Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/197

 NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET

me; for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.

And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which the Reply grew the anec dote which closed my recent article and consider how it is that this pimple has spread to these can cerous dimensions. If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention mag nified some hundreds of times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back way. But I accuse you of nothing nothing but error. When you say that I &quot; retort by calling France a nation of bastards,&quot; it is an error. And not a small one, but a large one. I made no such remark, nor anything resembling it. Moreover, the magazine would not have allowed me to use so gross a word as that.

You told an anecdote. A funny one I admit that. It hit a foible of our American aristocracy, and it stung me I admit that; it stung me sharp ly. It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French kings in the gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:

&quot;He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his grandfather?&quot; That is, the Ameri can aristocrat s grandfather.

read more of our novels before he came. It is the only way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was coming to Paris I read La Terre. &quot;

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