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210 the plurality of prices to our mutual satisfaction, for we returned together to the Metropole, the richer by some rare prints and the promise of congenial companionship. Literary reminiscence furnished many bonds of common interest. We had witnessed, it seemed, simultaneously several incidents which marked the waning of old and the rising of new constellations in the firmament of French art. The première of Rodenbach's "Le Voile" and Rostand's "Les Romanesques," the funeral of Paul Verlaine, the students' repudiation of Brunetiere and acclamation of Zola at the Sorbonne, the banquets to Puvis de Chavannes and Emile Verhaeren, had strangely enough united us in the same company without opportunity of introduction. But community of tastes counts for less in friendship than charm of character. What particularly pleased me in M. Beauregard was a modesty, not too common among his compatriots, and a chivalry towards women which the Quartier Latin had failed to destroy. I had known so many petits féroces (as Daudet called them), vaunting their talents and their bonnes fortunes, for whom a mistress ranked somewhere between an advertisement and an absinthe. He was not an arriviste, then; but neither was he a worker. Too self-critical to write badly, too lazy to write well, he ended by not writing at all, and, as his means permitted him to play the rôle of spectator, he followed various movements in art and letters with amiable, intelligent passivity. He had come to Japan with the object of studying on the spot the Kōrin and Shijō schools of painting, but found his progress much hindered by ignorance of the language, which he had not seriously tried to learn. As we were both anxious to see the Matushima, or Pine Islands, perhaps the