Moreover, will our lovely women, our _petites-maîtresses_ extol a novel to the clouds, if the hero does not speak another language than that of their husbands and lovers?--"Bah! that is a book for the servants' hall!" they will say, as they disdainfully cast aside a novel which is neither English, nor German, nor romantic! "It is an insufferable sort of work! forbidden words are used in it! I find the word _cuckold_ there! Mon Dieu! it is shocking! But our newspaper critic will belabor that author soundly for us!"
And in fact the critic reads the work and considers it revoltingly immoral! The author's cynicism, his obscenity are beyond words! he uses the word _cuckold_ when he finds it necessary! Did anyone ever hear of such indecency?--To be sure, Molière often used the same word, and some others even stronger, in several of his works; but what a difference! one must be very careful not to print in a novel what one may say on the stage before a large audience!--Make your inversions, ye novelists; go back to the Syntax; adopt a style _ad usum tyronum linguæ Latinæ_; monopolize mythology, astronomy, mineralogy, ornithology, zoology, aye, even conchology; mingle with it all a little ancient and sacred history, much about dreams and ghosts, minstrels, druids, or hermits, according to the scene of your plot; indulge in sonorous phrases, which used to be called fustian, and you will surely have a fashionable success! Some ladies will faint when they are reading you, others after they read you; there will even be some who will not understand you; but you will appear all the nobler to them! To be unintelligible is to be sublime in your kind. Great geniuses wrap themselves in mystery.--Ask Cagliostro rather,--he ought not to be dead, as he was a sorcerer,--or Lord Byron, or Mademoiselle Lenormand.
As for you, young authors, who claim to be simple and natural, who seek to arouse laughter or interest with events which may happen any day before our eyes, and who describe them for us in such wise as to be readily understood, away with you to oblivion! or go to see _George Dandin_ and _Le Malade Imaginaire_; those plays are worthy of you; but you will never be read by our vaporish ladies, and you will not cause the hundred mouths of Renown to sound.