When a name is in the public mouth the public nostril likes to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that Milton was a brute; that Raffaelle's vices killed him; that Pascal was mad; that Lamartine lived and died a pauper; that Scipio took the treasury moneys; that Thucydides and Phidias stole; that Heloise and Hypatia were but loose women after all—so the gamut runs over twice a thousand years; and Rousseau is at heart the favourite of the world because he was such a beast, with all his talent.
When the world is driven to tears and prayers by Schiller, it hugs itself to remember that he could not write a line without the smell of rotten apples near, and that when he died there was not enough money in his desk to pay his burial. They make him smaller, closer, less divine—the apples and the pauper's coffin.
"Get a great cook; give three big balls a winter, and drive English horses; you need never consider Society then, it will never find fault with you, ma très-chère."
She did not quite understand, but she obeyed; and Society never did. Society says to the members of it as the Spanish monk to the tree that he pruned, and that cried out under his hook:
"It is not beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but olives."
Moral loveliness or mental depth, charm of feeling or nobleness of instinct, beauty, or shade, it does not ask for, but it does ask for olives—olives that shall round off its dessert, and flavour its dishes, and tickle its sated palate; olives that it shall pick up without trouble, and never be asked to pay for; these are what it likes.
Now it is precisely in olives that the woman who has one foot in Society and one foot out of it will be profuse.
She must please, or perish.