= t =


 
 FRENCH PROFILES
 
 Other Works by Mr. EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 On Viol and Flute 
 Firdausi in Exile 
 King Erik 
 In Rutiet and Silver 
 
 IN PROSB 
 Northern Studies 
 
 Life of Gray 
 
 Seventeenth Century Studiet 
 
 Life of Congreve 
 
 A Hittory of Eighteenth Century Literature 
 
 A Short Hittory of Modern English Literature 
 
 Life of Philip Henry Gone, F.R.S. 
 
 Gossip in a Library 
 
 The Secret of Nareisse 
 
 Questions at Issue 
 
 Critical Kit-Katt 
 
 Life and Letters of John Donne 
 Life of Jeremy Taylor
 
 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 MCMV
 
 First Edition, November 1904. 
 Reprinted, March 1905. 
 
 All rightt reserved
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 To 
 
 My Friend 
 SIR ALFRED BATEMAN, K.C.M.G. 
 
 In Memory of 
 
 The Talks of Many Tears 
 
 I Affectionately Inscribe 
 
 these Studies
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT is characteristic of native criticism that it con- 
 templates, or should contemplate, the products of 
 native literature from the front ; that it looks at 
 them, in other words, from a direct and complete 
 point of view. Foreign criticism must not pretend 
 to do this ; unless it is satisfied to be a mere echo 
 or repetition, its point of view must be incomplete 
 and indirect, must be that of one who paints a 
 face in profile. In preparing the following side- 
 views of some curious figures in modern French 
 literature, I have attempted to keep two aims 
 prominently before me. I have tried to preserve 
 that attitude of sympathy, of general comprehen- 
 sion, for the lack of which some English criticism 
 of foreign authors has been valueless, because 
 proceeding from a point so far out of focus as to 
 make its whole presentation false ; and yet I have 
 remembered that it is a foreigner who takes the 
 portrait, and that he takes it for a foreign audience, 
 and not for a native one. 
 
 What I have sought in every case to do is to 
 give an impression of the figure before me which
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 shall be in general harmony with the tradition of 
 French criticism, but at the same time to preserve 
 that independence which is the right of a foreign 
 observer, and to illustrate the peculiarities of my 
 subject by references to English poetry and prose. 
 
 It should not be difficult to carry out this 
 scheme of portraiture in the case of authors whose 
 work is finished. But the study of contemporary 
 writers, also, is of great interest, and must not 
 be neglected, although its results are incomplete. 
 Several of the authors who are treated here are 
 still alive, and some are younger than myself. It 
 is highly probable that all of these will, in the 
 development of their genius, make some new 
 advance which may render obsolete what the 
 most careful criticism has said about them up to 
 the present time. In these living cases, there- 
 fore, it seems more helpful to consider certain 
 books to take snapshots, as it were, at the 
 authors in the course of their progress than to 
 attempt a summing-up of what is still fortunately 
 undefined. Of the art with which this can be 
 done, and the permanent value of that art, the 
 French criticism of our generation has given 
 admirable proof. 
 
 The last chapter in this book is not in any 
 sense a profile, but the writer trusts that he will 
 be forgiven for introducing it here. Last winter 
 he had the honour of being invited to Paris to
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 deliver an address before the Societ des Con- 
 ferences. The Committee of that Society, consist- 
 ing of MM. Ferdinand Brunetiere, Edouard Rod 
 and Gaston Deschamps, in proposing the subject 
 of the address, asked that it should be delivered in 
 English. In an admirable French translation, 
 made by my accomplished friend, M. Henry D. 
 Davray, it was afterwards published in the Mercure 
 de France and then as a separate brochure, but the 
 English text is now printed for the first time. 
 
 Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has been so kind 
 as to read the proofs of this volume, and I am 
 indebted to his rare acquaintance with Continental 
 literature for many valuable corrections and 
 suggestions. My thanks are due to the pro- 
 prietors of the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary 
 Review, the International Quarterly Review, the 
 Saturday Review and the Daily Chronicle, for per- 
 mission to reprint what originally appeared in 
 their pages. I regret that in one other case, 
 that of the useful and unique European review, 
 Cosmopolis, there is no one left who can receive 
 this acknowledgment. 
 
 ARGELfcs-GAZOST, 
 September 1904.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 Preface ....... vii 
 
 Alfred de Vigny ..... I 
 
 Mademoiselle A'isse . . . . 35 
 
 A Nun's Lovf-Lctiers .... 68 
 
 Barley D* Aur evilly ..... 92 
 
 Alphonse Daudet . . . . .108 
 
 The Short Stories of Zola . . . .129 
 
 Ferdinand Fabre . . . . .153 
 
 A First Sight of Verlaine . . . .182 
 
 The Irony of M. Anatole France . . 189 
 
 Pierre Loti . . . . . .202 
 
 Some Recent Books of M. Paul Bourget . 239 
 M. Rene Bazin . . . . .266 
 
 M. Henri de Regnier . . . .292 
 
 Four Poets : 
 
 Stephane Mallarme . . . -305 
 
 M. Entile Verbaeren . . . .312 
 
 Albert Samain . . . . .318 
 
 M. Paul Fort . . . . -324 
 
 The Influence of France upon English Poetry . 330 
 Index . . . . . . . 365
 
 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 
 
 THE reputation of Alfred de Vigny has endured 
 extraordinary vicissitudes in France. After having 
 taken his place as the precursor of French ro- 
 mantic poetry and as one of the most admired of 
 its proficients, he withdrew from among his noisier 
 and more copious contemporaries into that " ivory 
 tower " of reverie which is the one commonplace 
 of criticism regarding him. He died in as deep a 
 retirement as if his body had lain in the shepherd's 
 hut on wheels upon the open moorland, which he 
 took as the symbol of his isolation. He had long 
 been neglected, he was almost forgotten, when the 
 publication of his posthumous poems a handful 
 of unflawed amethysts and sapphires revived his 
 fame among the enlightened. But the Second 
 Empire was a period deeply unfavourable to such 
 contemplation as the writings of Vigny demand. 
 He sank a second time into semi-oblivion ; he 
 became a curiosity of criticism, a hunting-ground 
 for anthology-makers. Within the last ten years, 
 however, a marked revolution of Uste has occurred 
 in France. The supremacy of Victor Hugo has 
 
 A
 
 2 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 been, if not questioned, since it is above serious 
 attack, at least mitigated. Other poets have re- 
 covered from their obscurity ; Lamartine, who had 
 been quenched, shines like a lamp relighted ; and, 
 above all, the pure and brilliant and profoundly 
 original genius of Alfred de Vigny now takes, for 
 the first time, its proper place as one of the main 
 illuminating forces of the nineteenth century. It 
 was not until about ninety years after this poet's 
 birth that it became clearly recognised that he is 
 one of the most important of all the great poets of 
 France. 
 
 The revival of admiration for Vigny has not yet 
 spread to England, where he is perhaps less known 
 than any other French writer of the first class. 
 This is the more to be regretted because he did 
 not, in the brief day of his early glory, contrive to 
 attract many hearers outside his own country. It 
 is not merely regrettable, moreover, it is curiously 
 unjust, because Vigny is of all the great French 
 poets the one who has assimilated most of the 
 English spirit, and has been influenced most by 
 English poetry. Andr Chnier read Pope and 
 Thomson and the Faerie Queen but he detested 
 the Anglo-Saxon spirit. Alfred de Vigny, on the 
 other hand, delighted in it ; he was a convinced 
 Anglophil, and the writers whom he resembles, in 
 his sublime isolation from the tradition of his own 
 country, are Wordsworth and Shelley, Matthew 
 Arnold and Leopardi. He has much of the spirit 
 of Dante and of the attitude of Milton. Wholly 
 independent as he is, one of the most unattached 
 of writers, it is impossible not to feel in him a
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 3 
 
 certain Anglo- Italian gravity and intensity, a cer- 
 tain reserve and resignation in the face of human 
 suffering, which distinguish him from all other 
 French writers of eminence. It is not from any 
 of Alfred de Vigny's great contemporaries that life 
 would have extracted that last cry in the desert : 
 
 " Seul le silence est grand : tout le reste est faiblesse," 
 
 nor should we look to them for the ambiguous 
 device " Parfaite illusion Realit6 parfaite." The 
 other poets of France have been picturesque, 
 abundant, gregarious, vehement ; Alfred de Vigny 
 was not of their class, but we can easily conceive 
 him among those who, in the Cumberland of 
 a hundred years ago, were murmuring by the 
 running brooks a music sweeter than their own. 
 
 One word of warning may not be out of place. 
 If Alfred de Vigny was known to English readers 
 of a past generation it was mainly through a 
 brilliant study by Sainte-Beuve in his Nouveaux 
 Lundis. This was composed very shortly after 
 the death of Vigny, and, in spite of its excessive 
 critical cleverness, it deserves very little commen- 
 dation. Sainte-Beuve, who had been more or less 
 intimate with Vigny forty years before, had formed 
 a strange jealousy of him, and in this essay his 
 perfidy runs riot. It is Sainte-Beuve who calls 
 the poet of Les Destine'es a " beautiful angel 
 who had been drinking vinegar," and the modern 
 reader needs a strong caution against the malice 
 and raillery of the quondam friend who was so 
 patient and who forgot nothing.
 
 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 I 
 
 An image of the youthful Alfred de Vigny is 
 preserved for us in the charming portrait of the 
 Carnavalet Museum. Here he smiles at us out of 
 gentle blue eyes, and under copious yellow curls, 
 candid, dreamy, almost childlike in his magnificent 
 scarlet and gold uniform of the King's Musketeers. 
 This portrait was painted in 1815, when the sub- 
 ject of it was just eighteen, yet had already served 
 in the army for a year. Alfred de Vigny was born 
 at Loches, on March 27, 1797. Aristocrats and 
 of families wholly military, his father and mother 
 had been thrown into prison during the Terror, 
 had escaped with their lives, and had concealed 
 themselves after Thermidor, in the romantic little 
 town of the Touraine. The childhood of the poet 
 was not particularly interesting ; what is known 
 about it is recorded in M. Scene's recent volume l 
 and elsewhere. But there effervesced in his young 
 soul a burning ambition for arms, and before he 
 was seventeen, he contrived to leave school and 
 enter a squadron of the Gendarmes Rouges. He 
 was full of military pride in his early life, and until 
 his illusions overcame him he hardly knew whether 
 to be more vain of the laurel or of the sword. He 
 says : 
 
 " J'ai mis sur le cimier dore* du gentilhomme 
 Une plume de fer qui n'est pas sans beaute* ; 
 J'ai fait illustre un nom qu'on m'a transmis sans gloire," 
 
 for he knew that the deeds of that " petite nob- 
 
 1 L&m S6ch6, Alfred de Vigny et son Temps, Paris, F&ix Juven, 1902.
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 5 
 
 lesse" from which he sprang were excellent, but 
 not magnificent. 
 
 No one seems to have discovered under what 
 auspices he began to write verses. There appear 
 in his works two idyls, La Dryade and Sytne'tha, 
 which are marked as " written in 1815." 
 Sainte-Beuve, with curious coarseness, after 
 Vigny's death, accused him in so many terms 
 of having antedated these pieces by five years in 
 order to escape the reproach of having imitated 
 Andre Chnier, whose poems were first collected 
 posthumously in 1819. Such a charge is contrary 
 to everything we know of the upright and chival- 
 rous character of Vigny. That the influence of 
 Chenier is strong on these verses is unquestionable. 
 But Sainte-Beuve should not have forgotten that 
 the eclogues of Chenier were quoted by Chateau- 
 briand in a note to the Genie du Chrislianisme in 
 1802, and that this was quite enough to start the 
 youthful talent of Vigny. From this time forth, 
 no attack can be made on the originality of the 
 poet, so far as all French influences are concerned. 
 The next piece of his which we possess, La Dame 
 Romaine, is dated 1817 ; this and Le Bal, of 
 1818, show the attraction which Byron had for 
 him. In these verses the romantic school of 
 French poetry made its earliest appeal to the 
 public, and in 1819 Alfred de Vigny's friendship 
 with the youthful Victor Hugo began. 
 
 It was in 1822 that a little volume of the highest 
 historical importance was issued, without the 
 name of its author, and under the modest title 
 of Poentes. It was divided into three parts,
 
 6 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Antiques, Judaiiques, and Modernes, and the second 
 of these sections contained one poem which 
 can still be read with undiluted pleasure. This 
 is the exquisite lyrical narrative entitled La Fille 
 de Jephte, which had been composed in 1820. 
 To realise what were the merits of Alfred de 
 Vigny as a precursor, we have but to compare 
 this faultless Biblical elegy with anything of the 
 kind written up to that date by a French poet, 
 even though his name was Hugo. 
 
 Meanwhile the life of Vigny was a picturesque 
 and melancholy one. A certain impression of its 
 features may be gathered, incidentally, from the 
 pages of the Grandeur et Servitude Militaires t al- 
 though that was written long afterwards. He was 
 a soldier from his seventeenth to his thirtieth year, 
 and many of his best poems were written by 
 lamplight, in the corner of a tent, as the young 
 lieutenant lay on his elbow, waiting for the tuck 
 of drum. He was long in garrison with the Royal 
 Foot Guards at Vincennes, and thence he could 
 slip in to Paris, meet the other budding poets at 
 the rooms of Nodier, and recite verses with Emile 
 Deschamps and Victor Hugo. But in 1823 he 
 was definitely torn from Paris. The Spanish War 
 took his regiment to the Pyrenean frontier and it 
 was while in camp, close to Roncevaux and Fuent- 
 arrabia, that he seems to have heard, one knows 
 not how, of the newly discovered wonders of the 
 Chanson de Roland, which was still unknown save 
 to a few English scholars ; the result was that 
 he wrote that enchanting poem, Le Cor. If the 
 student is challenged, as he sometimes is, to name
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 7 
 
 a lyric in the French language which has the 
 irresistible magic and melody of the best pieces of 
 Coleridge or Keats, that fairy music which is the 
 peculiar birthright of England, he cannot do 
 better than to quote, almost at random, from Le 
 Cor : 
 
 " Sur le plus haut des monts s'arretent les chevaux ; 
 L'ecume les blanchit ; sous leurs pieds, Roncevaux 
 Des feux mourants du jour a peine se colore. 
 A 1'horizon lointain fuit Pe'tendard du More. 
 
 ' Turpin, n'as-tu rien vu dans le fond du torrent ? ' 
 ' J'y vois deux chevaliers ; Tun mort, 1'autre expirant. 
 Tous deux sont ecrases sous une roche noire ; 
 Le plus fort, dans sa main, dleve un Cor d'ivoire, 
 Son ame en s'exhalant nous appela deux fois.' 
 
 Dieu ! que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois." 
 
