It is his eager, restless
spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian
rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles,
Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African
fantasias, and Egyptian concertos; and, in the same way, he roams
through the ages, writing Greek tragedies, dance music of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and preludes and fugues of the eighteenth.
But in all these exotic and archaic reflections of times and countries
through which his fancy wanders, one recognises the gay, intelligent
countenance of a Frenchman on his travels, who idly follows his
inclinations, and does not trouble to enter very deeply into the spirit
of the people he meets, but gleans all he can, and then reproduces it
with a French complexion--after the manner of Montaigne in Italy, who
compared Verona to Poitiers, and Padua to Bordeaux, and who, when he was
in Florence, paid much less attention to Michelangelo than to "a very
strangely shaped sheep, and an animal the size of a large mastiff,
shaped like a cat and striped with black and white, which they called a
tiger."
[Footnote 129: _Les Heures; Mors; Modestie (Rimes familieres_).
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