A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 7

[Sidenote: _La Fee aux Miettes._]

In fact, acknowledging most humbly that I could not write even the worst and shortest of Nodier's stories, I am bound to say that I think he was not to be trusted with a long one. _La Fee aux Miettes_ is at once an awful and a delightful example. The story of the mad s.h.i.+pwright Michel, who fell in love with the old dwarf beggar--so unlike her of Bednal Green or King Cophetua's love--at the church door of Avranches; who followed her to Greenock and got inextricably mixed between her and the Queen of Sheba; who for some time pa.s.sed his nights in making love to Belkis and his days in attending to the wisdom of the Fairy of the Crumbs (she always brought him his breakfast after the Sabaean Nights); who at last identified the two in one final rapture, after seeking for a Singing Mandrake; and who spent the rest (if not, indeed, the whole) of his days in the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum;--is at times so ineffably charming that one is almost afraid oneself to repeat the refrain--

C'est moi, c'est moi, c'est moi!

Je suis la Mandragore!

La fille des beaux jours qui s'eveille a l'aurore-- Et qui chante pour toi!

though, after all, every one whose life has been worth living has listened for the song all that life--and has heard it sometimes.

To find any fault with the matrix of this opal is probably blasphemous.

But I own that I could do without the Shandean prologue and epilogue of the narrator and his man-servant Daniel Cameron. And though, as a tomfool myself, I would fain not find any of the actions of my kind alien from me, I do find some of the tomfoolery with which Nodier has seasoned the story superfluous. Why call a damsel "Folly Girlfree"? What would a Frenchman say if an English story-teller christened some girl of Gaul "Sottise Librefille"? "Sir j.a.p Muzzleburn," the Bailiff of the Isle of Man, and his black poodle-equerry, Master Blatt, amuse me but little; and Master Finewood, the s.h.i.+pbuilder,--whose rejected six sons-in-law, lairds of high estate, run away with his thirty thousand guineas, and are checkmated by six st.u.r.dy s.h.i.+pwrights,--less. I have no doubt it is my fault, my very great fault, but I wish they would _go_, and leave me with Michel and La Fee, or rather allow me to _be_ Michel _with_ La Fee.

[Sidenote: _Smarra_ and _Soeur Beatrix_.]

_Smarra_--which made a great impression on its contemporaries and had a strong influence on the Romantic movement generally--is a fantasia of nightmare based on the beginning of _The Golden a.s.s_, with, again, a sort of prologue and epilogue of modern love. It is undoubtedly a fine piece of work of its kind and beautifully written. But in itself it seems to me a little too much of a _tour de force_, and its kind a little rococo. Again, _mea maxima culpa_ perhaps. On the other hand, _Soeur Beatrix_ is a most charmingly told version of a very wide-spread story--that of Our Lady taking the place of an erring sister during her sojourn in the world, and restoring her to it without any scandal when she returns repentant and miserable after years of absence.

It could not be better done.

[Sidenote: _Ines de las Sierras._]

But the jewel of the book, and of Nodier's work, to me, is _Ines de las Sierras_--at least its first and larger part; for Nodier, in one of those exasperatingly uncritical whims of his which have been noticed, and which probably prevented him from ever writing a really good novel of length, has attached an otiose explanation _a la_ Mrs. Radcliffe, which, if it may please the weakest kind of weak brethren, may almost disgust another, and as to which I myself exercise the critic's _cadi_-rights by simply ignoring and banis.h.i.+ng what I think superfluous.

As for what remains, once more, it could not be done better.

Three French officers, at the moment of disturbance of the French garrisons in the north of Spain, owing to Napoleon's Russian disasters (perhaps also to more local events, which it was not necessary for Nodier to mention), are sent on remount duty from Gerona to Barcelona, where there is a great horse-fair on. They are delayed by bad weather and other accidents, and are obliged to stop half-way after nightfall.