 Begun at Roncevaux in 1823, Le Cor was 
 finished at Pau in 1825. At the former date, 
 Alfred de Vigny was slightly in love with the 
 fascinating Delphine Gay, and some verses, re- 
 cently given to the world, lead to the belief that 
 he failed to propose to her because she "laughed too 
 loudly." Already the melancholy and distinguished 
 sobriety of manner which was to be the mark of 
 Alfred de Vigny had begun to settle upon him. 
 Already he shrank from noise, from levity, from 
 hollow and reverberating enthusiasm. His regi- 
 ment was sent to Strasburg and he became a 
 captain. Returning to the Pyrenees, he wrote 
 Le Deluge and Dolorida ; in the Vosges he 
 composed the first draft of /oa, which he 
 called Satan. In the second edition of his 
 Poemes, there were included a number of pieces
 
 8 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 vastly superior to those previously published, and 
 Alfred de Vigny boldly claimed for himself that 
 distinction as a precursor, which was long denied 
 to him, and which is now again universally con- 
 ceded. He wrote that "the only merit of these 
 poems," it was not their only or their greatest 
 merit, but it was a distinction, "c'est d'avoir 
 devanc6 en France toutes celles de ce genre." 
 That was absolutely true. 
 
 When we reflect that the earliest poems of 
 Victor Hugo which display his characteristic 
 talent, such as Le Sylphe and La Grand'mere, 
 belong to 1823, the originality of Mo'ise, which 
 was written in 1822, is extraordinary. In spite 
 of all that has been published since, this poem 
 may still be read with complete pleasure ; there 
 are few narratives in the French language more 
 distinguished, more uplifted. Moses stands at 
 sunset on the brow of Nebo ; the land of Canaan 
 lies spread at his feet. He gazes at it with long- 
 ing and despair, and then he turns to climb the 
 mountain. Amid the hymns of Israel he ascends 
 into the clouds, and in the luminous obscurity he 
 speaks with God. In a majestic soliloquy he ex- 
 patiates on the illusions of his solitary greatness, 
 and on the disappointment of his finding his own 
 life more isolated and more arid the vaster his 
 destinies become. The angels, themselves, envy 
 his position : 
 
 " Vos anges sont jaloux et m'admirent entre eux, 
 Et cependant, Seigneur, je ne suis pas heureux ; 
 Vous m'avez fait vieillir puissant et solitaire, 
 Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre."
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 9 
 
 Here we have at length the master accent of 
 Alfred de Vigny, that which was to be the central 
 note of his poetry, a conception of the sublimity 
 of man, who, having tasted of the water of 
 life, sinks back " dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing." 
 Nothing could be more poignant than the 
 melodious reverie of Moses : 
 
 " J'ai vu 1'amour s'eteindre et 1'amitie tarir ; 
 Les vierges se voilaient et craignaient de mourir. 
 M'enveloppant alors de la colonne noire, 
 J'ai marche devant tous, triste et seul dans ma gloire, 
 Et j'ai dit dans mon cceur : ' Que vouloir k present ?' 
 Pour dormir sur un sein mon front est trop pesant, 
 Ma main laisse 1'effroi sur la main qu'elle touche, 
 L'orage est dans ma voix, 1'dclair est sur ma bouche ; 
 Aussi, loin de m'aimer, voilk qu'ils tremblent tous, 
 Et, quand j'ouvre les bras, on tombe k mes genoux. 
 O Seigneur ! j'ai vecu puissant et solitaire, 
 Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre ! " 
 
 On the morning when these enchanting verses 
 were composed, poetry was full-grown again in 
 France, reborn after the long burial of the eigh- 
 teenth century. 
 
 The processes of the poet's mind are still better 
 observed in Le Deluge, a less perfect poem. All 
 was serene and splendid in the primeval world, 
 
 " Et lajbeaute du Monde attestait son enfance," 
 
 but there was one blot on the terrestrial paradise, 
 for " I'Homme etait mechant." In consequence of 
 a secret warning, Noah builds the ark, and enters 
 it with his family. One of his descendants, 
 however, the young Sara, refuses to take shelter 
 in it, because she has an appointment to meet
 
 io FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Emmanuel, her angel lover, on Mount Arar. 
 The deluge arrives ; Sara calls in vain on her 
 supernatural protector, and, climbing far up the 
 peak, is the last of mortals to be submerged. The 
 violence of the flood is rather grotesquely described ; 
 the succeeding calm is, on the other hand, of the 
 purest Vigny : 
 
 " La vague etait paisible, et molle etjcadence'e, 
 En berceaux de cristal mollement balancee ; 
 Les vents, sans resistance, etaient silencieux ; 
 La foudre, sans echos, expirait dans les cieux ; 
 Les cieux devenaient purs, et, refle'chis dans 1'onde, 
 Teignaient d'un azur clair I'lmmensite" profonde." 
 
 Written in the Pyrenees in 1823, Le Deluge exempli- 
 fies the close attention which Alfred de Vigny paid 
 to English literature, and particularly to Byron. 
 In Mo'ise the sole influences discoverable are those 
 of the Bible and Milton ; Le Deluge shows that 
 the French poet had just been reading Heaven 
 and Earth. This drama was not published until 
 January 1823, a week after Moore's Loves of 
 the Angels, which also was already exercising a 
 fascination over the mind of Vigny. The prompti- 
 tude with which he transferred these elements into 
 his own language is very remarkable, and has never, 
 I think, been noted. 
 
 Still more observable are these English influences 
 in j/oa, which was written in the spring of 1824. 
 This is the romance of pity, tenderness, and sacri- 
 fice, of vain self-sacrifice and of pity without hands 
 to help. It was received by the young writers of its 
 own country with a frenzy of admiration. In La 
 Muse Franfaise Victor Hugo reviewed it in terms
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY n 
 
 of redundant eulogy. A little later, and when so 
 much more of a brilliant character had been 
 published, Gautier styled loa " the most beautiful 
 and perhaps the most perfect poem in the French 
 language." As a specimen of idealistic religious 
 romanticism it will always be a classic and will 
 always be read with pleasure ; but time has 
 somewhat tarnished its sentimental beauty. It 
 is another variant of The Loves of the Angels, 
 but treated in a far purer and more ethereal spirit 
 than that of Moore or Byron. 
 
 It would be difficult to point to a more delicate 
 example of the school of sensibility than loa. To 
 submit one's self without reserve to its pellucid 
 charm is like gazing into the depths of an ame- 
 thyst. The subject is sentimental in the highest 
 degree ; Eloa is an angel, who, in her blissful 
 state, hears of the agony of Satan, and is drawn 
 by curiosity and pity to descend into his sphere. 
 Her compassion and her imprudence are rewarded 
 by her falling passionately in love with the stricken 
 archangel, and resigning herself to his baneful 
 force. Brought face to face with his crimes, she 
 resists him, but the wily fiend melts into hypo- 
 critical tears, and Eloa sinks into his arms. 
 Wrapped in a flowing cloud they pass together 
 down to Hell, and a chorus of faithful seraphim, 
 winging their way back to Paradise, overhear this 
 latest and fatal dialogue: 
 
 " ' Ou me conduisez-vous, bel ange ? ' J Viens toujours.' 
 ' Que votre voix est triste, et quel sombre discours ! 
 N'est-ce pas Eloa qui souleve ta chaine ? 
 J'ai cru t'avoir sauveY ' Non ! c'est moi qui t'entraine.'
 
 12 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ' Si nous sommes unis, peu m'importe en quel lieu ! 
 
 Nomme-moi done encore ou ta soeur ou ton dieu ! ' 
 
 ' J'enleve mon esclave et je tiens ma victime.' 
 
 'Tu paraissais si bon ! Oh ! qu'ai-je fait ?' ' Un crime. 
 
 'Seras-tu plus heureux? du moins, es-tu content?' 
 
 ' Plus triste que jamais.' ' Qui done est-tu ?' ' Satan.' " 
 
 Taste changes, and loa has too much the 
 appearance, to our eyes, of a wax-work. But 
 nothing can prevent our appreciation of the 
 magnificent verses in which it is written. The 
 design and scheme of colour may be those of Ary 
 Scheffer, the execution is worthy of Raphael. 
 
 Before we cease to examine these early writings, 
 however, we must spare a moment though only 
 a moment to the consideration of a work which 
 gave Vigny the popular celebrity which served to 
 introduce his verses to a wider public. Early in 
 1826 he was presented to Sir Walter Scott in 
 Paris, and, fired with Anglomaniac ambition, he 
 immediately sat down to write a French Waverley 
 novel. The result was Cinq-Mars, long the most 
 successful of all his writings, although not the 
 best. It is a story of the time of Louis XIII. and 
 of Cardinal Richelieu ; it deals with all the court 
 intrigues which led up to the horrible assassina- 
 tion of De Thou and of Henri d'Effiat, Marquis 
 de Cinq-Mars. Anne of Austria is a foremost 
 figure on the scene of it. Cinq-Mars, a very care- 
 ful study in the manner of Walter Scott, was 
 afterwards enriched by notes and historical 
 apparatus, and by an essay " On Truth in Art," 
 written in 1827. It has passed through countless 
 editions, but it is overfull of details, the plot drags,
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 13 
 
 and the reader must be simple to find it an excit- 
 ing romance. It is interesting to notice in it the 
 Anglophil tendencies of its author betrayed in 
 quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, 
 and the restricted circle of his friends by frequent 
 introduction of the names of Delphine Gay, 
 Soumet, Nodier, Lammenais. Cinq -Mars will 
 always be remembered as the earliest French 
 romantic novel of the historical order. 
 
 The marriage of Alfred de Vigny, the facts and 
 even the date of which have been persistently 
 misreported by his biographers even by M. 
 Paleologue took place, as M. Sech has proved, 
 at Pau, on February 3, 1825. He married Miss 
 Lydia Bunbury, the daughter of Sir Edward 
 Bunbury, a soldier and politician not without 
 eminence in his day. She was twenty-six years 
 of age, of a " majestic beauty " which soon dis- 
 appeared under the attacks of ill-health, and 
 everything about her gratified the excessive Anglo- 
 mania of the poet. She could not talk French 
 with ease, and curiously enough -when she had 
 for many years been the Comtesse Alfred de 
 Vigny, it was observed that she still spoke broken 
 French with a strong English accent. It appears 
 that this was positively agreeable to the poet, who 
 had a little while before written that his only 
 penates were his Bible and " a few English engrav- 
 ings," and whose conversation ran incessantly on 
 Byron, Southey, Moore, and Scott. It is certain 
 that some French critics have found it hard to 
 forgive the intensity of Vigny's early love of all 
 things English.
 
 i 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 French writers have laboured to prove that the 
 marriage of Alfred de Vigny was an unhappy one. 
 It was certainly both anomalous and unfortunate, 
 but there is no need to exaggerate its misfortunes. 
 Lydia Bunbury appears to have been limited in 
 intelligence and sympathy, and bad health gradually 
 made her fretful. Yet there exists no evidence 
 that she ever lost her liking for her husband or 
 ceased to be soothed by his presence. He, for 
 his part, had never loved when he proposed to 
 Lydia Bunbury, and their relations continued to 
 be as phlegmatic on the one side as on the other. 
 For four or five years they lived together in sober 
 friendship, Lydia sinking deeper and deeper into 
 the condition of a chronic invalid. She was then 
 nursed and tended by her husband with the 
 tenderest assiduity and patience, and in later 
 years he was a constant visitor at her sofa. She 
 had exchanged a husband for a nurse, and doubt- 
 less renunciation would have been the greater 
 part for Vigny also to play. But over his calm 
 existence love now, for the first and only time, 
 swept like a whirlwind of fire. In the tumult of 
 this passion it is to his credit that he never forgot 
 to be patient with and solicitous about the helpless 
 invalid at home. If morality is offended, let this 
 at least be recollected, that Lydia de Vigny knew 
 all, and expressed no murmur which has been 
 recorded. 
 
 The first period of Alfred de Vigny's life closed 
 in 1827, when he left the army, on the pretext of 
 health. He travelled in England with his wife, 
 and it was at Dieppe, on a return journey in 1828,
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 15 
 
 that he wrote the most splendid of his few lyrical 
 poems, La Fregate ' La Se'rieuse.' This ode is too 
 long for its interest, but contains stanzas that 
 have never been surpassed for brilliance, as for 
 example : 
 
 " Comme un dauphin elle saute, 
 
 Elle plonge comme lui 
 Dans la mer profonde et haute 
 
 Ovt le feu Saint-Elme a lui. 
 Le feu serpente avec grace ; 
 Du gouvernail qu'il embrasse 
 II marque longtemps la trace, 
 
 Et 1'on dirait un eclair 
 Qui, n'ayant pu nous atteindre, 
 Dans les vagues va s'eteindre, 
 Mais ne cesse de les teindre 
 
 Du prisme enflamme de Pair." 
 
 II 
 
 It is remarkable to notice how many English 
 influences the nature of Alfred de Vigny obeyed. 
 In May, 1828, the performances of Edmund Kean 
 in Paris stirred his imagination to its depths. He 
 immediately plunged himself into a fresh study of 
 Shakespeare, and still further exercised his fancy 
 by repeated experiences of the magic of Mrs. 
 Siddons during a long visit he paid to London. 
 The result was soon apparent in his attempts to 
 render Shakespeare vocal to the French, who had 
 welcomed Kean's " Othello " with " un vulgaire le 
 plus profane que jamais 1'ignorance parisienne ait 
 dechaine dans une salle de spectacle" (May 17, 
 1828). Vigny translated The Merchant of Venice, 
 Romeo and Juliet, and, above all, Othello, which
 
 16 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 was acted in October, 1829, amid the plaudits 
 of the whole romantic camp of Paris. That 
 night Vigny, already extremely admired within 
 a limited circle, became universally famous, and 
 a dangerous rival to Victor Hugo, with whose 
 Hernani and Marion de Lorme, moreover, com- 
 parison soon grew inevitable. 
 
 But Alfred de Vigny cared little for the jealousies 
 of the Cenacle. He was now absorbed by a very 
 different passion. It appears to have been on May 
 30, 1829,* that, after a performance of Casimir 
 Delavigne's romantic tragedy of Marino Faliero, 
 Vigny was presented to the actress, Marie Dorval. 
 This remarkable woman of genius had been born 
 in 1798, had shown from the age of four years a 
 prodigious talent for the stage, had made her 
 debut in Paris in 1818, and had been a universal 
 favourite since 1822. She was, therefore, neither 
 very young nor very new when she passed across 
 the path of Alfred de Vigny with such fiery results. 
 She was highly practised in the arts of love, and 
 he a timid and fastidious novice. It may even be 
 said, without too great a paradox, that the romance 
 of loa was now enacted in real life, with the parts 
 reversed, for the poet was the candid angel, drawn 
 to his fall by pity, curiosity, and tenderness, while 
 Madame Dorvalwas the formidable and fatal demon 
 who dragged him down. " Demon," however, is 
 far too harsh a word to employ, even in jest, for 
 this tremulous and expansive woman, all emotion 
 and undisciplined ardour. M. Sech6 has put the 
 position very well before us : " When, at the age 
 
 1 See M Leon Se"che^s monograph, pp. 53-56.
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 17 
 
 of thirty-two, she saw kneeling at her feet this 
 gentleman of ancient lineage, his charming face 
 framed in his blond and curly hair and delicately 
 lighted up by the tender azure of his eyes, she 
 experienced a sentiment she had never felt before, 
 as though a cup of cold well-water had been lifted 
 to her burning lips." 
 
