"M. Manel," the paragraph read, "the well-known journalist, has renounced his candidacy for the vacant chair among the Forty Immortals. M. Manel will be well remembered by Parisians as the author who has written so much and so charmingly under the _nom de plume_ of 'Le Vicomte de Bornier.'" Whether this was or was not fair to the gentleman I had seen so highly honored I do not know, but it was calculated to make him a literary light of interest.
You are told in Paris that the title of Academician is the only one remaining under the republic which counts for anything; and, on the other hand, you hear the Academy called a pleasant club for old gentlemen, to which new members are elected not for any great work which they are doing in the world, but because their point of view is congenial to those who are already members. All that can be said against the Academy by a Frenchman has been printed by Alphonse Daudet in _The Immortals_. In that novel he charges that the Academy numbs the style of whosoever wears its green livery; he says that he who enters its door leaves originality behind, that he grows conservative and self-conscious, and that whatever freshness of thought or literary method may have been his before his admittance to its venerable portals is chilled by the severe classicism of his thirty-nine brethren.
This may or may not be true of some of the members, but it certainly cannot be true of all, as many of them were never distinguished as authors, but were elected, as were De Lesseps and Pasteur, for discoveries and research in science, medicine, or engineering.
Nor is it true of M. Paul Bourget, who is the last distinguished Frenchman to be received into the ranks of the Immortals. The same observations which he made to me while in this country, and when he was not an Academician, upon Americans and American institutions, he has repeated, since his accession to the rank of an Immortal, in _Outre Mer_. And the freedom with which he has spoken shows that the shadow of the palm-trees has not clouded his cosmopolitan point of view, nor the classicism of the Academy dulled his wonderful powers of analysis. In his election, representing as he does the most brilliant of the younger and progressive school of French writers, the Academy has not so much honored the man as the man has honored the Academy.