Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/68

Rh for him, for he rendered her poverty with a brio that made it as picturesque as her wealth. He professed always to care for nothing but beauty. "Fortunio," he says, in the preface to this grotesquely meretricious production, "is a hymn to Beauty, Wealth, and Happiness—the only three divinities we recognise. It celebrates gold, marble, and purple." But, in fact, he was too curious an artist not to enjoy ugliness very nearly as much, and he drew from it some of his most striking effects. We recommend to the reader the account of a stroll among the slaughterhouses and the asylums of lost dogs and cats in the Paris banlieue, in the "Caprices et Zigzags;" his elaborate pictures, several times repeated, of Spanish bull-fights (which show to what lengths l'art pour l'art can carry the kindliest tempered of men), and a dozen painful passages in his "Tableaux de Siége." This little volume, the author's last, is a culminating example of his skill. It is a common saying with light littérateurs, that to describe a thing you must not know it too well. Gautier knew Paris—picturesque Paris—with a forty years' knowledge; yet he has here achieved the remarkable feat of suppressing the sense of familiarity and winning back, for the sake of inspiration, a certain freshness of impression. The book was written in evil days; but nothing