Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/406

386. Julien thought it would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.

(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of dots. "That," said his publisher, "would be clumsy and in the case of so light a work clumsiness is death."

"Politics," replies the author, "is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half, who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the morning paper in its own drastic manner."

"If your characters don't talk politics," replied the publisher, "they cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as you claim?")

Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted extract, for it has betn necessary to adopt the invariable practice of suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed either offensive or intolerable (see the Gazette des Tribunaux).

The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first before the duke ("but what duke is it?" thought Julien to himself) with the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said.

"Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution. If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing with a man like