Genius alone renews
its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything
else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have
hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a
shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it,
without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in
meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was
perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments,
charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more
delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its
cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a
courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who
made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber
as minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!"
Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the
administration of non-success in little doses.
These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of
absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech
and affected diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so
--are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which
are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed
in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different
type.
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