Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/198

 MARK TWAIN

Now that hits only a few of us, I grant just the upper crust only but it hits exceedingly hard.

I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you. In one of your chapters I found this chance :

&quot;In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of the French soul.&quot;

You see? Your &quot;higher Parisian&quot; class not everybody, not the nation, but only the top crust of the nation applies to debauchery all the powers of its soul.

I argued to myself that that energy must produce results. So I built an anecdote out of your remark. In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped

^o, I repeat, Mark Twain does not like M. Paul Bourget s book. So long as he makes light fun of the great French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the American humorist we know. When he takes his revenge (and where is the reason for taking a revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.

For example :

See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:

&quot; I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because whenever he can t strike up any other way to put in his time, he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grand father was.&quot;

Hear the answer:

&quot;I reckon a Frenchman s got his little standby for a dull time, too; because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he can t find out who his father was.&quot;

The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery. I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women a remark unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a gentleman, a gross insult to a nation

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