A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 5

Manette, though she ends as his wife, is more of a sister at first; Adolphine is an adored and unhoped-for idol; while Lucile (it is hardly necessary to say that it is in the scenes with her that "candour" comes in) is at first a protectress, then a schoolmistress of the school of Cupid, in process of time a mistress in the other sense, and always a very good-natured and unselfish helper. In fact, Manette is so preternaturally good (she can't even be jealous in a sufficiently human way), Adolphine so prettily and at last tragically null, that one really feels inclined to observe to Andre, if he were worth it, the recondite quotation

Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori,

though perhaps seven years _is_ a long interval in the first third of life.

[Sidenote: _Jean._]

A still better instance of the modified _berquinade_--indeed, except for the absence of riotous fun, one of the best of all Paul de k.o.c.k's books--is _Jean_, also an example of his middle and ripest period. If translated into English it might have for second t.i.tle "or, The History of a Good Lout." The career of Jean Durand (one of the French equivalents for John Brown or Jones or Robinson) we have from the moment of, and indeed a little before, his birth to that crowning of a virtuous young Frenchman's hopes, which consists in his marrying a pretty, amiable, sensible, and well-to-do young widow.[49] Jean is the son of a herbalist father who is an eccentric but not a fool, and a mother who is very much of a fool but not in the least eccentric. The child, who is born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the way they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in consequence of his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely nothing, and (though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very bad company. With two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away (having, again by his mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in gold) at the age of sixteen, and executes a sort of picaresque journey in the environs of Paris, till he is brought to his senses through an actual robbery committed by the worst of his companions. He returns home to find his father dead: and having had a substantial income left him already by an aunt, with the practical control of his mother's resources, he goes on living entirely _a sa guise_. This involves no positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-cla.s.s circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink and strong language. He spends and gives money freely, but does not get into debt; flirts with grisettes, but falls into no discreditable entanglement, etc., etc.

His most characteristic peculiarity, however, is his absolute refusal to learn the rudiments of manners. He keeps his hat on in all companies; neglects all neatness in dress, etc.; goes (when he _does_ go) among ladies with garments reeking of tobacco and a mouth full of strange oaths, and generally remains ignorant of, or recalcitrant to, every form of conventional politeness in speech and behaviour.

The only person of any sense with whom he has. .h.i.therto come in contact, an old hairdresser named Bellequeue (it must be remembered that this profession or vocation is not as traditionally ridiculous in French literature as in ours), persuades his mother that the one chance of reforming Jean and making him like other people is to marry him off.

They select an eligible _parti_, one Mademoiselle Adelaide Chopard, a young lady of great bodily height, some facial charms, not exactly a fool, but not of the most amiable disposition, and possessed of no actual accomplishment (though she thinks herself almost a "blue") except that of preserving different fruits in brandy, her father being a retired liqueur manufacturer. Jean, who has never been in the least "in love," has no particular objection to Adelaide, and none at all to the preserved cherries, apricots, etc., and the scenes of his introduction and, after a fas.h.i.+on, proposal to the damsel, with her first resentment at his unceremonious behaviour and later positive attraction by it, are far from bad. Luckily or unluckily--for the marriage might have turned out at least as well as most marriages of the kind--before it is brought about, this French Cymon at last meets his real Iphigenia. Walking rather late at night, he hears a cry, and a footpad (one of his own old comrades, as it happens) rushes past him with a shawl which he has s.n.a.t.c.hed from two ladies. Jean counter-s.n.a.t.c.hes the shawl from him and succours the ladies, one of whom strikes his attention. They ask him to put them into a cab, and go off--grateful, but giving no address.

However, he picks up a reticule, which the thief in his fright has dropped, discovers in it the address he wants, and actually ventures to call on Madame Caroline Derville, who possesses, in addition to viduity, all the other attractions catalogued above.

Another scene of farce, which is not so far short of comedy, follows between the lout and the lady, the fun being, among other things, caused by Jean's unconventional strolling about the room, looking at engravings, etc., and showing, by his remarks on things--"The Death of Ta.s.so," "The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," and the like--that he is utterly uneducated.

