MARK TWAIN
life; for we have a saying, "Who humiliates my mother includes his own."
Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter, M. Bourget? Indeed I do not. I believe it to have been surreptitiously inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned. I think he did it with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve you when you see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a higher quality.
Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent information about Balzac and those others. 1 All this in simple justice to you and to
��11 Now the style of M. Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read Gustave Droz s Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe, and those books which leave for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandra Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo s Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris? Has he read or heard the plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of modern literature, whose names will be household read La Terre this kind-hearted, refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the violets, the roses, the jasmine or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the far-away corner where the soil is prepared. Hear what he says: I wish M. Paul Bourget had
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