Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/180

 contemporaries can possibly decide the question of a man's immortality!

Read over the lists of academicians since Richelieu's time, and see how many among all those names you will ever have heard of. Intrigue and prejudice frequently settle the question of a day's immortality. But in the case of a century's fame it requires solid merit of a higher order than that which is often necessary to secure the election of a candidate to an arm-*chair among the favoured Forty. Flaubert and Maupassant assuredly hold very different places in French literature from those occupied by the mild André Theuriet and the dull Paul Bourget; and it is as difficult to explain the absence of Balzac from this literary club half a century ago as it is to explain the presence there to-day of M. Henri Lavedan. The mystified foreigner notes that Balzac created the colossal Comédie Humaine, and that M. Lavedan wrote Le Vieux Marcheur, and is apt to tell himself gleefully that the judgment of the elect in France is no wiser, no more judicious, than that of the common herd elsewhere. But of course the institution, with its pretentious traditions, its mock air of the ancien régime, is only a club, whose members choose their society upon other than intellectual grounds. There is a great deal of wire-pulling, too, in the matter, chiefly done by women. In fact, when the noble dames of