 Reserved, irreproachable, by temperament ob- 
 scure and chilly, it was long before Alfred de 
 Vigny succumbed to the tumult of the senses. 
 For a long time the animated and extravagant 
 actress was dazzled by the mystical adoration, the 
 respectful and solemn worship of her new admirer. 
 She was accustomed to the rough way of the world, 
 but she had never been loved like this before. She 
 became hypnotised at last by the gaze of Alfred de 
 Vigny fixed upon her in what Sainte-Beuve has 
 called " a perpetual seraphic hallucination." A 
 transformation appeared to come over herself. 
 She fell in love with Vigny as completely as the 
 poet had with her, and she became, in virtue of 
 the transcendent ductility of her temperament as 
 an actress, a temporary copy of himself. She 
 was all reverie, all abstract devotion, and the 
 strange pair floated through the stormy life of 
 Paris, a marvel to all beholders, in a discreet and 
 delicate rapture, as a poet with his muse, as a 
 nun with her brother. This ecstatic relation 
 continued until 1831, and during these years 
 Alfred de Vigny scarcely wrote anything in prose 
 or verse, entirely supported by the exquisite senti- 
 ment of his attachment. He fulfilled the dream 
 of Pascal, "Tant plus le chemin est long dans 
 
 B
 
 i8 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 1'amour, tant plus un esprit dlicat sent de 
 plaisir." 
 
 The circumstances under which this seraphic 
 and mystical relation came to an end have but 
 recently beeen made public. The wonder is that 
 Madame Dorval, so romantic, violent, and suscep- 
 tible, should have been willing so long to preserve 
 such an idyllic or even angelic reserve. George 
 Sand, who saw her at this time, selects other adjec- 
 tives for her, " Oh ! na'ive et passionne, et jeune et 
 suave, et tremblante et terrible." But she deter- 
 mined at last to play the comedy of renunciation 
 no longer, and Vigny's subtlety and platonism 
 were burned up like grass in the flame of her 
 seduction. He was Eloa, as I have said ; she was 
 the tenebrous and sinister archangel, and he sank 
 in the ecstatic crisis of her will. For the next few 
 years, Mme. Dorval possessed the life of the poet, 
 swayed his instincts, inspired his intellect. His 
 genius enjoyed a new birth in her ; she brought 
 about a palingenesis of his talent, and during this 
 period he produced some of the most powerful 
 and the most solid of his works. 
 
 Under the influence of these novel and violent 
 emotions, Vigny began at the close of 1831 to 
 write Stello ; he composed it in great heat, and it 
 was finished in January, 1832, and immediately 
 sent to press. Stello is a book which has been 
 curiously neglected by modern students of the 
 poet ; it is highly characteristic of the author at 
 this stage of his career, and deserves a closer 
 examination than it usually receives. It is a triad 
 of episodes set in a sort of Shandean framework
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 19 
 
 of fantastic prose ; the influence of Sterne is 
 clearly visible in the form of it. It occupies a 
 single night, and presents but two .characters. 
 Stello, a very happy and successful poet, wealthy 
 and applauded, nevertheless suffers from the 
 " spleen." In a fit of the blue devils, he is 
 stretched on his sofa, the victim of a headache, 
 which is described in miraculous and Brobdig- 
 nagian terms. A mystic personage, the Black 
 Doctor, a physician of souls, attends the sufferer, 
 and engages him in conversation. This conver- 
 sation is the book called Stello. 
 
 The Black Doctor will distract the patient by 
 three typical anecdotes of poets, who, in Words- 
 worth's famous phrase, 
 
 " began in gladness, 
 But thereof came, in the end, despondency and madness." 
 
 He tells a story of a mad flea, which develops 
 into the relation of the sad end of the poet 
 Gilbert. To this follow the history of Chatter- 
 ton, and an exceedingly full and close chronicle 
 of the last days of Andre Chnier. The friends 
 converse on the melancholy topic of the rooted 
 antipathy which exists between the Man of 
 Action and the Man of Art. Poets are the 
 eternal helots of society ; modern life results 
 in the perpetual ostracism of genius. Stello, in 
 whom Alfred de Vigny obviously speaks, is 
 roused to indignation at the charge of inutility 
 constantly brought against the fine arts, and 
 charges Plato with having given the original 
 impetus to this heresy by his exclusion of the
 
 20 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 poets from his republic. But the Black Doctor 
 is inclined to accept Plato's view, and to hold that 
 the great mistake is made by the men of reverie 
 themselves in attempting to act as social forces. 
 The friends agree that the propaganda of the 
 future must be to separate the Life Poetic from 
 the Life Politic as with a chasm. 
 
 Then in eloquent and romantic pages the law 
 of conduct is laid down. The poet must not 
 mix with the world, but in solitude and liberty 
 must withdraw that he may accomplish his mis- 
 sion. He must firmly repudiate the too facile 
 ambitions and enterprises of active life. He 
 must keep firmly before him the image of those 
 martyrs of the mind, Gilbert, Chatterton, and 
 Chnier. He must say to his fellow men, what 
 the swallows say as they gather under our eaves, 
 " Protect us, but touch us not." Such is the 
 teaching of Stello, a book extraordinary in its 
 own day, and vibrating still ; a book in which 
 for the first time was preached, without the least 
 reserve, the doctrines of the aristocracy of ima- 
 gination and of the illusiveness of any theory of 
 equality between the artist and the common pro- 
 letariat of mankind. Alfred de Vigny wrote Stello 
 in a passion of sincerity, and it is in its pages that 
 we first see him retiring into his famous "ivory 
 tower." It is the credo of a poet for whom the 
 charges of arrogance and narrowness do not exist; 
 who doubted as little about the supremacy of 
 genius as an anointed emperor does about Right 
 Divine. 
 
 The stage now attracted Vigny. In the summer
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 21 
 
 of 1831 he wrote, and in 1834 brought out on the 
 stage of the Second Theatre Franais, La Mare'chale 
 d'Ancre, a melodrama in prose, of the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century, a poison and dagger 
 piece, thick with the intrigues of Concini and 
 Borgia. In May 1833 he produced Quitte pour la 
 Peur, a trifle in one act. These unimportant 
 works lead us up to what is perhaps the most 
 famous of all Vigny's writings, the epoch-making 
 tragedy of Chatterton. This drama, which is in 
 very simple prose, was the work of seventeen 
 nights in June 1834, when the poet was at the 
 summit of his infatuation for Madame Dorval. The 
 subject of Chatterton had been already sketched in 
 Stello, and the play is really nothing more than 
 one of the episodes in that romance, expanded 
 and dramatised. Vigny published Chatterton with 
 a preface which should be carefully read if we are 
 to appreciate the point of view from which the 
 poet desired his play to be observed. 
 
 The subject of Chatterton is the perpetual 
 and inevitable martyrdom of the Poet, against 
 whom all the rest of the successful world nourishes 
 an involuntary resentment, because he will take no 
 part in the game of action. Vigny tells the story 
 of the young English writer, with certain neces- 
 sary modifications. He represents him as a lodger 
 at the inn of John and Kitty Bell, where at the end 
 he tears up his manuscripts and commits suicide. 
 The English reader must try to forgive and forget 
 the lapses against local colour. Chatterton has been 
 a spendthrift at Oxford, and has friends who hunt 
 the wild boar on Primrose Hill ; Vigny keeps to
 
 22 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 history only when it suits him to do so. These 
 eccentricities did not interfere with the frenetic 
 joy with which the play was received by the 
 young writers and artists of Paris, and they ought 
 not to disturb us now. Chatterton drinks opium 
 in the last scene, because a newspaper has said 
 that he is not the author of the " Rowley Poems," 
 and because he has been offered the situation of 
 first flunkey to the Lord Mayor of London. But 
 these things are a symbol. 
 
 Much of the plot of Chatterton may strike 
 the modern reader as mere extravagance. The 
 logic of the piece is, nevertheless, complete and 
 highly effective. It was the more strikingly effec- 
 tive when it was produced because no drama of 
 pure thought was known to the audience which 
 witnessed it. Classics and romantics alike filled 
 their stage with violent action ; this was a play of 
 poignant interest, but that interest was entirely in- 
 tellectual. The mystical passion of Chatterton and 
 Kitty Bell is subtle, silent, expressed in thoughts; 
 here were brought before the footlights " infinite 
 passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn " 
 without a sigh. It is a marvellous tribute to genius 
 that such a play could succeed, yet it was precisely 
 in the huge psychological soliloquy in the third 
 act where the danger seemed greatest that suc- 
 cess was most eminent. When the audience lis- 
 tened to Chatterton murmuring in his garret, with 
 the thick fog at the window, all the cold and 
 hunger supported by pride alone, and when they 
 listened to the tremendous words in which the 
 pagan soul of Alfred de Vigny speaks through the
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 23 
 
 stoic boy, their emotion was so poignant as to be 
 insupportable. 
 
 The Poet as the imaginative pariah that is the 
 theme of C hatter ton ; the man of idealism crushed 
 by a materialistic society. It is a case of romantic 
 neurosis, faced without shrinking. Chatterton, the 
 dramatist admits, is suffering from a malady of 
 the mind. But why, on that account, should he 
 be crushed out of existence ? Why should there 
 be no pity for the infirmities of inspiration ? Has 
 the poet really no place in the state ? Is not the 
 fact that he " reads in the stars .the pathway that 
 the finger of God is pointing out " reason enough 
 for granting him the trifle that he craves, just 
 leisure and a little bread ? Why does the man 
 of action grudge the inspired dreamer his reverie 
 and the necessary food ? Everybody in the world 
 is right, it appears, except the poets. I do not 
 know that it has ever been suggested that, in his 
 picture of Chatterton, Vigny was thinking of the 
 poet, Hegesippe Moreau, who, in 1833, was in 
 hospital, and who eminently " n'tait pas de ceux 
 qui se laissent proteger aisement." 
 
 Chatterton is Alfred de Vigny's one dramatic 
 success. Its form is extremely original ; it expresses 
 with great fulness one side of the temperament of 
 the author, and it suits the taste of the young artist 
 not only in that but in every age. It is written 
 with simplicity, although adorned here and there, 
 as by a jewel, with an occasional startling image, 
 as where the Quaker (a chorus needed because the 
 passion of Chatterton and Kitty is voiceless) says 
 that " the peace that reigns around you has been
 
 24 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 as dangerous for the spirit of this dreamer as sleep 
 would be beneath the white tuberose." What- 
 ever is forgotten, Chatterton must be remembered, 
 and in each generation fresh young pulses will 
 beat to its generous and hopeless fervour. Vigny 
 was writing little verse at this time, but the curious 
 piece called " Paris : Elevation " belongs to the 
 year 1834, and is interesting as a link between 
 the otherwise unrelated poetry of his youth and 
 the chain of philosophical apologues in which his 
 career as a poet was finally to culminate. But his 
 main interest at this time was in prose. 
 
 Tenacity of vision was one of the most remark- 
 able of Vigny's characteristics. When an experi- 
 ence had once made its impression upon him, this 
 became deeper and more vivid as the years went 
 on. He concealed it, he brooded on it, and sud- 
 denly the seed shot up and broke in the perfect 
 blossom of imaginative writing. Hence we need 
 not be surprised that the military adventures of 
 his earliest years, when the yellow curls fell round 
 the candid blue eyes of the boy as he rode in his 
 magnificent scarlet uniform, although long put aside, 
 were not forgotten. In the summer of 1835, with 
 that curious activity in creation which always fol- 
 lowed his motionless months of reverie, Alfred de 
 Vigny suddenly set about and rapidly carried 
 through the composition of the finest of his prose 
 works, the admirable classic known as Grandeur et 
 Servitude Militaires. The subject of this book is 
 the illusion of military glory as exemplified in 
 three episodes of the great war. The form of the 
 volume is very notable; its stories rest in an auto-
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 25 
 
 biographical setting, and it was long supposed that 
 this also was fiction. But a letter has recently 
 been discovered, written to a friend while the 
 Grandeur et Servitude was being composed, in which 
 the author says, categorically, " wherever I have 
 written 'I/ what I relate is the truth. I was at 
 Vincennes when the poor adjutant died. I saw 
 on the road to Belgium a cart driven by an old 
 commander of a battalion. It was I who galloped 
 along singing Joconde." This testimony adds great 
 value to the delightful setting of the three stories, 
 Laurette, La Veillee de Vincennes, and La Canne de 
 Jonc, It is the confession of a sensitive spirit, 
 striking the note of the disappointment of the 
 age. 
 
 Laurette is an experience of 1815, in which a 
 tale of 1797 is told; the poet makes a poignant 
 appeal to the feelings by relating a savage crime 
 of the Directory. A blunt sea captain is ordered 
 to take a very young man and his child-wife to 
 the tropics, and on a certain day to open a sealed 
 letter. He becomes exceedingly attached to the 
 charming pair of lovers, but when at last the letter 
 is opened, he finds that he is instructed to shoot 
 the husband for a supposed political offence. This 
 he does, being under the " servitude " of duty, and 
 the little wife goes mad. Nothing can exceed the 
 exquisite simplicity of the scenes on shipboard, and 
 the whole narrative is conducted with a masterly 
 and almost sculptural reserve. The moral of Lau- 
 rette is the illusion of pushing the sentiment of duty 
 to its last and most inhuman consequences. 
 
 Somewhat later experiences in Vigny's life inspire
 
 26 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 La Veillee de Vincennes, a story of 1819. This epi- 
 sode opens with a delicious picture of a summer 
 evening in the fortress before the review, the soldiers 
 lounging about in groups, the white hen of the regi- 
 ment strutting across the courtyard in her scarlet 
 aigrette and her silver collar. It is full of those 
 marvellous sudden images in which Vigny delights, 
 phrases that take possession of the fancy ; such as, 
 " Je sentais quelque chose dans ma pense, comme 
 une tache dans une meraude." 
 
 As a story La Veillee de Vincennes is not so in- 
 teresting as its companions, but as an illustration 
 of the poet's reflection upon life, it has an extreme 
 value. The theme is the illusion of military excite- 
 ment ; the soldier only escapes ennui by the mag- 
 nificent disquietude of danger, and in periods of 
 peace he lacks this tonic. The curious and quite 
 disconnected narrative of the accidental blowing 
 up of the powder magazine, towards the close of 
 this tale, is doubtless drawn directly from the ex- 
 perience of Vigny, who narrates it in a manner 
 which is almost a prediction of that of Tolstoi. 
 
