222 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



"for nothing. The she-wolf suckled other founders 

 beside those of Rome. Especially when I read of 

 the adventures of Russian and Polish exiles in Siberia 

 men of aristocratic lineage, wandering amid snow 

 and arctic cold, sleeping in rocks or in hollow trees, 

 and holding their own, empty-handed, against hunger 

 and frost and their fiercer, brute embodiments do 

 I recognize a hardihood and a ferity whose wet-nurse, 

 ages back, may well have been this gray dut of the 

 woods. 



It is this fierce, untamable core that gives the point 

 and the splendid audacity to French literature and 

 art its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It 

 is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. 

 When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic ten- 

 dency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. 

 In this great writer, however, it more frequently 

 takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger 

 that glares and bristles, and is insatiable and omnivo- 

 rous. 



And how many times has Paris, that boudoir of 

 beauty and fashion, proved to be a wolfs lair, swarm- 

 ing with jaws athirst for human throats ! the lust 

 for blood and the greed for plunder, sleeping, biding 

 their time, never extinguished. 



I do not contemn it. To the natural historian, it 

 is good. It is a return to first principles again after 

 6O much art, and culture, and lying, and chaavinisme, 

 and shows these old civilizations in no danger of be- 

 coming effete yet. It is like the hell of fire beneath 



