You may now see the various sorts of seductions which assailed me during
this short and brilliant period of my literary life. The world lay
smiling before me, and I felt quite happy,--when I met Monsieur Louis
Veuillot, the eminent editor of "L'Univers," which the government has
since suppressed.
We had exchanged visiting-cards several times, and a few letters, but I
did not as yet know him. I was attracted to him by the very contrasts
which existed between us. My elegant and delicate nature (as the
newspapers then styled it: they _now_ call it my weak and morbid nature)
seemed in absolute contradiction to that robust frame, that oaken
solidity, which revealed beneath its rugged bark its virile juices. His
masculine and potent ugliness reminded me of Mirabeau, of a plebeian
Mirabeau with straight black hair, of a Mirabeau who had found at the
foot of the altar calmness for his tempest-tossed soul. His conversation
delighted and fascinated me. One felt (despite some coarseness in minor
details, and which almost seemed to be assumed) that there glowed within
him the energetic convictions of an honest man and a Christian, who had
at command the most stinging language that ever wrung the withers of
Voltaire's pale successors.
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