 In La Canne de Jonc we have the illusion of 
 active glory. In the military life, when it is not 
 stagnant, there is too much violence of action, not 
 space enough for reflection. The moral of this 
 story of disappointment in the person of Napoleon 
 is that we should devote ourselves to principles 
 and not to men. There are two magnificent scenes 
 in La Canne de Jonc, the one in which the Pope con- 
 fronts Napoleon with the cry of " Commediante ! " 
 the other in which the author pays a noble tribute 
 to Collingwood, and paints that great enemy of
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 27 
 
 France as a hero of devotion to public duty. The 
 whole of this book is worthy of close attention. It 
 is one of the most distinguished in modern litera- 
 ture. Nothing could have been more novel than 
 this exposure to the French of the pitiful fallacies 
 of their military glory, of the hollowness of vows 
 of poverty and obedience blindly made to power, 
 whose only design was to surround itself by a body- 
 guard of gladiators. Of the reserve and sobriety 
 of emotion in Grandeur el Servitude Militaires, and of 
 the limpid, delicate elegance of its style, there can- 
 not be any question. It will be a joy to readers 
 of refinement as long as the French language 
 endures. 
 
 At the close of 1835 Alfred de Vigny made the 
 distressing discovery he was the only member of 
 the circle who had remained oblivious of the fact 
 that Madame Dorval was flagrantly unfaithful to 
 him. He became aware that she was in intrigue with 
 no less a personage than the boisterous Alexandre 
 Dumas. Recent investigations have thrown an 
 ugly light on this humiliating and painful incident. 
 Wounded mortally in his pride and in his passion, 
 he felt, as he says, "the earth give way under his 
 feet." He was from this time forth dead to the 
 world, and, in the fine phrase of M. Paleologue, 
 he withdrew into his own intellect as into " an 
 impenetrable Thebaid where he could be alone in 
 the presence of his own thoughts." Alfred de 
 Vigny survived this blow for more than a quarter 
 of a century, but as a hermit and a stranger among 
 the people.
 
 28 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 III 
 
 When Alfred de Vigny perceived the treason of 
 Madame Dorval in December, 1835, his active life 
 ceased. Something snapped in him the chords of 
 illusion, of artistic ambition, of the hope of happiness. 
 He never attempted to forgive the deceiver, and 
 he never forgave woman in her person. His pes- 
 simism grew upon him ; he lost all interest in the 
 public and in his friends ; after a brief political effort 
 he sank into a soundless isolation. He possessed a 
 country house, called Le Maine-Giraud, in the west 
 of France, and thither he withdrew, absorbed in the 
 care of his invalid wife, and in the cultivation of his 
 thoughts. His voice was scarcely heard any more 
 in French literature, and gradually he grew to be 
 forgotten. The louder and more active talents of 
 his contemporaries filled up the void ; Alfred de 
 Vigny glided into silence, and was not missed. 
 During the last twenty-eight years of his existence, 
 on certain rare occasions, Vigny's intensity of 
 dream, of impassioned reverie, found poetical re- 
 lief. When he died, ten poems of various length 
 were discovered among his papers, and these were 
 published in 1864, as a very slender volume called 
 Les Destine'es, by his executor, Louis Ratisbonne. 
 
 Several of these posthumous pieces are dated, 
 and the earliest of them seems to be La Colere de 
 Samson, written in April 1839, when the Vignys 
 were staying with the Earl of Kilmorey at Shav- 
 ington Park in Shropshire. It is a curious proof 
 of the intensity with which Alfred de Vigny con-
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 29 
 
 centrated himself on his vision that this terrible 
 poem, one of the most powerful in the French 
 language, should have been written in England 
 during a country visit. It would seem that for 
 more than three years the wounded poet had been 
 brooding on his wrongs. Suddenly, without warn- 
 ing, the storm breaks in this tremendous picture 
 of the deceit of woman and the helpless strength 
 of man, in verses the melody and majesty of which 
 are only equalled by their poignant agony : 
 
 " Toujours voir serpenter la vipere dore"e 
 Qui se traine en sa fange et s'y croit ignoree ; 
 Toujours ce compagnon dont le cceur n'est pas sur, 
 La Femme, enfant malade et douze fois impur ! 
 Toujours mettre sa force a garder sa colere 
 Dans son cceur offense, comme en un sanctuaire, 
 D'ou le feu s'echappant irait tout deVorer ; 
 Interdire a ses yeux de voir ou de pleurer, 
 C'est trop ! Dieu, s'il le veut, peut balayer ma cendre, 
 J'ai donne mon secret, Dalila va le vendre." 
 
 He buried the memory of Madame Dorval under 
 La Colere de Samson, as a volcano buries a guilty 
 city beneath a shower of burning ashes, and he 
 turned to the contemplation of the world as he 
 saw it under the soft light of the gentle despair 
 which now more and more completely invaded 
 his spirit. 
 
 The genius of Alfred de Vigny as the philo- 
 sophical exponent of this melancholy composure 
 is displayed in the noble and sculptural elegy, 
 named Les Destine'es, composed in terza rima in 
 1849; but in a still more natural and personal way 
 in a poem which is among the most fascinating 
 that he has left behind him, La Maison du Berger.
 
 30 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Here he adopted a stanzaic form closely analogous 
 to rime royal, and this adds to the curiously English 
 impression, as of some son of Wordsworth or 
 brother of Matthew Arnold, which this poem pro- 
 duces ; it may make a third in our memories with 
 " Laodamia " and " The Scholar-Gipsy." Vigny 
 describes in it the mode in which the soul goes 
 burdened by the weight of life, like a wounded 
 eagle in captivity, dragging at its chain. The poet 
 must escape from this obsession of the world ; he 
 finds a refuge in the shepherd's cabin on wheels, 
 far from all mankind, on a vast, undulating surface 
 of moorland. Here he meditates on man's futility 
 and fever, on the decline of the dignity of conduct, 
 on the public disdain of immortal things. It is 
 remarkable that at this lofty station, no modern 
 institution is too prosaic for his touch ; his treat- 
 ment of the objects and methods of the day is 
 magnificently simple, and he speaks of railways as 
 an ancient Athenian might if restored to breath and 
 vision. A certain mystical Eva is evoked, and a 
 delicate analysis of woman follows. From the 
 solitude of the shepherd's wheeled house the 
 exile looks out on life and sees the face of nature. 
 But here he parts with Wordsworth and the pan- 
 theists ; for in nature, also, he finds illusion and 
 the reed that runs into the hand : 
 
 " Vivez, froide Nature, et revivez sans cesse 
 Sur nos pieds, sur nos fronts, puisque c'est votre loi ; 
 Vivez, et dedaignez, si vous etes de"esse, 
 L'homme, humble passager, qui dut vous e"tre un roi ; 
 Plus que tout votre regne et que ses splendeurs vaines, 
 J'aime la majeste* des souffrances humaines ; 
 Vous ne recevrez pas un cri d'amour de moi."
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 31 
 
 Finally, it is in pity, in the tender patience of 
 human sympathy, in the love which is " taciturne 
 et toujours menac," that the melancholy poet 
 finds the sole solace of a broken and uncertain 
 existence. 
 
 It is in the same connection that we must read 
 La Sauvage and La Mart du Loup, poems which 
 belong to the year 1843. The close of the second 
 of these presents us with the pessimistic philosophy 
 of Vigny in its most concise and penetrating form. 
 The poet has described in his admirable way the 
 scene of a wolf hunt in the woods of a chateau 
 where he has been staying, and the death of the 
 wolf, while defending his mate and her cubs. He 
 closes his picture with these reflections : 
 
 " Comment on doit quitter la vie et tous ses maux, 
 C'est vous que le savez, sublimes animaux ! 
 A voir ce que Ton fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse, 
 Seul le silence est grand : tout le reste est faiblesse ; 
 Ah ! je t'ai bien compris, sauvage voyageur, 
 Et ton dernier regard m'est alle jusqu'au coeur ! 
 II disait : ' Si tu peux, fais que ton ame arrive 
 A force de rester studieuse et pensive, 
 Jusqu' k ce haut degre de stoique fierte 
 Oil, naissant dans les bois, j'ai tout d'abord monte. 
 Gemir, pleurer, prier, est egalement lache. 
 Fais energiquement ta longue et lourde tache 
 Dans la voie ou le sort a voulu t'appeler 
 Puis, apres, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler.' " * 
 
 It was, in nourishing such lofty thoughts as these 
 that Alfred de Vigny lived the life of a country 
 gentleman at Maine-Giraud, reading, dreaming, 
 cultivating his vines, sitting for hours by the bed- 
 side of his helpless Lydia. 
 
 1 We have here, doubtless, a reminiscence of Byron and Childe 
 Harold, " And the wolf dies in silence."
 
 32 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 " Silence is Poetry itself for me," Alfred de 
 Vigny says in one of his private letters, and as 
 time went on he had scarcely energy enough to 
 write down his thoughts. When he braced him- 
 self to the effort of doing so, as when in 1858 he 
 contrived to compose La Bouteille a la Mer, his 
 accent was found to be as clear and his music as 
 vivid and resonant as ever. The reason was that 
 although he was so solitary and silent, the labour 
 of the brain was unceasing ; under the ashes the 
 fire burned hot and red. He has a very curious 
 phrase about the action of his mind ; he says, 
 " Mon cerveau, toujours mobile, travaille et tour- 
 billonne sous mon front immobile avec une vitesse 
 effrayante ; des mondes passent devant mes yeux 
 entre un mot qu'on me dit et le mot que je r- 
 ponds." Dumas, who was peculiarly predisposed 
 to miscomprehend Vigny, could not reconcile him- 
 self, in younger days, to his " immateriality," to 
 what another observer called his " perpetual 
 seraphic hallucination"; after 1835, this discon- 
 certing remoteness and abstraction grew upon the 
 poet so markedly as to cut him off from easy 
 contact with other men. But his isolation, even 
 his pessimism, failed to harden him ; on the con- 
 trary, by a divine indulgence, they increased his 
 sensibility, the enthusiasm of his pity, his passion 
 for the welfare of others. 
 
 Death found him at last, and in one of its most 
 cruel forms. Soon after he had passed his sixtieth 
 year, he began to be subjected to vague pains, 
 which became intenser, and which presently proved 
 to be the symptoms of cancer. He bore this
 
 ALFRED DE VIGNY 33 
 
 final trial with heroic fortitude, and as the 
 physical suffering grew more extreme, the intel- 
 lectual serenity prevailed above the anguish. In 
 the very last year of his life, the poetical faculty 
 .awakened in him again, and he wrote Les Oracles, 
 the incomparably solemn and bold apologue of 
 Le Mont des Oliviers, and the mystical ode entitled 
 L'Esprit Pur. This last poem closed with the 
 ominous words, " et pour moi c'est assez." On 
 September 17, 1863, his soul was released at 
 length from the tortured and exhausted body, 
 and the weary Stello was at peace. 
 
 It is not to be pretended that the poetry of 
 Alfred de Vigny is to every one's taste. He was 
 too indifferent to the public, too austere and 
 arrogant in his address, to attract the masses, 
 and to them he will remain perpetually unknown. 
 But he is a writer, in his best prose as well as in 
 the greater part of his scanty verse, who has 
 only to become familiar to a reader susceptible 
 to beauty, to grow more and more beloved. The 
 other poets of his age were fluent and tumultuous ; 
 Alfred de Vigny was taciturn, stoical, one who had 
 lost faith in glory, in life, perhaps even in himself. 
 While the flute and the trumpet sounded, his 
 hunter's horn, blown far away in the melancholy 
 woodland, could scarcely raise an echo in the heart 
 of a warrior or banqueter. But those who visit 
 Vigny in the forest will be in no hurry to return. 
 He shall entertain them there with such high 
 thoughts and such proud music that they will follow 
 him wherever his dream may take him. They may 
 admit that he is sometimes hard, often obscure, 
 
 C
 
 34 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 always in a certain facile sense unsympathetic, but 
 they will find their taste for more redundant 
 melodies than his a good deal marred for the 
 future. And some among them, if they are sin- 
 cere, will admit that, so far as they are con- 
 cerned, he is the most majestic poet whom France 
 produced in the rich course of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 1903.
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 
 
 LITERATURE presents us with no more pathetic 
 figure of a waif or stray than that of the poor 
 little Circassian slave whom her friends called 
 Mademoiselle A'fsse. But interesting and touching 
 as is the romance of her history, it is surpassed by 
 the rare distinction of her character and the delicacy 
 of her mind. Placed in the centre of the most de- 
 praved society of modern Europe, protected from 
 ruin by none of those common bulwarks which 
 proved too frail to sustain the high-born virtues of 
 the Tencins and the Paraberes, exposed by her 
 wit and beauty to all the treachery of fashionable 
 Paris unabashed, this little Oriental orphan pre- 
 served an exquisite refinement of nature, a con- 
 science as sensitive as a nerve. If she had been 
 devote, if she had retired to a nunnery, the lesson 
 of her life would have been less wholesome than 
 it is ; we may go further and admit that it would 
 be less poignant than it is but for the single frailty 
 of her conduct. She sinned once, and expiated 
 her sin with tears ; but in an age when love was 
 reduced to a caprice and intrigue governed by 
 cynical maxims, Aisse's fault, her solitary abandon- 
 ment to a sincere passion, almost takes the 
 proportions of a virtue. Mr. Ruskin has some- 
 where recommended Swiss travellers who find 
 themselves physically exhausted by the pomp of
 
 36 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Alpine landscape, to sink on their knees and 
 concentrate their attention on the petals of a 
 rock-rose. In comparison with the vast expanse 
 of French literature the pretensions of Aiss are 
 little more than those of a flower, but she has no 
 small share of a flower's perfume and beauty. 
 
 In her lifetime Mademoiselle Ai'sse associated 
 with some of the great writers of her time. Yet 
 if any one had told her that she would live in 
 literature with such friends as Montesquieu and 
 Destouches her modesty would have been over- 
 whelmed with confusion. She made no preten- 
 sions to being a blue-stocking ; she would have 
 told us that she did not know how to write a page. 
 An exact coeval of hers was the sarcastic and 
 brilliant young man who called himself Voltaire ; 
 he was strangely gentle to A'isse, but she would 
 have been amazed to learn that he would long 
 survive her, and would annotate her works in his 
 old age. Her works ! Her only works, she 
 would have told us, were the coloured embroideries 
 with which, in some tradition of a Turkish taste, 
 she adorned her own rooms in the Hotel Ferriol. 
 Notwithstanding all this, no history of French 
 literature would have any pretensions to complete- 
 ness if it omitted Ai'sse's name. Among all the 
 memoir-writers, letter-writers, and pamphleteers 
 of the early eighteenth century she stands in some 
 respects pre-eminent. As a correspondent pure 
 and simple there is a significance in the fact that 
 her life exactly fills the space between the death 
 of Sevigne, which occurred when A'iss6 was about 
 two years old, and the birth of L'Espinasse, which
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 37 
 
 happened a few months before Aiss6's death. 
 During this period of nearly forty years no 
 woman in France wrote letters which could be 
 placed beside theirs except our Circassian. They 
 form a singularly interesting trio ; and if A'isse 
 can no more pretend to possess the breadth of 
 vision and rich imagination of Madame de Svigne 
 than to command the incomparable accent of 
 passion which cries through the correspondence 
 of Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse, she has qualities 
 which are not unworthy to be named with these 
 an exquisite sincerity, an observation of men and 
 things which could hardly be more picturesque, 
 a note of pensive and thrilling tenderness, and a 
 candour which melts the very soul to pity. 
 
