Hail and Farewell! Vale

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:It was about the time of the publication of my letter to the Irish Times, mentioned in the last pages of Salve, that I received from the French Consul an invitation to dinner to meet the Secretary of the Consulate, M. Orange, a young man, a poet, au moins il a publié un volume de vers chez Lemerre. The Méaulles, Monsieur et Madame, are among my pleasantest memories of Dublin, and on the night in question, when it was time to bid our host and hostess good night, I proposed to Orange that we should walk back to Dublin together, thinking that perhaps he might like to talk French poetry with me. As we passed through the garden-gate he muttered: voilà une soirée bien passée. He was quite right; we had passed a pleasant evening in pleasant company. But when he repeated the same words at the same place the next time we dined at the Méaulles', I began to read into them a hidden meaning: that we were nearer our graves than we had been earlier in the afternoon; and when he repeated the same words some weeks afterwards, and in the same place, they took on still another meaning: that we being men of letters would have done better had we stayed at home reading books under our lamps. And as we strode along together I resolved that I would reacquire the habit of reading without it occurring to me that the temptation is always by the talker to lay his book aside and go out to look up a friend, especially in Dublin, where casual visiting is our single pleasure.And Orange's criticism of life leaving me no peace, I begged Teresa one evening, after she had removed the cloth, to tell whosoever called that I was not at home; and when she had put my coffee on the table I said: The moment has come for me to pick out a book from the shelves. But which? I knew that a large volume containing Shakespeare's plays stood on the third shelf and that I should find in it a well of pure literature undefiled. Alarums, excursions, and the blowing of trumpets over the field of Agincourt, Kings in full armour rushing about crying for destriers — the French word for what we would call a cob, compact and thick-set. He charges like a destrier in the Henrys, and after the charge retires to a hawthorn-tree and neighs a melodious plaint of graves and worms and epitaphs. But Balzac appealed to me for a moment and my eyes ran through the titles of the edition printed in 1855, a prize brought back from Paris some months ago, but never looked into; treated, alas! like a wife, a sort of matrimonial edition, and only known to me by a long attempt to read César Birotteau, an adventure that had stopped half-way, so cumbersome was the burly Tourainean in this story, so slow was he to rise, like a cart-horse asleep in the middle of the road, too heavy to struggle to his hooves in less than a hundred pages, but getting away at last. His ends are no doubt fine and thunderous. All the same, Turgenev didn't believe in him, and glancing down a line of small volumes I said: Turgenev is neither cob nor dray, but an Arab carrying in every story a lady as romantic as one of Chopin's ballads, especially the third, and I thought of the celebrated phrase. Maupassant detained me for a moment and then seemed to me too much like an intrigue with a housemaid. Goncourt? The fashion of yesterday and today older than Herodotus. Pater? His Epicurean? A tide of honeyed words preached by a divine from an ivory pulpit, well worth re-reading but —And I returned to my chair frightened, feeling that if I did not learn to read my life would become a burden to me and to others. Everybody will fly from me, my friends will melt away. Edward wouldn't open to me the other night, he preferred his book to my talk, and he continues to struggle through Ruskin, and John Eglinton toils at Don Quixote. Those fellows can live alone, and AE .