Note 434 — Chapter XII

The labour of reading the book has been repaid by a few useful specimens of Feydeau's want of anything like distinction of thought or style. He makes his hero (whom he does not in the least mean for a fool, though he is one) express surprise at the fact that when he was in statu pupillari he liked fredaines, but when he became his own master did not care about them! Again: "Were I to possess the power and infinite charm of HIM [sic] who invented the stars I could never exactly paint the delightful creature who stood before me." Comment on either of these should be quite needless. Again: "Her nose, by a happy and bold curve, joined itself to the lobes, lightly expanded, of her diaphanous nostrils." Did it never occur to the man that a nose, separately considered from its curve and its nostrils, is terribly like that of La Camarde herself? I wasted some time over the tedious trilogy of Un Début à L'Opera, M. de Saint Bertrand, Le Mari de la Danseuse. Nobody—not even anybody qui Laclos non odit—need follow me.