise precaution it was, for they contained much that should be suppressed, such as letters from the Russian emperor and from Barras relating to the impostor--noxious papers, all of them." "And what writing, except good poetry, is not noxious?" disdainfully inquired the king. "A perpetual conflagration should exist for the consuming of all private letters and documents. Continue the destruction. My desire is well known to you, namely, that only purely official documents remain after me. Spare not a page of confidences, intrigues or anything calculated to embroil historians or encourage romanticists. To ashes with the whole! While the verses of the great poets, the Latins especially, exist, what matters it about other writing? Here is a Petrarch in antique vignettes which I secured yesterday. Crude, is it? Why, the devil, Excellency! There was no mock modesty in those days." Lecazes smiled, remembering Talleyrand's epigram: "The King reads Horace in public and yellow-backs when alone." "Your Majesty," said he, "ever discourses on the intellectual and the artistic--" "Ever, ever," rejoined the flattered monarch. "It is this diversion alone that buoys me up in supporting the weight of the crown, for 'tis heavy, so heavy! Lecazes, I do not lie on roses. If 'twere not for madrigals--eh? The prettiest madrigal ever written to my sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette, was from my pen. Do you remember it? 'Twas of the zephyr and love. Not even Voltaire surpassed it. I ought to have devoted my life to the art of verse and not been obliged to desert the Muse in order to treat with those devilish emigrants who return from exile as they left, having learned nothing, forgotten nothing. The importunate creatures wish to obliterate the Red Terror with the White. They would return to '86, and the guillotine, hang, drown, seeking only a fierce revenge. Such imbecility! One may take vengeance on an individual, but never on a nation. Do you follow me, Lecazes? The fools! They would be better royalists than the King himself." The Superintendent was pleased at this apt epigram, heard then for the first time.