There is about half the book to come, but no more abstract can be necessary. The way in which Jean is delivered from his Adelaide and rewarded with his Caroline, if not quite probable (for Adelaide is made to blacken her own character to her rival), is not without ingenuity.

And the narrative (which has Paul de k.o.c.k's curious "holding" quality for the hour or two one is likely to bestow on it) is diversified by the usual duel, by Jean's n.o.ble and rather rash conduct, in putting down his pistols to bestow sacks of five-franc pieces on his two old friends (who try to burgle and--one of them at least--would rather like to murder him), etc., etc.[50] But the real value--for it has some--of the book lies in the vivid sketches of ordinary life which it gives. The curious c.o.c.kneydom, diversified by glimpses of a suburban Arcadia, in which the French _bourgeois_ of the first half of the nineteenth century seems to have pa.s.sed his time; the humours of a _coucou_ journey from Paris to Saint-Germain; all sorts of details of the Durand and Chopard households--supply these. And not the least of them is given by the bachelor menage of Bellequeue with his eighteen-year-old _bonne_ Rose, the story whereof need not sadden or shock even Mrs. Grundy, unless she scents unrecounted, indeed not even hinted at, improprieties.

Bellequeue, as noted above, is by no means a fool, and achieves as near an approach to a successful "character" as Paul de k.o.c.k has ever drawn; while Rose plays the same part of piebald angel as Lucile in _Andre_, with a little more cleverness in her espieglerie and at least no vouched-for unlawfulnesses.

[Sidenote: _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant._]

But perhaps if any one wants a single book to judge Paul de k.o.c.k by (with one possible exception, to follow this), he cannot do better than take _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant_, a novel again of his middle period, and one which, if it shows some of his less desirable points, shows them characteristically and with comparatively little offence, while it exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I believe, call "a range of his best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul Deligny, is one of his nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call him insipid or priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not such a madcap as the similarly situated Frederique of _Une Gaillarde_ (_v. inf._), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are "l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same time no prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very much less of a success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and affectionate wife, but treats his lower-cla.s.s loves shabbily, and allows himself to be swindled and fooled to the _n_th by an adventuress of fas.h.i.+on and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois, the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally manages to make his friends pay the bill, are not bad common form of farce. One of the best of Paul's own special scenes, the pancake party, with a bevy of grisettes, is perhaps the liveliest of all such things, and, but for one piece of quite unnecessary Smollettism or Pigaulterie, need only scandalise the "unco guid." The whole has, in unusual measure, that curious _readableness_ which has been allowed to most of our author's books. Almost inevitably there is a melodramatic end; but this, to speak rather Hibernically, is made up for by a minute and curious account, at the beginning, of the actual presentation of a melodrama, with humours of pit, box, and gallery. If the reader does not like the book he will hardly like anything else of its author's; if he does, he will find plenty of the same sort of stuff, less concentrated perhaps, elsewhere. But if he be a student, as well as a consumer, of the novel, he can hardly fail to see that, at its time and in its kind, it is not so trivial a thing as its subjects and their treatment might, in the abstract, be p.r.o.nounced to be by the grave and precise.

[Sidenote: _Mon Voisin Raymond._]

Yet somebody may say, "This is all very well, but what was it that made Major Pendennis laugh?" Probably a good many things in a good many books; but I do not know any one more likely to have received that crown than the exception above mentioned, _Mon Voisin Raymond_, which also bears (to me) the recommendation of a very competent friend of mine. My experience is that you certainly do begin laughing at the very beginning, and that the laughter is kept up, if not without cessation, with very few intervals, through a remarkable series of comic scenes.

The book, in fact, is Paul de k.o.c.k's _Gilbert Gurney_, and I cannot sink the critic in the patriot to such an extent as to enable me to put Theodore, even in what is, I suppose, his best long story, above, or even on a level with, Paul here.

