He summed her up as a tomboy, an
artist, a mind great, generous, devoted and chaste (this last term
would need explanation); her characteristic traits were those of a
man, not a woman. She had, so he opined, neither force of conception,
nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor
the art of the pathetic. The French language she used she did not
thoroughly know, but she had style. Of her glory she made little
account, and despised the public. Her fate was to be duped--and duped
she had been by Bocage, by de Lamennais, by Liszt, by Madame d'Agoult.
Together they discussed the future revolution in manners and morals,
and the influence their books might have in bringing it about. She
suggested to him some subjects that he might develop, and taught him
--up to then opposed to the weed--how to smoke latakia tobacco in a
hookah pipe. Imagining the hookah to be something Russian, he asked
Madame Hanska, to whom he related all this, to purchase him one,
telling her that he would have his wonderful stick-knob, with its
jewels, adapted to it, since he no longer bore the stick about with
him as a fetish.
From Frapesle he returned with the plan matured which he had been
preparing since his excursion to Italy.
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