appear commonplace and silly, the prototype of all crossed loves and the
narrow ideal of sentimental schoolgirls? The unfortunate mistress of the
great Abélard deserved a better fate, for she loved him with devoted
admiration, although he was hard and taciturn at times and spared her
neither bitterness nor blows. She dreaded offending him more than she
dreaded offending God, and strove harder to please him. She did not wish
him to marry her, because she thought that "it was wrong and deplorable
that the one whom nature had created for all ... should be appropriated
by one woman." She found, she said, "more happiness in the appellation
of mistress or concubine, than in that of wife or empress," and by
humiliating herself in him, she hoped to gain a stronger hold over his
heart.

* * * * *

The park is really delightful. Alleys wind through the woods and
clusters of trees bend over the meandering stream. You can hear the
bubbling water and feel the coolness of the foliage. If we were
irritated by the bad taste displayed here, it was because we had just
left Clisson, which has a real, simple, and solid beauty, and after all,
this bad taste is not that of our contemporaries. But what is, in fact,
bad taste? Invariably it is the taste of the period which has preceded
ours. Bad taste at the time of Ronsard was represented by Marot; at the
time of Boileau, by Ronsard; at the time of Voltaire, by Corneille, and
by Voltaire in the day of Chateaubriand, whom many people nowadays begin
to think a trifle weak. O men of taste in future centuries, let me
recommend you the men of taste of to-day! You will laugh at their
cramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, and
the faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is served
to them. Everything that is beautiful will then appear ugly; everything