If the reader thinks that all these talking Teacups came together by
mere accident, as people meet at a boarding-house, I may as well tell
him at once that he is mistaken. If he thinks I am going to explain
how it is that he finds them thus brought together, whether they form
a secret association, whether they are the editors of this or that
periodical, whether they are connected with some institution, and so
on,--I must disappoint him. It is enough that he finds them in each
other's company, a very mixed assembly, of different sexes, ages, and
pursuits; and if there is a certain mystery surrounds their meetings,
he must not be surprised. Does he suppose we want to be known and talked
about in public as “Teacups”? No; so far as we give to the community
some records of the talks at our table our thoughts become public
property, but the sacred personality of every Teacup must be properly
respected. If any wonder at the presence of one of our number, whose
eccentricities might seem to render him an undesirable associate of the
company, he should remember that some people may have relatives whom
they feel bound to keep their eye on; besides the cracked Teacup brings
out the ring of the sound ones as nothing else does. Remember also that
soundest teacup does not always hold the best tea, or the cracked teacup
the worst.
This is a hint to the reader, who is not expected to be too curious
about the individual Teacups constituting our unorganized association.
The Dictator Discourses.
I have been reading Balzac's Peau de Chagrin. You have all read the
story, I hope, for it is the first of his wonderful romances which fixed
the eyes of the reading world upon him, and is a most fascinating if
somewhat fantastic tale. A young man becomes the possessor of a certain
magic skin, the peculiarity of which is that, while it gratifies every
wish formed by its possessor, it shrinks in all its dimensions each time
that a wish is gratified. The young man makes every effort to ascertain
the cause of its shrinking; invokes the aid of the physicist, the
chemist, the student of natural history, but all in vain. He draws a
red line around it. That same day he indulges a longing for a certain
object. The next morning there is a little interval between the red line
and the skin, close to which it was traced. So always, so inevitably.
As he lives on, satisfying one desire, one passion, after another, the
process of shrinking continues. A mortal disease sets in, which keeps
pace with the shrinking skin, and his life and his talisman come to an
end together.
One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable
possession. And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de
chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and
incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its
progress.
Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized,
as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in
the thaw of January?
How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number
of coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has
flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons?
And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem,
stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced
to the narrowest conditions of reproductive existence. Such is the fate
of the financial peau de chagrin. Pity the poor fractional capitalist,
who has just managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds.
The shears of Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long
scissors which cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice
of dry toast it served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder
that my thoughts took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these
changes and their melancholy consequences? If the entire poem, of
several hundred lines, was “declined with thanks” by an unfeeling
editor, that is no reason why you should not hear a verse or two of it.