“Ah, monseigneur,” cried Lucien, hoping to break thick heads with his golden sceptre, “but ordinary people have neither your intellect nor your charity.  No one heeds our sorrows, our toil is unrecognized.  The gold-digger working in the mine does not labor as we to wrest metaphors from the heart of the most ungrateful of all languages.  If this is poetry—­to give ideas such definite and clear expressions that all the world can see and understand—­the poet must continually range through the entire scale of human intellects, so that he can satisfy the demands of all; he must conceal hard thinking and emotion, two antagonistic powers, beneath the most vivid color; he must know how to make one word cover a whole world of thought; he must give the results of whole systems of philosophy in a few picturesque lines; indeed, his songs are like seeds that must break into blossom in other hearts wherever they find the soil prepared by personal experience.  How can you express unless you first have felt?  And is not passion suffering.  Poetry is only brought forth after painful wanderings in the vast regions of thought and life.  There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and died—­Richardson’s Clarissa, Chenier’s Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Francesca, Moliere’s Alceste, Beaumarchais’ Figaro, Scott’s Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes,—­do we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?”

“And what are you going to create for us?” asked Chatelet.

“If I were to announce such conceptions, I should give myself out for a man of genius, should I not?” answered Lucien.  “And besides, such sublime creations demand a long experience of the world and a study of human passion and interests which I could not possibly have made; but I have made a beginning,” he added, with bitterness in his tone, as he took a vengeful glance round the circle; “the time of gestation is long——­”

“Then it will be a case of difficult labor,” interrupted M. du Hautoy.

“Your excellent mother might assist you,” suggested the Bishop.

The epigram, innocently made by the good prelate, the long-looked-for revenge, kindled a gleam of delight in all eyes.  The smile of satisfied caste that traveled from mouth to mouth was aggravated by M. de Bargeton’s imbecility; he burst into a laugh, as usual, some moments later.

“Monseigneur, you are talking a little above our heads; these ladies do not understand your meaning,” said Mme. de Bargeton, and the words paralyzed the laughter, and drew astonished eyes upon her.  “A poet who looks to the Bible for his inspiration has a mother indeed in the Church.—­M. de Rubempre, will you recite Saint John in Patmos for us, or Belshazzar’s Feast, so that his lordship may see that Rome is still the Magna Parens of Virgil?”

The women exchanged smiles at the Latin words.