He seems to belong to ancient history,
he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his smart
sayings. Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the
most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth. Over in Paris
there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very
brilliant and very poor and very eccentric. So long as people study
French literature, and care to investigate the amount of high artistic
workmanship which goes into even its minor productions, so long the name
of Barbey D'Aurevilly will have its niche--not a very large one, it is
true--in the temple. The author of that strange and beautiful story "Le
Chevalier des Touches," was a great devotee of Brummell's. He was
himself the "last of the dandies". All the money he had--and he had very
little of it--he spent in dandification. But he never moved with the
times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last
he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young
men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and
romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very
curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism,
with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so
largely affect to despise.
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