Le Portrait En France Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from French Portraits: Being Appreciation of the Writers of Young France It was Friday, June the 31st, 1872. Goncourt dined with Flaubert at the Cafe Riche, "in a private room, because Flaubert cannot endure noise, tolerates no one near him, and, when dining, likes to take off his coat and shoes." A detail of this sort is worth pages of biography and exegesis. Not even the philosopher can be indifferent to the fact that Socrates sat rubbing his leg in prison, or that Aristotle wore a stomach pad filled with hot oil. The ideas of great men, the fulhams of poetic fiction, the theories for which we fight, are the common patrimony of mankind: what the great man possesses is, in reality, only his eccentricities. That Milton trilled the letter "R" and that Shelley wore wool next to his skin, these are the true glosses on their poems. In these appreciations of the writers of young France I have not, I trust, laid undue stress upon what they have done, slighting what they are. I should like you to see - across these pages - Verlaine hobbling to his cafe in the Boul' Mich', Mallarme jogging by in his donkey-cart, Eekhoud fondling his rabbit, or, it may be, Signoret, impossibly young, promenading his pale soul in the autumnal alleys of Versailles. For many years, now, the dear Lord has preserved me from the sin of inutile reading. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.