"I laugh," she said, "as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait.

What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and literature too, indeed--Zola, Daudet.

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then--all the _combinaisons_ made--they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.