If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not
because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could
not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the
appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write
upon it in the _Revue Critique_. But it appealed to him that I had
come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become
acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had
spent my youth in study.
He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might
have done, and smiled at my imprudences--as for instance when I almost
killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught--(_vous etes
imprudent, c'est de votre age_). He sometimes reproached me with not
jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to
me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to
nothing on account of the war, of his _Notes sur l'Angleterre_,
which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing
nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a
chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to
him after my stay in England.
When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Chatenay, he
sometimes flung his arm round my neck--an act which roused great
astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their
eyes.
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