The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.
She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.
People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere, called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society—had she seen it?
No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the petite entrée; they were always full of such blunders.
Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"
No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a Censorship of the Press.
The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un tas d'ordures soigneusement enveloppé."
She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be blamed—it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were noxious, the fungus was bad.
The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.
She said that when there was one it had let pass Crebillon, the Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could be expected to be wiser than all his generation.