The Saint-Florentin Murders Read Online Free PDF

admitting defeat,’ said Noblecourt. ‘I don’t need to justify my contradictions. I certainly maintain that meat should bemeat and taste like meat, but in art I’m delighted by fantasy. A well-organised fantasy that makes us dream.’
    ‘But the depth of the new style,’ said La Borde, ‘stimulates our imagination by combining the emotion of tragedy with the pleasure and delight of melody.’
    ‘I see nothing in it but faults and pretence. A kind of deceptive mishmash of meat and fish.’
    ‘You are talking just like the directors of our Royal Academy of Music, who ignore foreign art for fear it will bring down theirs.’
    ‘Peace, gentlemen,’ growled Semacgus. ‘I’m sure you’re both right, but you seem to take a perverse pleasure in forcing your arguments, with even more bad faith than the Président de Saujac.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Noblecourt, laughing, ‘that’s the whole pleasure of the thing. To maintain the unmaintainable, push your reasoning beyond the reasonable and put forward exaggerated arguments – all that is part of the joy of the debate.’
    ‘You admit it, then?’
    ‘I admit nothing. All I’m saying is that we should increase the controversy and put some bite into our presentation. The alternative would be like defending a dull thesis to the academics of the Sorbonne.’
    Marion approached Louis, who was starting to doze off, and gave him a bag of fresh hazelnuts from a tree in the garden. Nicolas noticed his son’s tiredness.
    ‘My friends,’ he said, consulting his repeater watch, which sounded softly, ‘I think it’s time to bring this memorable evening to an end. Our host needs to rest after this royal feast and his excesses.’
    ‘So early?’ said Noblecourt. ‘Do you really want to interrupt this delightful interlude?’
    ‘Tomorrow has already sounded, and Louis’s mother is waiting for him. He is leaving for Juilly at dawn on the first mail coach.’
    ‘Before he leaves us, I want to give him a gift,’ said the procurator.
    Monsieur de Noblecourt undid the second package, took out two small leather-bound volumes bearing his arms, and opened one with infinite care. Everyone present smiled, knowing his fanatical devotion to his books.
    ‘Here,’ he said with blissful solemnity, ‘are Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Abbé Banier, of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. These fine works are decorated with frontispieces and illustrations. My dear Louis, I offer them to you with all my heart …’ He added in a lower voice, as if to himself, ‘The only gifts that matter are those from which one parts with sorrow and regret.’ Then, raising his voice again, ‘May these fables, with their gods made flesh, stimulate your imagination and instil in you a love of literature.
    All is enchantment, each thing has its place,
    With a body, a soul, a mind and a face. 6
    May reading them persuade you that what is elegant in Latin is not necessarily so in French, that each language has a tone, an order and a genius peculiar to it. Whenever you need to translate, remember to be simple, clear and correct, in order to render the author’s ideas precisely, omitting nothing of the delicacy andelegance of his style. Everything should hold together, in fact. Just as, in life, one becomes hard and heartless by being too attached to the letter of a principle, so in translation, the tone can become dry and arid as soon as one tries to impose one’s own ideas in place of the author’s.’
    ‘Monsieur,’ said Louis, now completely awake again, ‘I don’t know what to say. I certainly wouldn’t like to deprive you of a treasure to which I know you are attached. My father has told me all about your great love of the books in your library.’
    ‘Not at all, it is a pleasure for me to offer them to you! Don’t worry, I still have Monsieur Burman’s large folio edition, published by Westeins and Smith in 1732, with splendid intaglio figures …’
    ‘Many thanks,