females, who shall have been seduced by my sublime strains, approach me with prayers and supplications to have pity on them; my only answer to it all will be: 'Pshaw!' Oh, glory without end! My manuscripts shall sell for their weight in gold, my books shall cross the sea; fame and fortune shall pursue me everywhere; I alone will appear indifferent to the murmur of the multitude that shall crowd about me. In a single word, I will be a perfect white blackbird, a veritable eccentric author, feasted, petted, admired, and envied, but always grumbling and ever insupportable."
VII
It took me only six weeks to bring out my first work. It was, as I had determined it should be, a poem in forty-eight cantos. It is true that there were some passages that showed marks of hasty composition, but that was owing to the prodigious rapidity with which it had been written, and I thought that the public, accustomed as it is to the fine writing that it finds in the feuilletons of the newspapers nowadays, would overlook such a trifling defect.
My success was such as accorded with my merit, that is to say, it was unparalleled. The subject of my work was nothing other than myself; in that I conformed to the ruling fashion of our time. The egotistic unreserve with which I told the story of my late sufferings was charming; I let the reader into the secret of a thousand domestic details of most absorbing interest; the description of my mother's porringer alone filled no less than fourteen cantos. The description was perfect; I enumerated every
