"
* * * * *
_And as such, Madame, you have placed them exactly where they should be:
their earthly Paradise is the apartment of Monsieur Willy. In your
salon, the probable palm and rubber-plant give the impression of
luxuriant Edenic flora, relatively speaking, and illustrate the
transmogrification which is to allow M. Gaston Deschamps--critic of a_
"Temps" _plus-que-passe--to announce to the wilderness (where he speaks
familiarly of Chateaubriand), and to the College de France, how well he
can admire and understand a true poet_.
* * * * *
_For you are a true poet and I will declare it freely, not concerning
myself more with the legends Parisians have the habit of weaving about
every celebrity. They admire Gauguin and Verlaine, not so much for their
originality, as for their eccentricities. And so it happens that certain
persons, unacquainted with the nameless sentiment, the order and purity,
the thousand interior virtues which guide you, persist in saying that
you wear your hair short and that Willy is bald._
_Must I then--living at Orthez--tell_ Tout-Paris _who you are, present
you to all who know you--I who have never seen you_?
* * * * *
_I will say then, that Madame Colette Willy never had short hair, that
she does not wear masculine attire; that her cat does not accompany her
when she goes to a concert, that her friend's dog does not drink from a
tumbler.
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