But the halting-place is choke-full of other travellers on their way to the same fair, and neither at inn nor in private house is there any room whatever, though there is no lack of "provant." Everybody tells them that they can only put up at "the castle of Ghismondo." Taking this for a Spanish folkword, they get rather angry. But, finding that there _is_ a place of the name close by in the hills--ruinous, haunted, but actual--they take plenty of food, wine, and torches, etc., and persuade, with no little difficulty, their _arriero_ and even their companion and the real hirer of the vehicle (a theatrical manager, who has allowed them to accompany him, when they could get no other) to dare the night adventure. On the way the _arriero_ tells them the legend, how, centuries before, Ghismondo de las Sierras, ruined by debauchery, established himself in this his last possession, with one squire, one page (both of the worst characters), his beautiful niece Ines, whom he has seduced, and a few desperate followers, who help him to live by brigandage. Every night the three chiefs drank themselves senseless, and were regularly dragged to bed by their men. But one Christmas Eve at midnight, Ines, struck with remorse, entered the hall of orgies, and implored them to repent, actually kneeling before Ghismondo, and placing her hand on his heart. To which the ruffian replied by stabbing her, and leaving her for the men-at-arms to find, a corpse, among the drunken but live bodies. For a whole twelvemonth the three see, in dreams, their victim come and lay a burning hand on their hearts; and at its end, on the same day and at the same hour, the dream comes true--the phantom appears, speaks _once_, "Here am I!" sits with them, eats and drinks, even sings and dances, but finally lays the flaming hand of the dream on each heart; and they die in torture--the men-at-arms entering as usual, only to find _four_ corpses. (Now it is actually Christmas Eve--the Spanish _Noche Buena_--at "_temp._ of tale.")

So far the story, though admirably told, in a fas.h.i.+on which mere summary cannot convey, is, it may be said, not more than "as per usual." Not so what follows.

The four travellers--the unnamed captain who tells the story; his two lieutenants, Boutraix, a bluff Voltairian, with an immense capacity for food and drink, and Sergy, a young and romantic Celadon, _plus_ the actor-manager Bascara, who is orthodox--with the _arriero_, arrive at last at the castle, which is Udolphish enough, and with some difficulty reach, over broken staircases and through ruined corridors, the great banqueting-hall.[87]

Here--for it is less ruinous that the rest of the building and actually contains furniture and mouldering pictures--they make themselves tolerably comfortable with their torches, a huge fire made up from broken stairs and panels, abundance of provisions, and two dozen of wine, less a supply for the _arriero_, who prudently remains in the stables, alleging that the demons that haunt those places are fairly familiar to him and not very mischievous. As the baggage has got very wet during the day, the dresses and properties of Bascara's company are taken out and put to air. Well filled with food and drink, the free-thinker Boutraix proposes that they shall equip themselves from these with costumes not unsuitable to the knight, squire, and page of the legend, and they do so, Bascara refusing to take part in the game, and protesting strongly against their irreverence. At last midnight comes, and they cry, "Where is Ines de las Sierras?" lifting their gla.s.ses to her health. Suddenly there sounds from the dark end of the great hall the fateful "Here am I!" and there comes forward a figure in a white shroud, which seats itself in the vacant place a.s.signed by tradition to Ines herself. She is extraordinarily beautiful, and is, under the white covering, dressed in a fas.h.i.+on resembling the mouldering portrait which they have seen in the gallery. She speaks too, half rallying them, as if surprised at _their_ surprise; she calls herself Ines de las Sierras; she throws on the table a bracelet with the family arms, which they have also seen dimly emblazoned or sculptured about the castle; she eats; and, as a final piece of conviction, she tears her dress open and shows the scar on her breast. Then she drinks response to the toast they had in mockery proposed; she accepts graciously the advances of the amorous Sergy; she sings divinely, and she dances more divinely still. The whole scene is described supremely well, but the description of the dance is one of the very earliest and very finest pieces of Romantic French prose. One may try, however rashly, to translate it:

(_She has found a set of castanets in her girdle._)

She rose and made a beginning by grave and measured steps, displaying, with a mixture of grace and majesty, the perfection of her figure and the n.o.bility of her att.i.tudes.

As she s.h.i.+fted her position and put herself in new aspects, our admiration turned to amazement, as though another and another beautiful woman had come within our view, so constantly did she surpa.s.s herself in the inexhaustible variety of her steps and her movements. First, in rapid transition, we saw her pa.s.s from a serious dignity to transports of pleasure, at first moderate, but growing more and more animated; then to soft and voluptuous languors; then to the delirium of joy, and then to some strange ecstasy more delirious still. Next, she disappeared in the far-off darkness of the huge hall, and the clash of the castanets grew feeble in proportion to the distance, and diminished ever till, as we ceased to see, so we ceased to hear her. But again it came back from the distance, increasing always by degrees, till it burst out full as she reappeared in a flood of light at the spot where we least expected her. And then she came so near that she touched us with her dress, clas.h.i.+ng the castanets with a maddening volubility, till they weakened once more and twittered like cicalas, while now and then across their monotonous racket she uttered shrill yet tender cries which pierced to our own souls. Afterwards she retired once more, but plunged herself only half in the darkness, appearing and disappearing by turns, now flying from our gaze and now desiring to be seen,[88] while later still you neither saw nor heard her save for a far-off plaintive note like the sigh of a dying girl. And we remained aghast, throbbing with admiration and fear, longing for the moment when her veil, fluttering with the dance-movement, should be lighted up by the torches, when her voice should warn us of her return, with a joyful cry, to which we answered involuntarily, because it made us vibrate with a crowd of secret harmonies. Then she came back; she spun round like a flower stripped from its stalk by the wind; she sprang from the ground as if it rested only with her to quit earth for ever; she dropped again as if it was only her will which kept her from touching it at all; she did not bound from the floor--you would have thought that she shot from it--that some mysterious law of her destiny forbade her to touch it, save in order to fly from it. And her head, bent with an expression of caressing impatience, and her arms, gracefully opened, as though in appealing prayer, seemed to implore us to save her.