The central point, as one sees almost at once, is that this Raymond (I think we are never told his other name), a not entirely ill-meaning person, but a _facheux_ of almost ultra-Molieresque strength, is perpetually spoiling his unlucky neighbour's, the autobiographic Eugene Dorsan's, sport, and, though sometimes paid out in kind, bringing calamities upon him, while at last he actually capots his friend and enemy by making him one of the _derniers_ already mentioned! This is very bold of Paul, and I do not know any exact parallel to it. On the other hand, Eugene is consoled, not only by Raymond's death in the Alps (Paul de k.o.c.k is curiously fond of Switzerland as a place of punishment for his bad characters), but by the final possession of a certain Nicette, the very pearl of the grisette kind. We meet her in the first scene of the story, where Dorsan, having given the girl a guiltless sojourn of rescue in his own rooms, is detected and exposed to the malice of a cast mistress by Raymond. I am afraid that Paul rather forgot that final sentence of his own first book; for though Pelagie, Dorsan's erring and unpleasant wife, dies in the last chapter, I do not observe that an actual Hymen with Nicette "covers the fault" which, after long innocence, she has at last committed or permitted. But perhaps it would have been indecent to contract a second marriage so soon, and it is only postponed to the unwritten first chapter of the missing fifth volume.[51]

The interval between overture and finale is, as has been said or hinted, uncommonly lively, and for once, not only in the final retribution, Paul has distributed the _peine du talion_ pretty equally between his personages. Dorsan has already lost another grisette mistress, Caroline (for whose sake he has neglected Nicette), and a _femme du monde_, with whom he has for a short time intrigued; while in both cases Raymond, though not exactly the cause of the deprivation, has, in his meddling way, been mixed up with it. In yet other scenes we have a travelling magic-lantern exhibition in the Champs elysees; a night in the Tivoli Gardens; an expedition to a party at a country house, which, of course, Raymond's folly upsets, literally as well as metaphorically; a long (rather too long) account of a musical evening at a very lower-middle-cla.s.s house; a roaringly farcical interchange of dinners _en cabinet particulier_ at a restaurant, in which Raymond is the victim. But, on the whole, he scores, and is a sort of double cause of the hero's last and greatest misfortune. For it is a lie of his about Nicette which determines Dorsan to make a long-postponed visit to his sister in the country, and submit at last to her efforts to get him married to the exaggeratedly _ingenue_ Pelagie, and saddled with her detestable aunt, Madame de Pontchartrain. The end of the book is not quite equal to some other parts of it. But there is abundance of excellent farce, and Nicette might reconcile the veriest sentimentalist.

[Sidenote: _Le Barbier de Paris._]

At one time in England--I cannot speak for the times of his greatest popularity in France--Paul de k.o.c.k's name, except for a vague knowledge of his grisette and _mauvais sujet_ studies, was very mainly connected with _Le Barbier de Paris_. It was an instance of the constant mistakes which almost all countries make about foreign authors. I imagine, from a fresh and recent reading of it, that he probably did take more trouble with it than with most of his books. But, unfortunately, instances of lost labour are not confined to literature. The subject and the author are very ill matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so in a way competing with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics. But for such a task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of concocting a readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such high graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book with _Notre-Dame de Paris_ or the _Contes Drolatiques_, _Le Capitaine Fraca.s.se_ or the _Chronique de Charles IX_. But even the lower ways he could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but rather late Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed and Dumas possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations, if not in actual temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of _lingua franca_ suitable to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant with, _any_ particular time and _any_ particular state of manners. He could throw in types of the kind so much admired by no less a person than Sir Philip Sidney--a garrulous old servant, an innocent young girl, a gasconading coward, a revengeful daughter of Italy, a this and that and the other. But he could neither make individual character nor vivid historical scene. And so the thing breaks down.