 In the winter of 1697 or spring of 1698, a 
 dissipated and eccentric old bachelor, Charles de 
 Ferriol, Baron d'Argental, who was French Envoy 
 at the court of the Grand Vizier, bought a little 
 Circassian child of about four years old in one of 
 the bazaars of Constantinople. He had often 
 bought slaves in the Turkish market before, and 
 not to the honour of his memory. But this time 
 he was actuated by a genuine kindly impulse. 
 He was fifty-one years of age ; he did not intend 
 to marry, and he seems to have thought that he 
 would supply himself with a beautiful daughter 
 for the care of his old age. Sainte-Beuve, with his 
 unfailing intuition, insisted on this interpretation, 
 and since his essay was written, in 1 846, various 
 documents have turned up, proving beyond a 
 doubt that the intentions of the Envoy were 
 parental. The little girl said that her name was
 
 38 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Haidee. She preserved in later life an impression 
 of a large house, and many servants running 
 hither and thither. Her friends agreed to con- 
 sider her as the daughter of a Circassian prince, 
 and the very large price (1500 livres) which M. de 
 Ferriol paid for her, as well as the singular dis- 
 tinction of her beauty, to some extent supports 
 the legend. In August 1698, M. de Ferriol, who 
 had held temporary missions in Turkey for seven 
 years, was recalled to France, to be sent out again 
 as French ambassador to the Porte in 1699. He 
 brought his little Circassian orphan with him, and 
 placed her in the charge of his sister-in-law, 
 Madame de Ferriol, in Paris. She was immedi- 
 ately christened as Charlotte Haide, but she 
 preserved neither of these names in ordinary life ; 
 Charlotte was dropped at once, and Haidee on 
 the lips of her new French relations became the 
 softer Aiss. 
 
 A'isse's adopted aunt, as we may call her, 
 Madame de Ferriol, was a very fair average 
 specimen of the fashionable lady of the Regency. 
 She belonged to the notorious family of Tencin, 
 whose mark on the early part of the eighteenth 
 century is so ineffaceable. Of Madame de Ferriol 
 it may be said by her defenders that she was not 
 so openly scandalous as her sister the Canoness, 
 who appears in a very curious light in the letters 
 of Ai'ss6. Born in 1674, Madame de Ferriol was 
 still quite a young woman, and her sons, the 
 Marquis de Pont-de-Veyle and Comte d'Argental, 
 were little children, fit to become the playmates of 
 Aiss6. Indeed these two boys were regarded
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 39 
 
 almost as the Circassian's brothers, and the family 
 documents speak of all three as " nos enfants." 
 She was put to school it is believed, from a 
 phrase of her own, " Je viens de me ressouvenir " 
 with the Nouvelles Catholiques, a community 
 of nuns, whose house was a few doors away from 
 the Hotel Ferriol, and there for a few years we 
 may suppose her to have passed the happy life of 
 a child. From this life she herself, in one of the 
 most charming of her letters, draws aside the 
 curtain for a moment. In 1731 some gossip 
 accused her of a passion for the Due de Gesvres, 
 and her jealous mentor in Geneva wrote to know 
 if there was any truth in the report. Aisse, then 
 about thirty-seven years of age, wrote back as 
 follows : 
 
 " I admit, Madame, notwithstanding your anger 
 and the respect which I owe you, that I have had 
 a violent fancy for M. le Due de Gesvres, and 
 that I even carried this great sin to confession. 
 It is true that my confessor did not think it 
 necessary to impose any penance on me. I was 
 eight years old when this passion began, and at 
 twelve I laughed at the whole affair, not that I 
 did not still like M. de Gesvres, but that I saw 
 how ludicrous it had been of me to be so anxious 
 to be talking and playing in the garden with him 
 and his brothers. He was two or three years older 
 than I, and we thought ourselves a great deal 
 more grown up than the rest. We liked to be 
 conversing while the others were playing at hide- 
 and-seek. We set up for reasonable people ; we 
 met regularly every day : we never talked about
 
 40 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 love, for the fact was that neither of us knew 
 what that meant. The window of the little 
 drawing-room opened upon a balcony, where he 
 often came ; we made signs to each other ; he 
 took us out to see the fireworks, and often to 
 Saint Ouen. As we were always together, the 
 people in charge of us began to joke about us and 
 it came to the ears of my aga (the Ambassador), 
 who, as you can imagine, made a fine romance 
 out of all this. I found it out ; it distressed me ; 
 I thought that, as a discreet person, I ought to 
 watch my own behaviour, and the result was that 
 I persuaded myself that I must really be in love 
 with M. de Gesvres. I was devote, and went to 
 confession ; I first mentioned all my little sins, 
 and then I had to mention this big sin ; I could 
 scarcely make up my mind to do so, but as a girl 
 that had been well brought up, I determined to 
 hide nothing. I confessed that I was in love with 
 a young man. My director seemed astonished ; 
 he asked me how old he was. I told him he was 
 eleven. He laughed, and told me that there was 
 no penance for that sin ; that I had only to keep 
 on being a good girl, and that he had nothing 
 more to say to me for the time being." 
 
 It is like a page of Hans Andersen ; there is the 
 same innocence, the same suspicion that all the 
 world may not be so innocent. 
 
 The incidents of the early womanhood of Aiss6 
 are known to us only through an anonymous 
 sketch of her life, printed in 1787, when her 
 Letters first appeared. This short life, which has 
 been attributed to Mademoiselle Rieu, the grand-
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 41 
 
 daughter of the lady to whom the letters were 
 addressed, informs us that A'fsse was carefully 
 educated, so far as the head went, but more than 
 neglected in the lessons of the heart. " From the 
 moment when Mademoiselle Aisse began to lisp," 
 says this rather pedantic memoir, " she heard 
 none but dangerous maxims. Surrounded by 
 voluptuous and intriguing women, she was con- 
 stantly being reminded that the only occupation 
 of a woman without a fortune ought to be to 
 secure one." But she found protectors. The 
 two sons of Madame de Ferriol, though them- 
 selves no better than their neighbours, guarded 
 her as though she had really been their sister ; 
 and in her own soul there were no germs of the 
 fashionable depravity. When she was seventeen, 
 her " aga " came back from his long exile in 
 Constantinople, broken in health, even, it is said, 
 more than a little disturbed in intellect. To the 
 annoyance of his relatives he nourished the design 
 of being made a cardinal ; he was lodged, for 
 safety's sake, close to the family of his brother. 
 From Ferriol's return in 1711 to his death in 
 1722, we have considerable difficulty in realising 
 what Aisse's existence was. 
 
 There is some reason to suppose that it was 
 Lord Bolingbroke who first perceived the excep- 
 tional charm of Aisse's mind. When the illus- 
 trious English exile came to France in 1715, he 
 was almost immediately drawn into the society of 
 the Hotel Ferriol. One of Aisse's kindest friends 
 was that wise and charming woman, the Marquise 
 de Villette, whom Bolingbroke somewhat tardily
 
 42 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 married about 1720, and it was doubtless through 
 her introduction that he became intimate with 
 Madame de Ferriol. As early as 1719 Boling- 
 broke writes of Aisse as of an intimate friend, and 
 speaks of her as threatened by a " disadvantageous 
 metamorphosis," by which he probably refers to 
 an attack of the small-pox. It appears to have 
 been during a visit to the chateau of Lord and 
 Lady Bolingbroke that Aisse first met Voltaire ; 
 and later on we shall see that these persons played 
 a singular but very important part in the drama 
 of her life. There seems no doubt that, however 
 little Madame de Villette and Lord Bolingbroke 
 could claim the white flower of a spotless life, 
 they were judicious and useful friends at this 
 perilous moment of her career. Aisse's beauty, 
 which was extraordinary, and her dubious social 
 station, made the young Circassian peculiarly liable 
 to attack from the men of fashion who passed from 
 alcove to alcove in search of the indulgence of 
 some ephemeral caprice. The poets turned their 
 rhymes in her honour, and one of their effusions, 
 that of the Swiss Vernet, was so far esteemed that 
 it was engraved fifty years afterwards underneath 
 her portrait. It may thus be paraphrased : 
 
 " Aissd's beauty is all Greek ; 
 
 Yet was she wise in youth to borrow 
 From France the charming tongue we speak, 
 And wit, and airs that banish sorrow : 
 
 A theme like this deserves a verse 
 As warm and clear as mine is cold, 
 
 For has there been a heart like hers 
 Since our Astrean age of gold ? "
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 43 
 
 Aisse received all this homage unmoved. The 
 Duke of Orleans one day met her in the salon of 
 Madame de Parabere, was enchanted with her 
 beauty, and declared his passion to Madame de 
 Ferriol. To the lasting shame of this woman, she 
 agreed to support his claim, and the Regent 
 imagined that the little Greek would fall an easy 
 prey. To his amazement, and to the indignation 
 of Madame de Ferriol, he was indignantly re- 
 pulsed ; and when further pressure was brought to 
 bear upon her, Aisse threatened to retire at once 
 to a convent if the proposition was so much as 
 repeated. She was one of the principal attrac- 
 tions of Madame de Ferriol's salon, and, says the 
 memoir, " as Aisse was useful to her, fearing to 
 lose her, she consented, though most unwillingly, 
 to say no more to her " about the Duke. This 
 was but one, though certainly the most alarming, 
 of the traps set for her feet in the brilliant and 
 depraved society of her guardians. The habitual 
 life of the Tencins and Paraberes of 1720 was 
 something to us quite incredible. Such a " moral 
 dialogue " as Le Hasard au Coin du Feu would be 
 rejected as the dream of a licentious satirist, if the 
 memoirs and correspondence of the Cidalises and 
 the Clitandres of the age did not fully convince us 
 that the novelists merely repeated what they saw 
 around them. We must bear in mind what an 
 extraordinary condition of roseate semi-nudity 
 this politest of generations lived in, to understand 
 the excellence as well as the frailty of Aiss6. We 
 must also bear in mind, when our Puritan indig- 
 nation is ready to carry us away in profuse
 
 44 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 condemnation of this whole society, that extremely 
 shrewd remark of Duclos : " Le peuple franais 
 est le seul peuple qui puisse perdre ses moeurs sans 
 se corrompre." 
 
 In 1720 the old ex-ambassador fell ill. Aisse 
 immediately took up her abode with him, and 
 nursed him assiduously until he died. That he 
 was not an easy invalid to cherish we gather from 
 a phrase in one of her own letters, as well as from 
 hints in those of Bolingbroke. In October, 1722, 
 he died, leaving to Aisse a considerable fortune in 
 the form of an annuity, as well as a sum of money 
 in a bill on the estate. The sister-in-law, Madame 
 de Ferriol, to whose guardianship Aiss6 had been 
 consigned, thought her own sons injured by the 
 ambassador's generosity, and had the extreme bad 
 taste to upbraid Aiss. The note had not yet been 
 cashed, and at the first word from Madame de 
 Ferriol, Aisse fetched it and threw it into the fire. 
 This little anecdote speaks worlds for the sensitive 
 and independent character of the Circassian ; one 
 almost blushes to complete it by adding that 
 Madame de Ferriol took advantage of her ward's 
 hasty act of injured pride. Aiss, however, had 
 other things to think of ; " the birthday of her life 
 was come, her love was come to her." As early 
 as 1721, we find Lord Bolingbroke saying, in a 
 letter to Madame de Ferriol, " I fully expect you 
 to come ; I even flatter myself that we shall see 
 Madame du Deffand ; but as for Mademoiselle 
 Aisse, I do not expect her. The Turk will be her 
 excuse, and a certain Christian of my acquaintance 
 her reason." This seems to mean that Aisse"
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 45 
 
 would give as her excuse for not coming tostay 
 with the Bolingbrokes that she was needed at the 
 Ambassador's pillow ; but that her real reason 
 would be that she wished to stay in Paris to be 
 near " a certain Christian." That which had been 
 vainly attempted by so many august and eminent 
 personages, namely, the capture of Aisse's heart, 
 was now being pursued with alarming success by 
 a very modest candidate for her affections. 
 
 The Chevalier Blaise Marie d'Aydie, the hope 
 of an impoverished Pe>igord family who claimed 
 descent, with a blot on their escutcheon, from the 
 noble house of Foix, was, in 1721, about thirty 
 years of age. He had lived a passably dissipated 
 life, after the fashion of the Clitandres of the age, 
 and if Mademoiselle Rieu is to be believed, 
 Madame la Duchesse de Berry herself had passed 
 through the fires on his behalf. He was poor ; 
 he was brave and handsome and rather stupid ; he 
 was expected one of these days to break his vows 
 as a Knight of Malta and redeem the family 
 fortunes by a good marriage. We have a portrait 
 of him by Madame du Deffand, written in her 
 delicate, persisent way, touch upon touch, with a 
 result that reminds one of Mr. Henry James's 
 pictures of character. Voltaire, more rapidly and 
 more enthusiastically, called him the " chevalier 
 sans peur et sans reproche," and drew him as the 
 hero of his tragedy of Adelaide du Guesclin. He 
 had the superficial vices of his time ; but his 
 tenderness, loyalty, and goodness of heart were 
 infinite, and if we judge him by the morals of his 
 own age and not of ours, he was a very fine fellow.
 
 46 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 His principal fault seems to have been that he was 
 rather dull. As Madame du Deffand puts it, 
 " They say of Fontenelle that instead of a heart he 
 has a second brain ; one might believe that the 
 head of the Chevalier contained another heart." 
 All evidence goes to prove that from the moment 
 when he first met Ai'ss6 no other woman existed 
 for him, and if their union was blameworthy, let it 
 be at least admitted that it lasted, with impassioned 
 fidelity on both sides, for twelve years and until 
 Aiss6's death. 
 
