Yet she never considered him submissive enough, notwithstanding his
pretty flattery.
"Why shouldn't you have a poet?" he asked, thinking of himself, "as
other people have a dog, a monkey, a parrot--the more so as I have in
me something of these three creatures: I always repeat the same
phrase, I imitate society, I am faithful." And again in a burst of
lyricism, he exclaimed: "Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like
the sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist to his ideal,
prayer to God, pleasure to cause, colour to the painter, life to the
sun. Love me, for I need your affection, so vivifying, so coloured, so
agreeable, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet dominance, and
so constantly vibrating." With comparisons of this sort he was lavish.
"I am like Monsieur de Talleyrand," he told her in another letter.
"Either I show a stolid, tin face and do not speak a word, or else I
chatter like a magpie." Adopting the expression first invented by
Guizot, he characterized their mutual relations as an _entente
cordiale_, impatient, none the less, for the realization of his fancy,
which was to see his idol enter a tabernacle prepared to receive her
on the return from a delightful honeymoon.
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