The barber-hero-villain himself is the most "unconvincing" of barbers (who have profited fiction not so ill in other cases), of heroes (who are too often unconvincing), and even of villains (who have rather a habit of being so).[52] Why a man who is represented as being intensely, diabolically, wicked, but almost diabolically shrewd, should employ, and go on employing, as his instrument a blundering poltroon like the Gascon Chaudoreille, is a question which recurs almost throughout the book, and, being unanswered, is almost sufficient to d.a.m.n it. And at the end the other question, why M. le Marquis de Villebelle--represented as, though also a villain, a person of superior intelligence--when he has discovered that the girl whom he has abducted and sought to ruin is really his daughter; when he has run upstairs to tell her, has knocked at her locked door, and has heard a heavy body splas.h.i.+ng into the lake under her window,--why, instead of making his way at once to the water, he should run about the house for keys, break into the room, and at last, going to the window, draw from the fact that "an object shows itself at intervals on the surface, and appears to be still in a state of agitation," the no doubt quite logical inference that Blanche is drowning--when, and only then, he precipitates himself after her,--this question would achieve, if it were necessary, the d.a.m.nation.

[Sidenote: The Pauline grisette.]

The fact is, that Paul had no turn for melodrama, history, or tragic matter of any kind. He wrote nearly a hundred novels, and I neither pretend to have read the whole of them, nor, if I had done so, should I feel justified in inflicting abstracts on my readers. As always happens in such cases, the feast he offers us is "pot-luck," but, as too seldom happens, the luck of the pot is quite often good. With the grisette, to whom he did much to give a niche (one can hardly call it a shrine) in literature, whom he celebrated so lovingly, and whose gradual disappearance he has so touchingly bewailed, or with any feminine person of partly grisettish kind, such as the curious and already briefly mentioned heroine of _Une Gaillarde_,[53] he is almost invariably happy.

The above-mentioned Lucile is not technically a grisette (who should be a girl living on her own resources or in a shop, not in service) nor is Rose in _Jean_, but both have the requirements of the type--_minois chiffonne_ (including what is absolutely indispensable, a _nez retrousse_), inexhaustible gaiety, extreme though by no means promiscuous complaisance, thorough good-nature--all the gifts, in short, of Beranger's _bonne fille_, who laughs at everything, but is perfectly capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not seldom marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher _spear_," the English "garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette of _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_, who outwits in the cleverest way three would-be gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and extracts thumping solatia from these for their victims.[54]

[Sidenote: Others.]

On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous book which suggested the t.i.tle of this--_L'Homme aux Trois Culottes_, symbolising and in a way giving a history of the times of the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration, and finis.h.i.+ng with "July"--seems to me again a failure. As I have said, Paul could not manage history, least of all spread-out history like this; and the characters, or rather personages, though of the lower and lower-middle rank, which he _could_ manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others may have been, or may be, more fortunate with them.

So, too, _Le Pet.i.t Fils de Cartouche_ (which I read before coming across its first part, _Les Enfants du Boulevard_) did not inspire me with any desire to look up this earlier novel; and _La Pucelle de Belleville_, another of Paul's attempts to depict the unconventional but virtuous young person, has very slight interest as a story, and is disfigured by some real examples of the "coa.r.s.e vulgarity" which has been somewhat excessively charged against its author generally. _Frere Jacques_ is a little better, but not much.[55]

Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once "got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have read, for instance, in succession, _M. Dupont_, which, even in the Belgian piracy, is of 1838, and _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_, which must be some quarter of a century later--so late, indeed, that Madame Patti is mentioned in it. The t.i.tle-hero of the first--a most respectable man--has an _ingenue_, who loves somebody else, forced upon him, experiences more recalcitrance than is usually allowed in such cases, and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical injustice, is butchered to make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does not so very distinctly deserve his Eugenie. It contains also one Zelie, who is perhaps the author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or most disagreeable, grisette. _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_ gives us a whole posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls--pretty, middling, and ugly, astonis.h.i.+ngly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and _couci-couci_ (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula,"

because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion almost n.o.ble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down with fifteen thousand francs for an old mistress (she has lost her beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of the extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or half-first; a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances of Marie's mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You might change over some of the personages and scenes of the two books; but they are scarcely unequal in such merit as they possess, and both lazily readable in the fas.h.i.+on so often noted.