The captain himself is on the point of yielding to the temptation, but is antic.i.p.ated by Sergy, whose embrace she returns, but sinks into a chair, and then, seeming to forget the presence of the others altogether, invites him to follow her through tortuous and ruined pa.s.sages (which she describes) to a sepulchre, which she inhabits, with owls for her only live companions. Then she rises, picks up her shroud-like mantle, and vanishes in the darkness with a weird laugh and the famous words, "_Qui m'aime me suive_."

The other three have the utmost difficulty in preventing Sergy (by main force at first) from obeying. And the captain tries rationalism, suggesting first that the pretended Ines is a bait for some gang of a.s.sa.s.sins or at least brigands, then that the whole thing is a trick of Bascara's to "produce" a new cantatrice. But Boutraix, who has been entirely converted from his Voltairianism by the shock, sets aside the first idea like a soldier, and Bascara rebuts the second like a sensible man. Brigands certainly would give no such warning of their presence, and a wise manager does not expose his prima donna's throat to cohabitation in ruins with skeletons and owls. They finally agree on silence, and shortly afterwards the three officers leave Spain. Sergy is killed at Lutzen, murmuring the name of Ines. Boutraix, who has never relapsed, takes the cowl, and the captain retires after the war to his own small estate, where he means to stay. He ends by saying _Voila tout_.

Alas! it is not all, and it is not the end. Some rather idle talk with the auditors follows, and then there is the above-mentioned Radcliffian explanation, telling how Ines was a real Las Sierras of a Mexican branch, who had actually made her debut as an actress, had been, as was at first thought, murdered by a worthless lover, but recovered. Her wits, however, were gone, and having escaped from the kind restraint under which she was put, she had wandered to the castle of her ancestors, afterwards completely recovering her senses and returning to the profession in the company of Bascara himself.

Now I think that, if I took the trouble to do so, I could point out improbabilities in this second story sufficient to d.a.m.n it on its own showing.[89] But, as has been said already, I prefer to leave it alone.

I never admired George Vavasour in Trollope's _Can You Forgive Her?_ But I own that I agree with him heartily in his opinion that "making a conjurer explain his tricks" is despicably poor fun.

Still, the story, which ends at "Voila tout" and which for me does so end "for good and all," is simply magnificent. I have put it elsewhere with _Wandering Willie's Tale_, which it more specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpa.s.ses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"--the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures of sight and sound and feeling, and heightens them by force of contrast. The scene of Ines' actual appearance would have been the easiest thing in the world to spoil, and therefore was the most difficult thing in the world to do right. But it is absolutely right. In particular, the way in which her conduct in at once admitting Sergy's attentions, and finally inviting him to "follow,"

is guarded from the very slightest suggestion of the professional "comingness" of a common courtesan, and made the spontaneous action of a thing divine or diabolic, is really wonderful.

At the same time, the adverse criticism made here, with that on _La Fee aux Miettes_ and a few other foregoing remarks, will probably prepare the reader for the repeated and final judgment that Nodier was very unlikely to produce a good long story. And, though I have not read _quite_ all that he wrote, I certainly think that he never did.

[Sidenote: Nodier's special quality.]

In adding new and important masterpieces to the glittering chain of short cameo-like narratives which form the peculiar glory of French literature, he did greatly. And his performance and example were greater still in respect of the _quality_ which he infused into those best pieces of his work which have been examined here. It is hardly too much to say that this quality had been almost dormant--a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that literature's graces--ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking--hardly more than motions in a dream--at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister--Our Lady of Dreams, one might call her in imitation of a famous fancy--had not shown herself much in French merriment or in French sadness: the light of common day there had been too much for her. Yet in Charles Nodier she found the magician who could wake her from sleep: and she told him what she had thought while sleeping.[92]

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Vol. I. pp. 458, 472, _notes_.