 It would appear that until the Ambassador 
 passed away, and the irksome life at the Hotel 
 Ferriol began again, Aiss contrived to keep her 
 ardent admirer within bounds. To us it seems 
 amazingly perverse that the lovers did not marry ; 
 but Aiss6 herself was the first to insist that a 
 Chevalier d'Aydie could not and should not offend 
 his relations by a mesalliance with a Circassian 
 slave. At last she yielded ; but, as Mademoiselle 
 Rieu tells us, " he loved her so delicately that he 
 was jealous of her reputation ; he adored her, and 
 would have sacrificed everything for her ; while she, 
 on her part, loving the Chevalier, found his fame, 
 his fortune, his honour, dearer to her than her 
 own." In 1724 she found it absolutely necessary 
 to disappear from her circle of acquaintance. She 
 did not dare to confide her secret to the un- 
 scrupulous Madame de Ferriol, and in her despair 
 she examined the circle of her friends for the most 
 sympathetic face. She decided to trust Lady 
 Bolingbroke, and she could not have made a wiser 
 choice. That tender-hearted and deeply-experi-
 
 MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 47 
 
 enced lady was equal to the delicate emergency. 
 She announced her intention of spending a few 
 months in England, and she begged Madame de 
 Ferriol to allow A'issd to accompany her. They 
 started as if for Calais, but only to double upon 
 their steps. Aiss6, in company with her maid, 
 Sophie, and a confidential English man-servant, 
 was installed in a remote suburb of Paris, under 
 the care of the Chevalier d'Aydie, while Lady 
 Bolingbroke hastened on to England, and amused 
 herself with inventing anecdotes and messages from 
 A'isse. In the fulness of time Lady Bolingbroke 
 returned and took care to " collect " Aiss6 before 
 she presented herself at the Hotel Ferriol. Mean- 
 while a daughter had been born, who was chris- 
 tened Cel6nie Leblond, and who was placed in 
 a convent at Sens, under the name of Miss Black, 
 as a niece of Lord Bolingbroke. The abbess of 
 this convent was a Mademoiselle de Villette, 
 the daughter of Lady Bolingbroke. No novelist 
 would dare to describe so improbable a stratagem ; 
 let us make the story complete by adding that it 
 succeeded to perfection, and that Madame de 
 Ferriol herself never seems to have suspected the 
 truth. This daughter, whom we shall presently 
 meet again, grew up to be a charming woman, 
 and adorned society in the next generation as the 
 Vicomtesse de Nanthia. If the story of Aiss6 
 ended here it would not appeal to a Richardson, or 
 even to an Abb PreVost d'Exiles, as a moral tale. 
 
 Between 1723 and 1726 Ai'ss6's life passed 
 quietly enough. The Chevalier d'Aydie was con- 
 stantly at the Hotel Ferriol, but the two lovers
 
 48 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 were not any longer in their first youth. A little 
 prudence went a long way in a society adorned by 
 Madame de Parabere and Madame de Tencin. 
 No breath of scandal seems to have troubled Aisse, 
 and when her cares came, they all began from 
 within. We do not possess the letters of A'isse to 
 her lover. I hope I am not a Philistine if I admit 
 that I sincerely hope they will never be discovered. 
 We possess the love letters of Mademoiselle de 
 L'Espinasse ; this should be enough of that kind 
 of literature for one century at least it would be 
 a terrible thing to come down one morning to see 
 announced a collection of the letters of Aiss to 
 her Chevalier, edited by M. Edmond de Goncourt ! 
 In the summer of 1726 there arrived from Geneva 
 a lady about twenty years older than Ai'ss, the 
 wife of a M. Calandrini ; she was a step-aunt, if 
 such a relationship be recognised, of Lord Boling- 
 broke, and so was intimately connected with the 
 Ferriol circle. Research, which really is far too 
 busy in our days, has found out that Madame de 
 Calandrini herself had not been all that could be 
 desired ; but in 1726 she was devote, yet not to 
 such an extent as to throw any barrier between 
 herself and the confidences of a younger woman. 
 Aiss received her warmly, gave her heart to her 
 without reserve, and when the lady went back to 
 Geneva Aiss6 discovered that she was the first and 
 best friend that she had ever possessed. Madame 
 Calandrini carried home with her the inmost and 
 most dangerous secrets of A'iss's history, and it is 
 evident that she immediately planned her young 
 friend's conversion.
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 49 
 
 The Letters of A'iss6 are exclusively composed 
 of her correspondence with this Madame Calandrini 
 from the autumn of 1726 to her own fatal illness 
 in January, 1733. They remained in Geneva 
 until, in 1758, they were lent to Voltaire, who 
 enriched them with very interesting and important 
 notes. Nearly thirty years more passed, and at 
 length, in 1787, they saw the light. Next year 
 they were reprinted, with a very delightful portrait 
 of Ai'sse. In this she appears as a decided beauty, 
 with very fair hair, an elegant and spirited head 
 lightly poised on delicate shoulders, and nothing 
 Oriental in her appearance except the large, oval, 
 dark eyes, languishing with incredible length of 
 eyelash. The text was confused and difficult in 
 these early editions, and in successive reprints has 
 occupied various biographers M. de Barante, M. 
 Ravenel, M. Piedagnal. I suppose, however, that I 
 do no injustice to those writers if I claim for M. 
 Eugene Asse the credit of having done more than 
 any other man, by patient annotation and collection 
 of explicatory documents, to render the reading of 
 Aiss's letters interesting and agreeable. 
 
 The letters of Aiss to Madame Calandrini are 
 the history of an awakening conscience. It is this 
 fact, and the slow development of the inevitable 
 moral plot, which give them their singular psycho- 
 logical value. As the letters approach their close, 
 our attention is entirely riveted by the spectacle of 
 this tender and passionate spirit tortured by re- 
 morse and yearning for expiation. But at the 
 outset there is no moral passion expressed, and we 
 think less of Aiss6 herself than of the society to 
 
 D
 
 50 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 which she belonged by her age and education. 
 As it seems impossible, from other sources of 
 information, to believe that Madame Calandrini 
 was what is commonly thought to be an amiable 
 woman, we take from Ai'ss6's praise of her some- 
 thing of the same impression that we obtain from 
 Madame de Sevign's affectionate addresses to 
 Madame de Grignan. Indeed, the opening letter 
 of Ai'ss's series, with its indescribable tone of the 
 seventeenth century, reads so much like one of the 
 Svigne's letters to her daughter that one wonders 
 whether the semblance can be wholly accidental. 
 There is a childish archness in the way in which 
 Aiss6 jests about all her own adorers the suscep- 
 tible abbes, and the councillors whose neglected 
 passion has comfortably subsided into friendship. 
 There are little picturesque touches the black 
 spaniel yelping in his lady's lap, and upsetting the 
 coffee-pot in his eagerness to greet a new-comer. 
 There are charming bits of self-portraiture : " I 
 used to flatter myself that I was a little philosopher, 
 but I never shall be one in matters of sentiment." 
 It is all so youthful, so girlish, that we have to 
 remind ourselves that the author of such a passage 
 as the following was in her thirty-third year : 
 
 " I spend my days in shooting little birds ; this 
 does me a great deal of good. Exercise and dis- 
 traction are excellent remedies for the vapours. 
 The ardour of the chase makes me walk, although 
 my feet are bruised ; the perspiration that this 
 exercise causes is good for me. I am as sun- 
 burned as a crow ; you would be frightened if you 
 saw me, but I scarcely mind it. How happy should
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 51 
 
 I be if I were still with you ! I would willingly 
 give a pint of my blood if we could be together at 
 this moment." 
 
 Here Aisse anticipates by a year or two Matthew 
 Green's famous " Fling but a stone, the giant dies." 
 She has told Madame Calandrini everything. The 
 Chevalier is away in Perigord, which adds to her 
 vapours ; but his letters breathe the sweetest con- 
 stancy. She would like to send them to Geneva, 
 but she dares not ; they are too full of her own 
 praises. She has been to see the first performance 
 of a new comedy, Pyrame et Thisbe, and giggles 
 over its disastrous fate. This gives us firm ground 
 in dating this first letter, for this comedy, or rather 
 opera, was played on the iyth of October, 1726. 
 Nothing could be more gay or sparkling than 
 Aiss's tone. 
 
 But soon there comes a change. We find that 
 she is not happy in the Hotel Ferriol. Her friend 
 and foster-brother, Comte d'Argental, who lived on 
 until 1788 to be the last survivor of her circle, is 
 away "with his sweetheart in the Enchanted 
 Island," and she has his room while hers is being 
 refurnished. But it will cost her one hundred 
 pistoles, for Madame de Ferriol makes her pay for 
 everything. The subjects which she writes about 
 in all light-heartedness are extraordinary. She 
 cannot resist, from sheer ebullience of mirth, copy- 
 ing out a letter of amazing impudence written by 
 a certain officer of dragoons to the bishop of his 
 diocese. Can she or can she not continue to 
 know the beautiful brazen Madame de Parabere, 
 whose behaviour is of a lightness, but oh ! of such
 
 52 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 a lightness. Yet " her carriage is always at my 
 service, and don't you think it would be ridiculous 
 not to visit her at all ? " If one desires a marvel- 
 lous tale of the ways and the manners of the great 
 world under Louis XV., there is the astounding 
 story of Madame la Princesse de Bournonville, 
 and how she was publicly engaged to marry the 
 Due de Ruffec fifteen minutes after her first hus- 
 band's death ; it is told, with perfect calmness, in 
 Aiss6's best manner. The Prince was one of 
 Aisse's numerous rejected adorers ; she rejoices 
 that he has left her no compromising legacy. 
 There is a certain affair, on the loth of January, 
 1727, "which would make your hair stand on 
 end ; but it really is too infamous to be written 
 down." A wonderful world, so elegant and so 
 debased, so enthusiastic and so cynical, so full of 
 beauty and so full of corruption, that we find no 
 name but Louis Quinze to qualify its paradoxes. 
 
 In her earlier letters Aiss reveals herself as a 
 patron of the stage, and a dramatic critic of marked 
 views. Her foster-brothers, Pont-de-Veyle and 
 Argental, were deeply stage-stricken ; the " En- 
 chanted Island " of the latter seems to have been 
 situated somewhere in that ocean, the Theatre de 
 1'Opera. Aisse threw herself with heart and soul into 
 the famous rivalry between the two operatic stars 
 of Paris ; she was all for the enchanting Lemaure, 
 and when that public favourite wilfully retired to 
 private life Aiss6 found that the Pellissier " fait 
 horriblement mal." She tells with infinite zest a 
 rather scurrilous story of how a certain famous 
 Jansenist canon, seventy years of age, fearing to
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISS 53 
 
 die without having ever seen a dramatic perfor- 
 mance, dressed himself up in his deceased grand- 
 mother's garments and made his appearance in the 
 pit, creating, by his incredible oddity of garb and 
 feature, such a sensation that the actor Armand 
 stopped playing, and desired him, amid the 
 shrieks of laughter of the audience, to decamp as 
 fast as possible. Voltaire vouches for the absolute 
 truth of this anecdote. But before Aiss begins 
 to lose the gaiety of her spirits it may be well to 
 let her give in her own language, or as near as I 
 can reach it, a sample of her powers as an artist 
 in anecdote. 
 
 " A little while ago there happened a little 
 adventure which has made a good deal of noise. 
 I will tell you about it. Six weeks ago Isez, the 
 surgeon [one of the most eminent practitioners of 
 his time] received a note, begging him, at six 
 o'clock on the afternoon of the next day, to be in 
 the Rue du Pot-de-Fer, close to the Luxembourg. 
 He did not fail to be there ; he found waiting for 
 him a man, who conducted him for a few steps, 
 and then made him enter a house, shutting the 
 door on the surgeon, so as, himself, to remain in 
 the street. Isez was surprised that this man did 
 not at once take him where he was wanted. . But 
 the portier of the house appeared, and told him 
 that he was expected on the first floor, and asked 
 him to step up, which he did. He opened an 
 ante-chamber all hung with white ; a lackey, made to 
 be put in a picture, dressed in white, nicely curled, 
 nicely powdered, and with a pouch of white hair 
 and two dusters in his hand, came to meet him, and
 
 54 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 told him that he must have his shoes wiped. After 
 this ceremony, he was conducted into a room also 
 hung with white. Another lackey, dressed like the 
 first, went through the same ceremony with the 
 shoes ; he was then taken into a room where every- 
 thing was white, bed, carpet, tapestry, fauteutls, 
 chairs, tables and floor. A tall figure in a night-cap 
 and a perfectly white dressing-gown, and a white 
 mask, was seated near the fire. When this kind of 
 phantom perceived Isez, he said to him, < I have the 
 devil in my body/ and spoke no more ; for three- 
 quarters of an hour he did nothing but put on and 
 pull off six pairs of white gloves which he had on 
 a table by his side. Isez was frightened, but he 
 grew more so when, glancing round the room, he 
 saw several fire-arms ; he was taken with such a 
 trembling that he was obliged to sit down for fear 
 of falling. At last, to break the silence, he asked 
 the figure in white what was wanted of him, 
 because he had an engagement, and his time be- 
 longed to the public. The white figure dryly 
 replied, ' What does it matter to you, if you are 
 paid well ? ' and said nothing more. Another 
 quarter of an hour passed in silence ; at last the 
 phantom pulled the bell-rope. The two white 
 lackeys reappeared ; the phantom asked for ban- 
 dages, and told Isez to draw five pounds of blood." 
 We must spoil the story by finishing it abruptly. 
 Isez bleeds the phantom not in the arm, on 
 account of the monstrous quantity of blood, but in 
 the foot, a very beautiful woman's foot, apparently, 
 when he gets to the last of six pairs of white silk 
 stockings. He is presently, after various other
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 55 
 
 adventures, turned out of the mysterious house, 
 and nobody, not even the King himself, can tell 
 what it all means. 
 
 But very soon the picture of A'iss^'s life begins 
 to be clouded over. In the spring of 1727, she is 
 in a peck of troubles. The periodical reduction 
 of the State annuities, which had been carried out 
 once more during the preceding winter by the new 
 Minister of Finance, had brought misery to many 
 gentlefolks of France. In Aisse's early letters, she 
 and her acquaintances appear much as Irish land- 
 lords do now ; in her latest letters they remind 
 us of what these landlords would be if the National 
 party realised its dream. The Chevalier does not 
 seem to have been a sufferer personally ; he had 
 not much to lose, but we find him sympathising 
 with Aisse', and drawing up an appealing letter for 
 her to send to the Cardinal de Fleury. Ai'sse 
 begins to feel the shadows falling across her future. 
 If ever she marries, she says, she will put into the 
 contract a clause by which she retains the right to 
 go to Geneva whenever she likes, for she longs to 
 tell her troubles to Madame Calandrini. And thus 
 is first sounded the mournful key to which we soon 
 become accustomed : 
 
 " Every day I see that there is nothing but virtue 
 that is any good for this world and the next. As 
 for myself, who have not been lucky enough to 
 behave properly, but who respect and admire 
 virtuous people, the simple wish to belong to the 
 number attracts to me all sorts of flattering things ; 
 the pity which every one shows me [for her money 
 losses, doubtless], almost prevents me from being
 
 56 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 miserable. I have just 2000 francs of income at 
 most left. My jewels and my diamonds are sold." 
 
 The result of her sudden poverty appears to 
 have been that the Chevalier d'Aydie, sorely against 
 his inclination, but actuated by a generous impulse, 
 offered to marry her. She was not less generous 
 than he, and almost Quixotically rejected what 
 would have been her greatest satisfaction. To 
 Madame Calandrini, who was plainly one of those 
 who urged her to accept this act of restitution, the 
 orphan-mother answers thus : 
 
 " Think, Madame, of what the world would say 
 if he married a nobody, and one who depended 
 entirely on the charity of the Ferriol family. 
 No ; I love his fame too much, and I have myself 
 at the same time too much pride, to allow him to 
 commit such an act of folly. He would be sure 
 to repent of having followed the bent of his absurd 
 passion, and I could not survive the pain of having 
 made him wretched, and of being myself no longer 
 loved." 
 