If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself supply a fuller explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for the s.p.a.ce here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the first place, from sheer and una.n.a.lysable narrative faculty, the secret of the business, the mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other.

But it also comes, as it seems to me, from the fact that Paul de k.o.c.k is the very first of French novelists who, though he has no closely woven plot, no striking character, no vivid conversation or arresting phrases, is thoroughly _real_, and in the good, not the bad, sense _quotidian_.

The statement may surprise some people and shock others, but I believe it can be as fully sustained as that other statement about the most different subject possible, the _Astree_, which was quoted from Madame de Sevigne in the last volume. Paul knew the world he dealt with as well almost as d.i.c.kens[56] knew his very different but somewhat corresponding one; and, unlike d.i.c.kens, the Frenchman had the good sense to meddle very little[57] with worlds that he did not know. Of course it would be simply _bete_ to take it for granted that the majority of Parisian shop- and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or the amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But somehow or other one feels that the general _ethos_ of the cla.s.s has been caught.[58] His _bourgeois_ interiors and outings have the same real and not merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less unreal than vulgarity.

The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in _Vanity Fair_ itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without G.o.d in the world." There certainly is not much G.o.dliness in the book, but he could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature (which he never was) if he had. In Paul de k.o.c.k's extensive work, on the other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people are married in church as well as at the _mairie_, and I remember one casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to ma.s.s, the whole spiritual region--religious, theological, ecclesiastical, and what not--is left blank. I do not remember so much as a _cure_ figuring personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting that Paul was born in 1794, and therefore pa.s.sed his earliest childhood in the time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in France--when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever hearing the name of G.o.d, except perhaps in phrases like _pardieu_ or _parbleu_. It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or draw inferences; I merely indicate the fact.

Another fact--perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs stating--is that Paul de k.o.c.k is not exactly the person to "take a course of," unless under such conditions as those under which Mr.

Carlyle took a course of a far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one regrets to remember) very ungrateful for the good it did him. He is (what some of his too critical countrymen have so falsely called Dumas) a mere _amuseur_, and his amus.e.m.e.nt is somewhat lacking in variety.

Nevertheless, few critical readers[59] of the present history will, I think, consider the s.p.a.ce given to him here as wasted. He was a really powerful schoolmaster to bring the popular novel into still further popularity; and he made a distinct advance upon such persons as Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil--upon the former in comparative decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the latter in getting close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the _furniture_ of his novels--the scene-painting, property-arranging, and general staging. This has been most unfairly a.s.signed to Balzac as originator, not merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention our own men, Paul began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of those curious efforts, half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal with later, and nearly two decades before _Les Chouans_. And, horrifying as the statement may be to some, I venture to say that his mere _mise en scene_ is sometimes, if not always, better than Balzac's own, though he may be to that younger contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard Street in respect of plot, character, thought, conversation, and all the higher elements, as they are commonly taken to be, of the novel.

[Sidenote: The minors before 1830.]

It has been said that the filling-up of this chapter, as to the rank and file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been a matter of some difficulty in the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the case. I have, however, been enabled to read, for the first time or afresh, examples not merely of those writers who have preserved any notoriety, but of some who have not, and to a.s.sure myself on fair grounds that I need not wait for further exploration. The authors now to be dealt with have already been named.

But I may add another novelist on the very eve of 1830, Auguste Ricard, whose name I never saw in any history of literature, but whose work fell almost by accident into my hands, and seems worth taking as "pot-luck."

[Sidenote: Mme. de Montolieu--_Caroline de Lichtfield_.]

