52 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
We have not been sufficiently grateful to the lorette, for her 
admirable perseverance in bringing back into the current of public 
circulation the metal which fatal individual preoccupations would 
have diverted from it. We forget too much, in France, that the 
Lorette of Gavarni, and Charlet^s Veteran of the Empire are per- 
haps to-day, the only two institutions that have preserved the 
brilliant reflections of the French national spirit — carelessness, 
gayety, generosity, devotion. Perhaps, alas ! there is nowhere 
else that the paltry ideas of the age have not yet penetrated — 
ideas of balancing accounts and measuring every thing by money. 
Yes, it is a valiant corporation, that of the lorettes, and superb 
in its struggle against capital and false morality, and whose future 
appears to me rose-colored. Its grammatical education is, per- 
haps, to be reformed, but it is not the less certain that the first 
woman who shall reign over humanity, both by right of conquest 
and by right of beauty, will be descended from a lorette. It is 
also certain that, from the day when civilized governments, at the 
end of their follies, shall wish to get a little good sense by way 
of a change, the lorette will be called to play the pivotal part in 
the reform. 
One of the first lucid acts of these governments, indeed, would 
infallibly be to arrest the human race on the slope of its degrada- 
tion ; and for this purpose to cause it to share in the benefits of 
the prizes for encouragement hitherto reserved to the species of 
horse, ox, sheep, and hog. ITow I promise, for this time, to the 
lorette, an existence all silken, of festivities, liberty, and glory — of 
liberty, first happiness of woman ; for from the day when beauty 
shall be a fortune, a consecrated superiority, beauty will find itself 
emancipated from the odious tribute that it pays to the frightful 
Minotaur of commerce. Beauty will then give itself, and not be 
any longer sold ; and its worship, progressively infiltrating into 
our manners, will put every thing in its true place ; then art re- 
generated, arming itself with the avenging lash, will purge its 
temples (the first boxes of the opera) from the tradesmen and 
tradeswomen that now dishonor them ; and people of the right 
sort — I speak of myself, of you, the artist, the laborer — all who 
produce and all who think — true men, I say, no longer fearing to 
