"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach you what brilliance and Bovarysme really mean.'" I was shocked at this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my temper.
"Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from reassuring reply. To fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Félicien Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose, and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of 1932. In life--or death--he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of the gods of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised, and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my dismay.
"You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of you modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken--ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"
Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I admire, but who was Chopin?"
Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's." Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as if his vanity had been wounded: