I reply: “There has been an election. It is Empis.”
“How do you look at it?” he asks.
“In both ways.”
“Empis?—-”
“And tant pis!”
March 16, 1847.
At the Academy to-day, while listening to the poems, bad to the point of grotesqueness, that have been sent for the competition of 1847, M. de Barante remarked: “Really, in these times, we no longer know how to make mediocre verses.”
Great praise of the poetical and literary excellence of these times, although M. de Barante was not conscious of it.