 The Chevalier, unable to live in Paris without 
 being at her side, fled for a five months' exile to 
 the parental chateau in Perigord. Aiss6 had 
 expressed a mild surprise that he could not con- 
 trive to be more calm, but their discussions had 
 always ended in a joke. Yet it is plain that all 
 these circumstances made her regard life more 
 seriously than she had ever done before. In her 
 next letter (August, 1727) we learn how miserable 
 a home the Hotel Ferriol had now become for 
 her. " The mistress of this house," she says, " is 
 much more difficult to live with than the poor
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 57 
 
 Ambassador was." As for the Chevalier, he had 
 scarcely reached Perigueux, when he forgot all 
 about the months he wished to spend in the 
 country, and hastened back to Paris to be near 
 Ai'sse'. The latter writes, in her prim way, " I 
 admit I was very agreeably surprised to see him 
 enter my room yesterday. How happy I should 
 be if I could only love him without having to 
 reproach myself for it ! " It is plain, in spite of 
 the always modest, and now timid way in which 
 she writes, that her moral worth and delicate 
 judgment were estimated at their true value even 
 by the frivolous women who surrounded her. 
 The Duchess of Fitz-James asks her advice as to 
 whether she shall or shall not accept the hand of 
 the Due d'Aumont. The dissolute Madame de 
 Tencin cannot forgive or forget Ai'sse's tacit dis- 
 approval of her conduct. The gentler, but not 
 less naughty Madame de Parabere purrs around 
 her like a cat, exquisitely assiduous not entirely 
 to lose the esteem of one whose position in the 
 world can have offered nothing to such a person- 
 age, but by whose intelligence and sympathetic 
 goodness she could not help being fascinated. 
 In recording all this, without in the least being 
 aware of it, Aiss gives us an impression of her 
 own simple sweetness as of a touchstone by 
 which radically evil natures were distinguished 
 from those whose voluntary abasement was not 
 the sign of a complete corruption of spirit. 
 
 We are made to feel in A'iss's letters, that, with- 
 out being in any degree a blue-stocking, she was 
 eager to form her own impression on the various
 
 58 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 intellectual questions of the hour. Gulliver's 
 Travels had only been published in England in 
 the autumn of 1726 ; in the spring of 1727 Aiss 
 had read it, in Desfontaine's translation, knew 
 that it was the work of Swift, and praised it in the 
 very same terms that the world has since agreed 
 to bestow upon it. Destouches seems to have 
 been a friend of hers, but when in the same year 
 she went to see his new comedy Le Philosophe 
 Marie, she was not blinded by friendship. " It is 
 a very charming comedy," she wrote, " full of 
 sentiment, full of delicacy ; but it does not possess 
 the genius of Moliere." Nor is she less judicious 
 in what she says about the masterpiece of another 
 friend, the Abb Provost d' Exiles. She writes in 
 October, 1728, "We have a new book here 
 entitled Me'moires dun Homme de Qualite retire du 
 Monde, it is not worth much, except one hundred 
 and ninety pages which make one burst out 
 crying." These one hundred and ninety pages 
 were that immortal supplement to a dull book 
 which we call Manon Lescaut, over which as many 
 tears are shed nowadays as were dropped a 
 century and a half ago. It is said by those who 
 have read Provost's forgotten romance, Histoire 
 dune Grecque Moderne, published long afterwards 
 in 1741, that it contains a full-length portrait of 
 the author's old friend Aiss6. It might be amusing 
 to compare this with Voltaire's portrait of her 
 chevalier in Adelaide du Guesclin. 
 
 She was evidently a centre of light and activity. 
 The young woman with whom, at all events during 
 certain periods, Bolingbroke corresponded by every
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 59 
 
 post, could be no commonplace person. Voltaire 
 vouches for her exact and independent knowledge 
 of events. When Madame Calandrini is anxious 
 to know how a certain incident at court will turn 
 out, Aisse says, " You shall know before the 
 people who make the Gazette do," and her letters 
 differ from the poet Gray's, which otherwise they 
 often curiously resemble, that she seems to know 
 at first hand the class of news that Gray only 
 repeats. She sometimes shows her first-hand 
 knowledge by her very inaccuracy. She gives, 
 for instance, a long account, which we follow 
 with breathless interest, of the death of Adrienne 
 Lecouvreur, the event, probably, which moved 
 Paris more vehemently than any other during the 
 year 1730. A'isse directly charges the young 
 Duchesse de Bouillon with the murder of the 
 actress, and supports her charge with an amaz- 
 ing array of horrible details. The affair was 
 mysterious, and A'isse was evidently minutely 
 informed ; yet Voltaire, in whose arms Adrienne 
 Lecouvreur died, declares that her account is not 
 the true one. On one point her knowledge of 
 her contemporaries is very useful to us. The 
 priceless correspondence of Madame du Deffand 
 makes the latter, as an old woman, an exceedingly 
 life-like figure, but we know little of her early life ; 
 Aisse's sketches of her, therefore, and to say the 
 truth, cruelly penetrating analysis of her character 
 at the age of thirty, are most valuable. The 
 Madame du Deffand we know seems a wiser 
 woman than Aiss's friend ; but the fact is that 
 many of these witty Frenchwomen only became
 
 60 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 tolerable, like remarkable vintages, when they were 
 growing a little crusted. 
 
 Among the brightest sections of Aisse's corres- 
 pondence are those in which she speaks of her 
 high-spirited and somewhat dissolute foster- 
 brothers, Pont-de-Veyle and D'Argental. These 
 two men were sowing their wild oats very hard, 
 in the fashion of the day, and although they were 
 passing the solemn age of thirty, the sacks seemed 
 inexhaustible. But so far as regarded Aiss6, their 
 conduct was all that was chivalrous, all that was 
 honourably fraternal. Pont-de-Veyle she calls an 
 angel, but it was D'Argental whom she loved the 
 most, and nothing is more touching than an 
 account she gives, with the naivete of a child, of 
 a quarrel she had with him. This quarrel lasted 
 eight days, and Aiss kept her letter open until 
 she could add, in a postscript, the desired infor- 
 mation that, she having drunk his health at dinner 
 and afterwards kissed him, they have made it up 
 without any formal explanation. " Since then," 
 she adds in that tone of hers which makes the 
 eyes of a middle-aged citizen of perfidious Albion 
 quite dim after a hundred and fifty years, " Since 
 then we have been a great deal together." 
 
 In 1728 she had need of all the kindness she 
 could get. The Chevalier was so ill in June that 
 she was obliged to face the prospect of his death. 
 " Duty, love, inquietude, and friendship, are for 
 ever troubling my thoughts and my body ; I am 
 in a cruel agitation ; my body is giving way, for 
 I am overwhelmed with vapours and with grief ; 
 and, if any misfortune should happen to that man,
 
 MADEMOISELLE AISSE 61 
 
 I feel I should not be able to endure the horrible 
 sorrow of it. He is more attached to me than 
 ever ; he encourages me to perform my duties. 
 Sometimes I cannot help telling him, that if he 
 gets any worse it will be impossible for me to 
 leave him ; and then he scolds me." The dread- 
 ful condition of genteel poverty in which the 
 Ferriol family were now living, did not tend to 
 make Aisse's home a bed of roses. In the winter 
 of 1728 these famous people of quality were 
 " dying of hunger." There was not, that is to 
 say, as much food upon their table as their 
 appetites required, and Aiss expected to share 
 the fate of the horse whose master gave him one 
 grain less of oats each day until he died from 
 starvation. In this there was of course a little 
 playful exaggeration, but her poverty weighed 
 heavily on Aisse. She had scarcely enough money 
 for her daily wants, and envied the Chevalier, 
 who was saving that he might form a dowry for 
 the little daughter at Sens, the " pauvre petite " in 
 the convent, after whom Aiss6's heart yearned, 
 and whom she might but very rarely visit as a 
 stranger. 
 
 She spent the autumn of 1729 at Pont-de- 
 Veyle, the country seat of the Ferriol family, a 
 chateau between Macon and Bourg. She took 
 advantage of this neighbourhood to Switzerland, 
 and paid the long-promised visit to Madame 
 Calandrini in Geneva. The incident was a moment- 
 ous one in the history of her soul. She came 
 back more uneasy, more irresolute than ever, and 
 in deep depression of spirits. Her first instinct,
 
 62 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 on being left to her own thoughts again, was to 
 enter a conv.ent, but Madame Calandrini did not 
 encourage this idea, and Ai'ss6 soon relinquished 
 it. She saw, herself, that duty called her to stay 
 with Madame de Ferriol, who was now growing 
 an invalid. Before leaving Geneva Madame 
 Calandrini had made a solemn attempt to per- 
 suade her to conclude her dubious relations with 
 the Chevalier. She tried to extract a promise 
 from A'iss6 that she would either marry D'Aydie 
 or cease to see him. But it is easy for comfort- 
 able matrons in their own boudoirs to urge a line 
 of conduct ; it is less simple for the unfortunate 
 to carry out these maxims in the hard light of 
 day. Aiss wrote : " All that I can promise you 
 is that nothing shall be spared to bring about one 
 or other of these things. But, Madame, it may 
 cost me my life." Such words are lightly said ; 
 but in Aiss's case they came from the heart. 
 She made the sacrifice, and it did cost her her 
 life. She attempted to melt the severe censor at 
 Geneva by extracts from the Chevalier's letters, 
 and finally she made an appeal which goes straight 
 to our sympathy. " How can I cut to the quick 
 a violent passion, and the tenderest and firmest 
 friendship ? Add to all this, gratitude : it is 
 frightful ! Death would not be worse ! How- 
 ever, since you wish me to make an effort, I will 
 do so." Conscience and the Calandrini were 
 inexorable. 
 
 In the dull house at Pont-de-Veyle A'iss6 was 
 thrown upon her own consciousness more than in 
 Paris. She gives us a picture of her dreary
 
 MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 63 
 
 existence. The Archbishop of Lyons, who was 
 Madame de Ferriol's brother, was the only intelli- 
 gent companion she had, and he was locked up 
 all day with Jesuit priests. The young Ferriols 
 were in Paris ; their mother, jealous, pietistic, and 
 peevish, wore Ai'sse out with ennui. It was in this 
 tension of the nervous system, this irritation and 
 depression of spirits, that on her way back to 
 Paris in November she paid a stolen visit to Sens 
 to see her little daughter. The letter in which 
 she describes the interview is simply heartrending. 
 The little delicate child, with an exquisite instinct, 
 clung to this unknown friend, and when at last 
 Aiss6 had to say farewell, her daughter whom 
 she must not call her daughter wrung the 
 mother's heart with mingled anguish and delight 
 by throwing her arms round her neck and crying 
 out, " I have no father or mother ; please, you be 
 my mother, for I love you as much as if you 
 really were ! " Ai'ss could not tear herself away ; 
 she remained a fortnight at the convent, more 
 unhappy than happy, and so afflicted in spirits 
 that she positively had to take to her bed. The 
 little "Miss Black" waited upon her with a child's 
 enthusiasm, refusing to play with her companions, 
 and lavishing her caresses upon her. At last the 
 poor mother forced herself to depart, fearing lest 
 she should expose her secret by her emotion. 
 She made her way to Paris, where she found the 
 Chevalier waiting for her, and all her good resolu- 
 tions were shattered by the passionate joy of his 
 welcome. She did not know what to do nor 
 where to turn.
 
 64 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 In the beginning of 1730 the Chevalier had 
 another dangerous illness, and Aiss6 was obliged 
 to postpone the crisis. He got well and she was 
 so happy that she could not but postpone it 
 a little longer. Slowly, as she herself perceived, 
 her bodily strength began to waste away under 
 the agitations of her conscience. We may pass 
 over the slow progress of the spiritual com- 
 plaint, which took more than three years to 
 destroy her healthy constitution. We must push 
 on to the end. In 1732 her health gave serious 
 alarm to all those who surrounded her. That 
 few of her friends suspected the real state of the 
 case, nor the hidden griefs that were destroying 
 her, is proved among other things by a little 
 copy of verses which has been preserved in the 
 works of a great man. Voltaire, who made a 
 joke of his own supposed passion for Aiss, sent 
 her in 1732 a packet of ratafia, to relieve a 
 painful symptom of her complaint, and he accom- 
 panied it by a flippant versicle, which may thus 
 be rendered : 
 
 " Hence ! Through her veins like subtle anguish fleet ! 
 Change to desires the snows that thro' them roll ! 
 So may she feel the heat 
 That burns within my soul." 
 
 But the women about her knew that she was 
 dying. The Parabere to whom we may forgive 
 much, because she loved Aiss6 so well, fluttered 
 around her with pathetic tenderness ; and we find 
 her forcing upon her friend the most beautiful of 
 her personal possessions, a splendid box of crimson
 
 MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 65 
 
 jasper. Even Madame de Tencin, whom she had 
 always kept at arm's length, and who had rewarded 
 her with aversion, startled her now with expres- 
 sions and proofs of affection. Madame de Ferriol 
 herself, with her sharp temper and her ugly 
 speeches, urged upon her the attentions of a Jan- 
 senist confessor. The Chevalier, understanding at 
 last that he was about to lose her, was distracted 
 with anxiety, and hung around the room until the 
 ladies were put to their wits' end to get rid of him. 
 In her next letter, written about Christmas of 
 1732, A'isse expresses herself thus : 
 
 " I have to be very careful how I deal with you 
 know whom. He has been talking to me about a 
 certain matter as reasonably and affectionately as 
 possible. All his goodness, his delicate way of 
 thinking, loving me for my own self, the interest 
 of the poor little one, to whom one could not give 
 a position, all these things force me to be very 
 careful how I deal with him. For a long time 
 I have been tortured with remorse ; the carrying 
 out of this would sustain me. If the Chevalier 
 does not keep to what he has promised, I will see 
 him no more. You see, Madame, what my resolu- 
 tions are ; I will keep to them. But they will 
 probably shorten my life." 
 
 The explanation of this passage seems to be that 
 the Chevalier, having put off marriage so long, 
 was anxious not to break his vows for a merely 
 sentimental union, that could last but a few weeks. 
 She had extracted, it would seem, a sort of pro- 
 mise from him, but he did not keep it, and A'isse 
 died unmarried. 
 
