Maltravers succeeded to the vacant chair.
"Have you been long abroad ?" asked Madame de Ventadour.
"Only four years; yet long enough to ask whether I should not be most abroad in England." "You have been in the East--I envy you.

And Greece, and Egypt,--all the associations! You have travelled back into the Past; you have escaped, as Madame D'Epinay wished, out of civilisation and into romance." "Yet Madame D'Epinay passed her own life in making pretty romances out of a very agreeable civilisation," said Maltravers, smiling.
"You know her Memoirs, then," said Madame de Ventadour, slightly colouring.

"In the current of a more exciting literature few have had time for the second-rate writings of a past century." "Are not those second-rate performances often the most charming," said Maltravers, "when the mediocrity of the intellect seems almost as if it were the effect of a touching, though too feeble, delicacy of sentiment?
Madame D'Epinay's Memoirs are of this character.

She was not a virtuous woman--but she felt virtue and loved it; she was not a woman of genius--but she was tremblingly alive to all the influences of genius.
Some people seem born with the temperament and the tastes of genius without its creative power; they have its nervous system, but something is wanting in the intellectual.

They feel acutely, yet express tamely.
These persons always have in their character an unspeakable kind of pathos--a court civilisation produces many of them--and the French memoirs of the last century are particularly fraught with such examples.
This is interesting--the struggle of sensitive minds against the lethargy of a society, dull, yet brilliant, that _glares_ them, as it were, to sleep.