Reasons of State Read Online Free PDF

hard to remove those inconvenient flats from the passage of “Für Elise” that she always gets wrong.
    “Beethoven,” says the Distinguished Academician,pointing upwards as if giving us an important piece of news. Then, with the indiscreet hand of someone who always treats my house as his own, he turns over the books my secretary brought back a little while ago.
Atheism
by Le Dantec. Good. Solid reading. Bourget’s
The Disciple
. Not bad, but don’t let’s imitate the German
emmerdeurs
with their mania for mixing philosophy into their novels. Anatole France: undoubted talent, but overestimated outside France. Besides, his systematic scepticism doesn’t lead anywhere.
Chanticleer
: a strange thing. A success and a failure. Audacity that is both brilliant and unsuccessful but the only attempt of its kind in theatrical history. And he declaims:
    O Soleil! toi sans qui les choses
    Ne seraient pas ce qu’elles sont …
    (The Academician is unaware that for some years past ten thousand bars and whorehouses in America have been called Chanticleer.) He grunts ironically but acquiescently at the sight of an anticlerical pamphlet by Leo Taxil, but makes a face of disgust, of open disapproval, over
Monsieur de Phocas
by Jean Lorrain, without perhaps knowing that his own publisher, Ollendorf, has swamped the bookshops of our continent with a Spanish translation of this novel, presented as an incomparable example of French genius, with a coloured frontispiece of a naked Astarte by Géo Dupuy, which at least gives our schoolboys dreams. Now he’s laughing, slyly, indulgently, as he comes across
Les cent milles verges
,
The sexual life of Robinson Crusoe
, and
Les fastes de Lesbos
, by unknown authors (three asterisks), profusely illustrated and bought by me yesterday in a specialist shop in the Rue de la Lune.
    “
Ce sont des lectures de Monsieur Peralta
,” I say, coward that I am.
    But our friend suddenly becomes serious and starts talking about literature in the deliberate and magisterial way Peralta and I know so well, trying to prove to us that the true, the best, the greatest literature
from here
is unknown in our countries. We all agree in admiring Baudelaire—sadly buried under a sad stone in the cemetery of Montparnasse—but we ought also to read Léon Dierx, Albert Samain, Henri de Régnier, Maurice Rollinat, Renée Vivien. And we must read Moréas, above all Moréas. (I remain silent rather than tell him how, when I was introduced to Moréas some years ago in the Café Vachetti, he accused me of having shot Maximilian, although I tried to prove that, on grounds of age alone, it would have been impossible for me to be in the Cerro de las Campanas on that day. “
Vous êtes tous des sauvages!
” the poet had replied with the fire of absinthe in his voice.) Our friend laments the fact that Hugo, old Hugo, still enjoys enormous popularity in our countries. It’s known that
over there
workers in cigar factories—who subscribe to public readings to relieve the monotony of their work—are especially fond of
Les Misérables
and
Notre Dame de Paris
, while
Oration pour tous
(“
naïve connerie
,” he says) is still often recited at poetical soirées. And, according to him, this is through our lack of the Cartesian spirit (that’s true: no carnivorous plants grow, no toucans fly, nor do you find cyclones in the
Discourse on Method
); we are too partial to unbridled eloquence, pathos, platform pomposity, resounding with romantic braggadocio.
    Feeling slightly irritated—though he couldn’t have guessed the fact—by an evaluation that directly wounded my concept of what oratory should be (to be more effective among us it must be luxuriant, sonorous, baroque, Ciceronian, original in imagery, implacable in epithets, sweeping in its crescendos), I try to change the subject by laying my handon an extremely rare edition-de-luxe of Renan’s
Prayer on the Acropolis
, illustrated by Cabanel.
    “
Quelle horreur!
”