Isabelle de Montolieu--a Swiss by birth but a French-woman by extraction, and Madame de Crousaz by her first marriage--was a friend of Gibbon's friend Georges Deyverdun, and indeed of Gibbon himself, who, she says, actually offered to father her novel. Odd as this seems, there really is in _Caroline de Lichtfield_[60] not merely something which distinguishes it from the ordinary "sensibility" tale of its time (it was first printed at Lausanne in 1786), but a kind of crispness of thought now and then which sometimes does suggest Gibbon, in something the same way as that in which f.a.n.n.y Burney suggests Johnson. This is indeed mixed with a certain amount of mere "sensibility" jargon,[61] as when a lover, making a surprisingly honest confession to his beloved, observes that he is going "to destroy those sentiments which had made him forget how unworthy he was of them," or when the lady (who has been quite guiltless, and has at last fallen in love with her own husband) tells this latter of her weakness in these very engaging words: "Yes! I did love Lindorf; _at least I think I recognise some relation between the sentiments I had for him and those that I feel at present_!"

[Sidenote: Its advance on "Sensibility."]

A kind of affection was avowed in the last volume for the "Phoebus" of the "heroics," and something similar may be confessed for this "Jupiter Pluvius," this mixture of tears and stateliness, in the Sentimentalists.

But Madame de Montolieu has emerged from the most _larmoyante_ kind of "sensible" comedy. If her book had been cut a little shorter, and if (which can be easily done by the reader) the eccentric survival of a _histoire_, appended instead of episodically inserted, were lopped off, _Caroline de Lichtfield_ would not be a bad story. The heroine, having lost her mother, has been brought up to the age of fifteen by an amiable canoness, who (to speak rather Hibernically) ought to have been her mother but wasn't, because the actual mother was so much richer. She bears no malice, however, even to the father who, well preserved in looks, manners, and selfishness, is Great Chamberlain to Frederick the Great.

That very unsacred majesty has another favourite, a certain Count von Walstein, who is amba.s.sador of Prussia at St. Petersburg. It pleases Frederick, and of course his chamberlain, that Caroline, young as she is, shall marry Walstein. As the girl is told that her intended is not more than thirty, and knows his position (she has, naturally, been brought up without the slightest idea of choosing for herself), she is not displeased. She will be a countess and an amba.s.sadress; she will have infinite jewels; her husband will probably be handsome and agreeable; he will certainly dance with her, and may very possibly not object to joining in innocent sports like b.u.t.terfly-catching. So she sets off to Berlin quite cheerfully, and the meeting takes place. Alas!

the count is a "civil count" (as Beatrice says) enough, but he is the reverse of handsome and charming. He has only one eye; he has a huge scar on his cheek; a wig (men, remember, were beginning to "wear their own hair"), a bent figure, and a leaden complexion. Caroline, promptly and not unnaturally, "screams and disappears like lightning." Nor can any way be found out of this extremely awkward situation. The count (who is a thoroughly good fellow) would give Caroline up, though he has taken a great fancy to her, and even the selfish Lichtfield tries (or _says_ he tries) to alter his master's determination. But Frederick of course persists, and with a peculiarly Frederician enjoyment in conferring an ostensible honour which is in reality a punishment, sees the marriage ceremony carried out under his own eye. Caroline, however, exemplifies in combination certain old adages to the effect that there is "No will, no wit like a woman's." She submits quite decently in public, but immediately after the ceremony writes a letter[62] to her husband (whose character she has partly, though imperfectly, gauged) requesting permission to retire to the canoness till she is a little older, under a covert but quite clearly intelligible threat of suicide in case of refusal. There are of course difficulties, but the count, like a man and a gentleman, consents at once; the father, _bon gre mal gre_, has to do so, and the King, a tyrant who has had his way, gives a sulky and qualified acquiescence. What follows need only be very rapidly sketched. After a little time Caroline sees, at her old-new home, an engaging young man, a Herr von Lindorf; and matters, though she is quite virtuous, are going far when she receives an enormous epistle[62] from her lover, confessing that he himself is the author of her husband's disfigurement (under circ.u.mstances discreditable to himself and creditable to Walstein), enclosing, too, a very handsome portrait of the count _as he was_, and but for this disfigurement might be still. What happens then n.o.body ought to need, or if he does he does not deserve, to be told. There is no greatness about this book, but to any one who has an eye for consequences it will probably seem to have some future in it.

