A little more, and they
would have ascribed to her the tastes of the mustiest symbolists--and
one knows how far from pleasing are those Muses' robes, how odious the
yellow bandeaux above faces expressionless as eggs. Robes and bandeaux
are to-day relegated to drawers in the Capitol at Toulouse, from which
they will never be taken more, except when occasion calls for the
howling of official alexandrines in honor of M. Gaston Deschamps,
Jaures, or Vercingetorix._
_Madame Colette Willy rises to-day on the world of Letters as the
poetess--at last!--who, with the tip of her slipper sends all the
painted, laureled, cothurned, lyre-carrying Muses--that, from Monselet
to Renan, have roused the aspirations of classes in Rhetoric--rolling,
from the top to the bottom of Parnassus._
_How charming she is thus--presenting her bull-dog and her cat with as
much assurance as Diana would her hound, or a Bacchante her tiger._
_See her apple-cheeks, her eyes like blue myosotis, her
lips--poppy-petals, and her ivy-like grace! Tell me if this way of
leaning against the green barrier of her garden-close, or of lying under
the murmurous arbor of mid-Summer, is not worth the starched manner,
that old magistrate de Vigny--with his neckcloth wound three times
around, and rigid in his trousers' straps--imposed upon his goddesses?
Madame Colette Willy is a live woman, a real woman, who has dared to be
natural and who resembles a little village bride far more than a
perverse woman of letters_.
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