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In the contes of M. Guy de Maupassant there is a manly vigor, pushed at times to excess; and in the very singular collection of stories which M. Jean Richepin has called the "Morts Bizarres" we find a modern continuation of the Poe tradition, always more potent in France than elsewhere.
"A naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords" might have shocked them, but not merely because he was naked. They were greatly interested when, as a sign of friendliness, one of the Frenchmen, the doctor of Le Naturaliste, began to sing a song. The women squatted around, in attitudes "bizarres et pittoresques," applauding with loud cries.
The Darwin tulips yield beautiful shades of violet, carmine, scarlet, and brown; the bizarres, many curious effects in stripes and flakes; the rose and white, delicate frettings and margins of pink on a white ground; but the parrots have petals fringed, twisted, beaked, poised curiously upon the stalks, splashed with reds, yellows, and green, and to come suddenly upon a mass of them in the garden is to think for a brief moment that a group of unknown birds blown from the tropics in a forced migration have alighted for rest upon the bending tulip stalks.
The Margaret carnations, though biennials, are best treated as annuals, for they may be had in flower in three to four months after the sowing of the seed, and the English perennial border carnations, bizarres, and picotees will live for several years, but in this climate must be wintered in a dry wooden cold pit, after the manner of the perennial varieties of wallflowers, tender roses, and the like.
Rudyard Kipling were kept from frank failure when they followed in Poe's footsteps and sought to imitate, or at least to emulate his more largely imaginative tales in the 'Diamond Lens' of the Irish-American, in the 'Morts Bizarres' of the Frenchman, and in half a dozen tales of the Anglo-Indian.
Poussin's contemporaries praised him chiefly as a preceptor, an inculcator of historical truths, more especially the truths of classical and Hebrew history. That is why Philippe de Champaigne deplores the fact that in his Rebecca "Poussin n'ait pas traité le sujet de son tableau avec toute la fidélité de l'histoire, parce qu'il a retranché la représentation des chameaux, dont l'Ecriture fait mention." But Le Brun, approaching the question from a different angle, comes heavily down on his scrupulous colleague with the rejoinder that "M. Poussin a rejeté les objets bizarres qui pouvaient débaucher l'oeil du spectateur et l'amuser
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