[38] Vol. I. p. 161.

[39] When he published _Le Cocu_, it was set about that a pudibund lady had asked her book-seller for "Le Dernier de M. Paul de k.o.c.k." And this circ.u.mlocution became for a time popular, as a new name for the poor creature on the ornaments of whose head our Elizabethans joked so untiringly.

[40] A short essay, or at least a "middle" article, might be written on this way of regarding a prophet in his own country, coupling Beranger with Paul de k.o.c.k. Of course the former is by much a _major_ prophet in verse than Paul is in prose. But the att.i.tude of the superior French person to both is, in different degrees, the same. (Thackeray in the article referred to below, p. 62 _note_, while declaring Paul to be _the_ French writer whose works are best known in England, says that his educated countrymen think him _pitoyable_.--_Works_, Oxford edition, vol. ii p. 533.)

[41] A gibe at the Vicomte d'Arlincourt's very popular novel, to be noticed below. I have not, I confess, identified the pa.s.sage: but it may be in one of the plays.

[42] It would _not_ be fair to compare the two as makers of literature.

In that respect Theodore Hook is Paul's Plutarchian parallel, though he has more literature and less life.

[43] Charity, outrunning knowledge, may plead "Irony perhaps?"

Unfortunately there is no chance of it.

[44] I really do not know who was (see a little below). Parny in his absurd _G.o.ddam!_ (1804) has something of it.

[45] And _he_ knew something of it through Addison.

[46] The straight hair is particularly curious, for, as everybody who knows portraits of the early nineteenth century at all is aware, Englishmen of the time preferred brushed back and rather "tousled"

locks. In Maclise's famous "Fraserians" there is hardly a straight-combed head among all the twenty or thirty. At the same time it is fair to say that our own book-ill.u.s.trators and caricaturists, for some strange reason, did a good deal to authorise the libels. Cruikshank was no doubt a wonderful draughtsman, but I never saw (and I thank G.o.d for it) anything like many, if not most, of his faces. "Phiz" and Cattermole in (for example) their ill.u.s.trations to _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ sometimes out-Cruikshank Cruikshank in this respect.

[47] Paul's ideas of money are still very modest. An income of 6000 francs (240) represents ease if not affluence; with double the amount you can "aspire to a d.u.c.h.ess," and even the dispendious Irish-French Viscount Edward de Sommerston in _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_ (_v. inf._) starts on his career with scarcely more than three thousand a year.

[48] Paul's scholars.h.i.+p was very rudimentary, as is shown in not a few sc.r.a.ps of ungrammatical Latin: he never, I think, ventures on Greek. But whether he was the first to _estropier_ the not ugly form "_Cleodora_,"

I know not. Perhaps he muddled it with "Clotilde."

[49] This cult of the widow might form the subject of a not uninteresting excursus if we were not confining ourselves to the literary sides of our matter. It has been noticed before (Vol. I. p.

368), and forms one of the most curious differences between the two countries. For, putting Mr. Weller out of the question, I have known far from sentimental critics who thought Trollope's best book by no means improved by the previous experience of Eleanor Bold. Cherolatry in France, however, is not really old: it hardly appears before the eighteenth century. It may be partly due to a more or less conscious idea that perhaps the lady may have got over the obligatory adultery at the expense of her "dear first" and may not think it necessary to repeat. A sort of "measles over."

[50] He also improves his neglected education in a manner not unsuggestive of Prince Giglio. In fact, I fancy there is a good deal of half-latent parody of Paul in Thackeray.

[51] There might have been fifteen or fifty, for the book is more a sequence of scenes than a schematic composition: for which reason the above account of it may seem somewhat _decousu_.

[52] I think I have commented elsewhere on the difficulty of villains.

It was agreeable to find confirmation, when this book was already in the printer's hands, given at an exemption tribunal by a theatrical manager.

For six weeks, he said, he had advertised and done everything possible to supply the place of a good villain, with no success. And your bad stage villain _may_ be comic: while your bad novel villain is only a bore.

[53] Frederique, Madame Dauberny (who has, without legal sanction, relieved herself of a loathsome creature whom she has married, and lives a free though not at all immoral life), was not very easy to do, and is very well done.

[54] This, which is short and thoroughly lively, is, I imagine, the latest of Paul's good books. It is indeed so late that instead of the _jupons_, striped and black and white, of which Georgette has made irreproachable but profitable use, she appears at the _denouement_ in a crinoline!