't forgive - that would have, in the case, no application; he
would simply turn, at the supreme moment, away, the bitterness of his personal
loss yielding to the very force of his aversion. All he would have at the end
would be therefore just the moral convenience, indeed the moral necessity, of
his practical, but quite unappreciated, magnanimity; and one's last view of him
would be that of a strong man indifferent to his strength and too wrapped in
fine, too wrapped above all in other and intenser, reflexions for the assertion
of his rights. This last point was of the essence and constituted in fact the
subject: there would be no subject at all, obviously, - or simply the commonest
of the common, - if my gentleman should enjoy his advantage. I was charmed with
my idea, which would take, however, much working out; and precisely because it
had so much to give, I think, must I have dropped it for the time into the deep
well of unconscious cerebration: not without the hope, doubtless, that it might
eventually emerge from that reservoir, as one had already known the buried
treasure to come to light, with a firm iridescent surface and a notable increase
of weight.
    This resurrection then took place in Paris, where I was at the moment
living, and in December, 1875; my good fortune being apparently that Paris had
ever so promptly offered me, and with an immediate directness at which I now
marvel (since I had come back there, after earlier visitations, but a few weeks
before), everything that was needed to make my conception concrete. I seem again
at this distant day to see it become so quickly and easily, quite as if filling
itself with life in that air. The objectivity it had wanted it promptly put on,
and if the questions had been, with the usual intensity, for my hero and his
crisis - the whole formidable list, the who? the what? the where? the when? the
why? the how? - they gathered their answers in the cold shadow of the Arc de
Triomphe, for fine reasons, very much as if they had been plucking spring
flowers for the weaving of a frolic garland. I saw from one day to another my
particular cluster of circumstances, with the life of the splendid city playing
up in it like a flashing fountain in a marble basin. The very splendour seemed
somehow to witness and intervene; it was important for the effect of my friend's
discomfiture that it should take place on a high and lighted stage