* * * * *
Garçon, un bock! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner; if my books sell I cannot help it—it is an accident.
But you live by writing.
Yes, but life is only an accident—art is eternal.
* * * * *
What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style; there is nothing you won't find in Zola from Chateaubriand to the reporting in the Figaro.
He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper's shop; if the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.
And his last novel "l'Oeuvre," how terribly spun out, and for a franc a line in the "Gil Blas." Not a single new or even exact observation. And that terrible phrase repeated over and over again—"La Conquête de Paris." What does it mean? I never knew any one who thought of conquering Paris;—no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, perhaps, two or three provincials.
* * * * *
You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only for the pleasure of imagining them as Venuses.