It shows the breaking of the Sensibility mould and the running of the materials into a new pattern as early as 1786. In 1886 M. Feuillet or M.

Theuriet would of course have clothed the story-skeleton differently, but one can quite imagine either making use of a skeleton by no means much altered. M. Rod would have given it an unhappy ending, but one can see it in his form likewise.[63]

[Sidenote: Madame de Genlis _iterum_.]

Of Stephanie Felicite, Comtesse de Genlis, it were tempting to say a good deal personally if we did biographies here when they can easily be found elsewhere. How she became a canoness at six years old, and shortly afterwards had for her ordinary dress (with something supplementary, one hopes) the costume of a Cupid, including quiver and wings; how she combined the offices of governess to the Orleans children and mistress to their father; how she also combined the voluptuousness and the philanthropy of her century by taking baths of milk and afterwards giving that milk to the poor;[64] how, rather late in life, she attained the very Crown-Imperial of governess-s.h.i.+p in being chosen by Napoleon to teach him and his Court how to behave; and how she wrote infinite books--many of them taking the form of fiction--on education, history, religion, everything, can only be summarised. The last item of the summary alone concerns us, and that must be dealt with summarily too.

_Mlle. de Clermont_--a sort of historico-"sensible" story in style, and evidently imitated from _La Princesse de Cleves_--is about the best thing she did as literature; but we dealt with that in the last volume[65] among its congeners. In my youth all girls and some boys knew _Adele et Theodore_ and _Les Veillees du Chateau_. From a later book, _Les Battuecas_, George Sand is said to have said that she learnt Socialism: and the fact is that Stephanie Felicite had seen so much, felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to complete my idea of her were _Le Comte_ _de Corke_ and _Les Chevaliers du Cygne_, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their t.i.tles. The first is a collection of short tales, the t.i.tle-piece inspired and prefaced by an account of the Boyle family, and all rather like a duller and more spun-out Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to Marmontel accounting for this. The concluding stories of each volume, "Les Amants sans Amour" and "Sanclair," are about the best. _Les Chevaliers du Cygne_ is a book likely to stir up the Old Adam in some persons. It was, for some mysterious reason, intended as a sort of appendix--for "grown-ups"--to the _Veillees du Chateau_, and is supposed to have incorporated parabolically many of the lessons of the French Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three volumes and eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the Empress Irene, and the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is dead at Roncevaux), and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the auth.o.r.ess, who was an untiring picker-up of sc.r.a.ps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the _pre_-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the _Veillees_ was altogether of the _veille_--the day just expired--or of the transitional and half-understood present--never of the past seen in some perspective, of the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.

[Sidenote: The minor popular novel--Ducray-Duminil--_Le Pet.i.t Carilloneur_.]

The batch of books into which we are now going to dip does not represent the height of society and the interests of education like Madame de Genlis; nor high society again and at least strivings after the new day, like the n.o.ble author of the _Solitaire_ who will follow them. They are, in fact, the minors of the cla.s.s in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and Paul de k.o.c.k later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's _Lolotte et Fanfan_, escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and careful study of the four volumes of his _Pet.i.t Carillonneur_ (1819) has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not merely _Lolotte_ (the second t.i.tle of which is _Histoire de Deux Enfants abandonnes dans une ile deserte_), but _Victor ou L'Enfant de la Foret_, _Caelina ou L'Enfant du Mystere_, _Jules ou le Toit paternel_, or any other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.

The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun _des enfants_; he writes rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books) loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men, and left to the chances of divine and human a.s.sistance, is made to earn his living by framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a _corvee_. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies, and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Ma.r.s.eilles, whose father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts--violent and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by Mr. Thomas Day)--beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent musician; an excellent cure; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de Surval, who, close to the end of the book, hides her trouble in the bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of Pigault as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing with them are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of general novel-development and admitting English examples, we may a.s.sign to its author a place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the _Family Herald_: confining ourselves to French only, he has again, like Pigault, something of the credit of making a new start. He may appeal to the taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the same sort of thing as "a vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable of providing general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.

[Sidenote: V. Ducange.]