Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

56

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

the air of it is apt to be, on the vague presumption, but addressed almost in especial to his disparities and oddities and
thereby, no doubt, none too different from affection. His friends
at all events were a rich and eager cenacle, among whom he was
on occasion, by his picturesque personality, a natural and overtopping centre; partly perhaps because he was so much and
so familiarly at home. He wore, up to any hour of the afternoon,
that long, colloquial dressing-gown, with trousers to match,
which one has always associated with literature in Francethe uniform really of freedom of talk. Freedom of talk abounded
by his winter fire, for the cenacle was made up almost wholly
of the more finely distinguished among his contemporaries;
of philosophers, men of letters and men of affairs belonging to
his own generation and the next. He had at the time I have in
mind a small perch, far aloft, at the distant, the then almost
suburban, end of the Faubourg Saint-Honore, where on Sunday afternoons, at the very top of an endless flight of stairs, were
to be encountered in a cloud of conversation and smoke most of
the novelists of the general Balzac tradition. Others of a different
birth and complexion were markedly not of the number, were
not even conceivable as present; none of those, unless I misremember, whose fictions were at that time " serialised " in
the Revue des Deux Mondes. In spite of Renan and Taine
and two or three more, the contributor to the Revue would
indeed at no time have found in the circle in question his foot
on his native heath. One could recall if one would two or
three vivid allusions to him, not of the most quotable, on the
lips of the most famous of " naturalists "t-allusions to him
as represented for instance by M. Victor Cherbuliez and M.
Octave Feuillet. The author of these pages recalls a concise
qualification of this last of his fellows on the lips of Smile Zola,
which that absorbed auditor had too directly, too rashly asked
for; but which is alas not reproducible here. There was little
else but the talk, which had extreme intensity and variety;
almost nothing, as I remember, but a painted and gilded idol,
of considerable size, a relic and a memento, on the chimneypiece. Flaubert was huge and diffident, but florid too and