"
Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on
political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day
the orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A
poet may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever
cease to be himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he
would one day be greater on the political side than on the literary.
"The forum of France was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles
supplanted fields of battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer
than any Austerlitz, and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals;
they spent their lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as
those who went to war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal
outlets of the vital fluid that man had ever known," etc.
This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases
and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de
Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made
a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame
Latournelle and Madame Mignon.
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