in one hand and one of these slick and flimsy little volumes in another.
And for this reason, perhaps, as much as any other—because of this savage struggle with an alien tongue, this agonizing, half-intuitive effort by which he groped his way to understanding through a book—the books themselves, and these graceful and shadowy figures who produced them, took on a quality that was as strange as the whole experience of these first weeks in Paris had become. Indeed, in later years, the legendary quality of his savage conflict with this world of print became indistinguishably mixed with the legendary quality of the life around him. Perhaps, even the swift, graceful, and fascinating little drawings and illustrations which dotted the pages of these books were in some measure responsible for this illusion: the pictures gave to the hard and difficult pages of a thousand fictions the illusion of an actual reality: in these little pictures he could see and recognize a thousand things that had already grown familiar to him—the narrow sidewalks and the tall and ancient houses of the Latin Quarter, the bridges of the Seine, the interior of a railway compartment, the great grilled gate of a château, people sitting at the tables in a café or on the terrace, the walls, the roofs, the chimney-pots of Paris which, no matter what changes had come about in human costume, feminine fashions, top-hats, frock-coats, or facial whiskerage had themselves changed very little.
The most extraordinary and vividly imagined phenomenon of his desperate struggle to understand these innumerable fictions was this: Although his reason told him that all these men—all these phantasmal and haunting names—Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Tinayre, Boylesve, Bazin, Theuriet—and all the rest of them—must have known all the sweat and anguish of hard labour, the solicitude, the grinding effort, and the desperate patience, that every artist knows, he became obsessed, haunted with the idea that the works of all this graceful, strange, and fortunate company were written without effort, with the most superb casualness and ease. It was his strange delusion that all of them were not only of an equal talent—could do all kinds of writing equally well and with equal ease—but that the reason for this marvellous endowment lay somehow in the fact that they were “French”—that by the fortunate accident of race and birth each one had somehow been constituted an artist who could do all things gracefully and well, and could do nothing wrong. Favoured at birth by the great inheritance of their language, blood,
