This man was Victorien Sardou.
A word more about my Japanese friends.
Kawakami has a son who was five years old when I first saw him. He passed his time drawing everything around him.
I observed in his simple childish drawings a very peculiar manner he affected in representing people’s eyes. They were always drawn like billiard balls emerging from the face. I asked Kawakami:
“Don’t you think that it is an odd way to draw eyes?”
“Yes, but it is because the European eye is quite like the eye of a fish,” the father replied.
That aroused in me a desire to know more intimately his impressions of our race, and I asked him what Europeans look like from the Japanese point of view.
“All Europeans,” he said, “resemble pigs. Some of them look like dirty pigs, some like clean pigs; but they all look like pigs.”
I never said anything about this to M. Sardou.