"
I at once began my campaign. I made war upon Voltaire, Beranger, Eugene
Sue, De Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Quinet; and as for
the small fry of literature, I showed them no mercy. War was soon
declared on _me_,--war without quarter.
My first adversary was little Monsieur Paulin Limayrac. He has become
the most accomplished specimen of the job-editor. As firmly convinced of
the supremacy of the Articles of War as the best disciplined private
soldier who ever showed how perfect an automaton man may become by
thorough discipline, his political opinions are something more than a
creed: they are a watchword which be observes with a most supple
obstinacy. The cabinet-minister he calls master is a corporal who has
the right to think for him; and were the corporal to contradict himself
ten times in the course of a single day, imperturbable little Paulin
Limayrac would demonstrate to him that he was ten times in the right.
But then (that is, in 1855) Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was a Republican, a
Socialist; and his weakness lay in imagining not only that people read
his articles in "La Presse," but that they remembered them for a whole
sennight after reading them.
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