BEAUTY^S TRIBUTE TO ART* 
53 
find themselves mixed up with infamous parasites, counter-jumpers, 
or skimmers of the exchange, in a communion of intellectual pleas- 
ures, will again find the way to the theatre. And beauty now 
will have its temples, and will be surrounded with so much vener- 
ation and love, that no adorable creature will be tempted to keep 
for herself alone, and for her selfish curtains, the secret of her 
charms, and that even the virgin will consider it a pious duty to 
make public confession to the plaster and to the Daguerreotype, 
and to have an immense number of copies taken, in order to trans- 
mit to posterity the remembrance of the liberality of heaven. 
And the public gardens will be enriched with these divine forms, 
and the impressible imagination of mothers, incessantly acted on by 
the repetition of these types, will strive to reproduce them in liv- 
ing casts, and the odious days of moral artifice and of the crino- 
line will have fled. Let us now say, that these wise ideas, renewed 
from the Greeks, are already the ideas of the immense majority of 
thinkers to-day, and that every day the sublime example of the 
beautiful Pauletta Borghese finds imitators in the midst of the 
best Parisian society. 
It is not long since I met, at the rooms of Ottin, the elegant 
sculptor, two plaster copies, quite fresh; two copies of native 
Parisiennes, the originals unknown, but destined ere long to impel 
all vagabond imaginations in search of a new ideal. Between 
these two a subtle hand placed two Venuses, one of them that of 
Milo! Poor Venus! Poor Greece! The two charminof imao’es 
were, it was said, those of two sisters of illustrious origin, some- 
what of artists ; who, having heard of the scarcity of models, had 
chosen to offer to arl (unknown to their mother) a proof of devo- 
tion. I know sublime acts of charity and love in the same kind, 
on the part of the lorette. And I repeat, that all glory in the 
future is reserved for the woman of France, whose noble brow 
was ever radiant with the fire of celestial intelligence — whose lithe 
and pliant form inspii’es all perfumed and graceful comparisons, 
and calls to the lips the rapturous invocation of the poet — 
“ Alma Venus, hominum divumque suprcma voluptas/’ 
God himself, moreover, does not conceal His predilection for the 