 E
 
 66 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 In her last hours Aiss6 became completely 
 devote, but not to such an extent as to be unable 
 to see the humour of sending such light ladies as 
 Madame de Parabere and Madame du Deffand 
 through the length and breadth of Paris to search 
 for a director to undertake her conversion. At 
 last these inexperienced emissaries discovered a 
 Pere Boursault, who was perhaps of their world, 
 for he was the son of the dramatist, the enemy of 
 Moliere ; from him Aiss6 received the consolations 
 of religion. A few days before she died she wrote 
 once more to Madame Calandrini, and these are 
 the last words which we possess from the pen of 
 Aiss : 
 
 " I say nothing to you about the Chevalier. 
 He is in despair at seeing me so ill. You 
 never witnessed a passion so violent, more delicacy, 
 more sentiment, more greatness and generosity. I 
 am not anxious about the poor little one ; she has 
 a friend and protector who loves her tenderly. 
 Good-bye, dear Madame ; I am too weak to write 
 any more. It is still infinitely sweet to me to think 
 of you ; but I cannot yield to this happiness without 
 tears, my dear friend. The life I have led has been 
 very wretched. Have I ever had a moment's 
 enjoyment ? I could not be happy alone ; I was 
 afraid to think ; my remorse has never once left 
 me since the instant when I began to have my 
 eyes open to my misconduct. Why should I 
 be alarmed at my soul being separated, since I am 
 persuaded that God is all good, and that the 
 moment when I begin to enjoy happiness will be 
 that in which I leave this miserable body ? "
 
 MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 67 
 
 On the 1 4th of March, 1733, Charlotte Elizabeth 
 Ai'sse, spinster, aged about forty years, was buried 
 in the chapel of the Ferriol family, in the Church 
 of St. Roch, in Paris. 
 
 1887.
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 
 
 BRIEF and unobtrusive as was the volume of Lettres 
 Portugaises published in Paris in 1669, it exercised 
 an influence on the sentimental literature of Europe 
 which was very extraordinary, and to which we 
 have not yet ceased to be subject. Since the 
 revival of learning there had been no collection of 
 documents dealing with the experiences of emotion 
 in which an element of Renaissance feeling had 
 not shown itself in some touch of rhetoric, in some 
 flower of ornament, in some trick of language that 
 concealed what it desired to expose. The Portu- 
 guese Letters, slight as they were, pleased in- 
 stantly and universally because they were entirely 
 modern. The seventeenth century, especially in 
 France, had cultivated epistolary literature with 
 care, even with too much care. There had been 
 letter-writers by profession, and the value of their 
 correspondence has been weighed and found want- 
 ing. Even in England, where the French were 
 held up as models of letter-writing, there were not 
 wanting critics. Ho well wrote in 1625 : 
 
 " Others there are among our next transmarine 
 neighbours eastward, who write in their own lan- 
 guage, but their style is so soft and easy that their 
 letters may be said to be like bodies of loose flesh 
 without sinews ; they have neither joints of art 
 nor arteries in them. They have a kind of simper- 
 
 68
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 69 
 
 ing and lank hectic expression, made up of a 
 bombast of words and finical affected compliments 
 only. I cannot well away with such fleasy stuff, 
 with such cobweb compositions, where there is no 
 strength of matter nothing for the reader to carry 
 away with him that may enlarge the notions of 
 his soul." 
 
 We may be quite sure that Howell had Balzac 
 in his eye when he wrote this passage, and to 
 Balzac presently succeeded Voiture. To the quali- 
 ties of Voiture's famous correspondence, to its 
 emptiness, flatness, and rhetorical elegance, signi- 
 fying nothing and telling us nothing, M. Gaston 
 Boissier has lately dedicated a very amusing page 
 of criticism. Even in the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century the French were conscious of their 
 deficiency as letter-writers, and were anxious to 
 remove it. Mademoiselle de Scudery, who was as 
 awkward as the best of them, saw that girls ought to 
 know how to express their feelings briefly, plainly, 
 and sincerely. In the depths of the wilderness of 
 Cle'lie may still be found rules for letter-writing. 
 But the time was not quite ripe, and it is notice- 
 able that it was just before the publication of 
 the Portuguese Letters that Mademoiselle, in the 
 agonies of her grotesque passion, turned over the 
 pages of Corneille for phrases which might express 
 the complex emotions of her heart. If she had 
 waited a few months a manual of the tender 
 passion would have lain at her hand. At all 
 events, the power to analyse the feelings in simple 
 language, to chronicle the minute symptoms of 
 emotion without rhetoric, closely succeeds the
 
 yo FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 great success of these letters ; nor is it unworthy 
 of notice that they appear to have exercised an 
 instant influence on no less a personage than 
 Madame de Sevign6, who alludes to them certainly 
 twice, if not oftener, and whose great epoch of 
 letter - writing, following upon the marriage of 
 Madame de Grignan, begins with this very year, 
 1669. In England the influence of the Portu- 
 guese Letters, as we shall presently see, was 
 scarcely less sudden than decisive. That we in 
 England needed such an influence on our letter- 
 writers is not to be questioned, although the faults 
 of English correspondence were not those of the 
 admirers of Voiture and Balzac. The French 
 needed to throw off a rhetorical insipidity ; the 
 English were still in the toils of the ornamental 
 allusiveness of the Renaissance. We find such a 
 sentence as the following, written by Mrs. Penrud- 
 dock, in 1655, on the night before her husband's 
 execution, in a letter which has been preserved just 
 because it seemed direct, tender, and sincere : 
 
 "Those dear embraces which I yet feel and 
 shall never lose, being the faithful testimonies of 
 a loving husband, have charmed my soul to such 
 a reverence of your remembrance, that, were it 
 possible, I would, with my own blood, cement 
 your dead limbs to live again, and (with re- 
 verence) think it no sin to rob Heaven a little 
 longer of a martyr." 
 
 Such persons as Mrs. Penruddock never again 
 on such occasions as this wrote in this particular 
 manner, when Europe had once read the Portu- 
 guese Letters. The secret of saying what was in
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 71 
 
 the heart in a straightforward way was discovered, 
 and was at once adopted by men and women a 
 hundred times more accomplished and adroit than 
 the Canoness of Beja. 
 
 A romantic and mysterious story had quite as 
 much to do with the success of the Portuguese 
 Letters as any directness in their style. In 
 January 1669 a little duodecimo of 182 pages, 
 entitled simply Lettres Portugaises, was issued by 
 Barbin, the leading Paris publisher. The Letters 
 were five in number ; they were neither signed nor 
 addressed, and there was no indication of date or 
 place. A prefatory note stated that they were a 
 translation of certain Portuguese letters written to 
 a gentleman of quality who had been serving in 
 Portugal, and that the publisher did not know the 
 name of the writer. He abstained from saying 
 that he knew to whom they were addressed. In- 
 ternal evidence showed that the writer was a nun 
 in a Portuguese convent, and that she had been 
 forsaken, after an impassioned episode, by a 
 French cavalry officer who had loved and had 
 ridden away. He had passed, at the head of 
 his regiment, through the narrow streets of the 
 town where she lived, like the hero of a Border 
 ballad, not a bowshot from her bower-eaves, and 
 she had leaned over her balcony, for a fatal 
 instant, and all was lost and won. The little 
 book was read and continued to be read ; edition 
 after edition was called for, and in 1678 the letters 
 were stated to be written by " le Chevalier de 
 C. . . ." Saint Simon and Duclos each informed 
 the world that the male personage was the Marquis
 
 72 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 of Chamilly, long afterwards Marshal of France, 
 and a mighty warrior before the Roi-Soleil. But 
 no indiscretion of memoir-writers gave the slightest 
 information regarding the lady. All that appeared 
 was that her name was Mariana and that her 
 chamber-window looked across to the only place 
 mentioned in the letters Mertola, a little town 
 on the right bank of the Guadiana. But in 1810 
 Boissonade, in a copy of the first edition, found a 
 note in a contemporary hand, stating in French 
 that the letters were written by Mariana Alca- 
 forada, a nun in a convent at Beja, in the pro- 
 vince of Alem-Tejo. 
 
 Beja, the theatre of the Portuguese Letters, is 
 a small mediaeval city, perched on a hill in the 
 midst of the vast fertile plain of central Portugal, 
 and boasting to this day a ring of walls and a 
 lofty citadel, which make it a beacon from all parts 
 of the surrounding province. What the Marquis 
 of Chamilly was doing at Beja may now be ex- 
 plained, especially as, owing to the recent re- 
 searches of M. Beauvois, we can for the first time 
 follow him with some exactness. The French 
 were holding a very equivocal position with regard 
 to Portugal. The Queen of Portugal was a French 
 princess, and the court of Lisbon was full of 
 Frenchmen, but Louis XIV. did not find it con- 
 venient to give Don Alfonso his open support. 
 The fact was that Mazarin, anxious to meet the 
 Spaniards half-way, had sacrificed Portugal in the 
 negotiations of the lie des Faisans. He had no 
 intention, however, of really leaving his old allies 
 to the tender mercies of Madrid, and he secretly
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 73 
 
 encouraged the Portuguese to fight for their inde- 
 pendence. The Spaniards had no sooner seen 
 France ,sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees, late 'm 
 1659, than they threw themselves on the frontier 
 of Portugal, and a guerilla war began that lasted 
 for nine years. All France could openly do was 
 to permit her own recently disbanded foreign 
 auxiliaries to take up service with the King of 
 Portugal ; and as a general for these somewhat 
 dubiously constituted troops, the Count of Schom- 
 berg offered peculiar advantages, as a Huguenot 
 and a citizen of Heidelberg. Schomberg arrived 
 late in 1660, and from this time forward success 
 leaned to the side of Portugal. M. Beauvois has 
 discovered that it was not until 1663 that a young 
 cavalry officer of great promise accompanied the 
 non- official envoy of France, Ablancourt, to the 
 court of Lisbon. This young soldier was Noel 
 Bouton, then known under the title of Count of 
 St. Lger-sur-Dheune, who had already, although 
 only twenty- six years of age, seen a great deal of 
 service in the field. He was the eleventh child of 
 a fine old Burgundy noble, who had trained him 
 to arms. In 1656 he had been taken prisoner at 
 the siege of Valenciennes, and had attracted the 
 notice of the king by a succession of gallant ex- 
 ploits. He is the hero, though in a most unheroic 
 light, of the Portuguese Letters. 
 
 His first mission to Portugal seems to have 
 been diplomatic ; but on the 3oth of April 1664, 
 being at Estremoz, on the Spanish frontier, and 
 in the heart of the fighting, he received from 
 Schomberg the command of a regiment of cavalry, 
 
 4
 
 74 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 and at once took his place in the forefront of the 
 work in hand. His name is henceforth connected 
 with the little victories of this obscure and pro- 
 vincial war, the results of which, none the less, 
 were highly important to Portugal. The theatre 
 of the campaign was the hilly district lying between 
 the Douro and that part of the Guadiana which 
 flows westward before its course changes at Jura- 
 menha. Chamilly is first mentioned with glory 
 for his part in the ten days' siege of Valenfa-de- 
 Alcantara, in Spain, in June 1664. A month 
 later he helped to defeat the Spaniards under the 
 walls of Castello Rodrigo, a mountain fastness in 
 the valley of the Douro. By this victory the in- 
 dependence of Northern Portugal was secured. 
 All through 1665 Chamilly and his dragoons 
 hovered around Badajos, winning laurels in June 
 at the great battle of Villa Vicosa ; and in October, 
 in the flight on Badajos, after the victory of Rio 
 Xevora. The war now sank to a series of marches 
 and countermarches, diversified by a few skirmishes 
 between the Tagus and Badajos. But in September 
 1667, after the Count of St. Leger, who is now 
 Marquis of Chamilly, has been more than three 
 years in Portugal, we find him for the first time 
 distinguishing himself in the plains of southern 
 Alam-Tejo by an attack on the Castle of Ferreira, 
 a few miles from Beja. It is scarcely too much 
 to conjecture that it was either while advancing 
 on, or more probably while returning from 
 Ferreira, that he passed under the balcony of the 
 Franciscan convent of the Conception, and won 
 the heart of the susceptible canoness. So long
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 75 
 
 as the war was being prosecuted with ardour 
 Chamilly could have had no time for such a 
 liaison, but all the troubles of the Portuguese were 
 practically over when Ferreira fell. Six months 
 later, on the i$th of February, 1668, peace was 
 proclaimed, and Spain accepted the independence 
 of Portugal. 1 
 
 A glance at the map will show the importance 
 of these dates and names in judging the authen- 
 ticity of the letters of Mariana. Without them 
 the critics of those letters have been left with no 
 basis for conjecturing when or how, between 1661 
 and 1668, the Portuguese nun and the French 
 officer met and parted. We now see that for the 
 first arduous years of the campaign the young 
 Frenchman was not near Beja, but that he may 
 well have spent the last six months of his cam- 
 paigning in peace within or beside its walls. One 
 or two otherwise meaningless phrases in the 
 letters are now easily explicable ; and the pro- 
 bability that the story, as tradition has sketched it 
 for us, is mainly correct, becomes vastly greater. 
 Before considering what these expressions are, 
 
 1 The important sequence of facts here given with regard to the 
 military record of Chamilly in Portugal has never been used before 
 in any critical examination of the Portuguese Letters. That I am 
 able to give it is owing to the kindness of my friend, M. Jusserand, 
 who has pointed out to me a very learned memoir on the Chamilly 
 family, full of fresh facts, buried by a Burgundian historian, M. E. 
 Beauvois, in the transactions for 1884 of a local society, the " Societe 
 d'Histoire " of Beaune. I think I never saw so valuable a contribution 
 to history concealed with so successful a modesty. I am the more 
 anxious to express my debt to M. Beauvois for his facts, in that I 
 wholly disagree with his conclusions when he comes to deal with the 
 Portuguese Letters.
 
 76 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 however, it may be best to take the Letters them- 
 selves into our hands. 
 
 It is with some trepidation that I confess that, 
 in my judgment, the central fact on which the 
 chronicle of the Portuguese Letters hangs has 
 hitherto been overlooked by all their editors and 
 critics. As the Letters were published without 
 dates, without indications of place or address, 
 they took a sequence which has ever since been 
 religiously adhered to. But reading them through 
 very carefully as Mark Pattison used to say all 
 books should be read, pencil in hand I had 
 come to the conclusion that this order was not 
 merely incorrect, but fatal, if persevered in, to 
 any historic credence in the Letters as a whole. 
 The fourth has all the appearance of being the 
 earliest in date, and M. Beauvois' discoveries 
 make this almost certain. We must understand 
 that all the five letters are the successive appeals 
 of a forsaken woman, who repeats her expressions 
 of love and lamentation without much indication of 
 scene or season. But some such indication may, 
 by reading the text with great care, be discovered. 
 The fourth letter, which I believe to be the first, 
 opens thus abruptly : 
 
 " Y our lieutenant tells me that a storm forced 
 you to put into port in the kingdom of Algarve. 
 I am afraid that you must have greatly suffered on 
 the sea, and this fear has so occupied me that I 
 have thought no more about all my own troubles. 
 Are you quite sure that your lieutenant takes 
 more interest than I do in all that happens to 
 you ? Why then do you keep him better in-
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 77 
 
 formed ? And, finally, why have you not written 
 to me ? I am very unfortunate if you found no 
 opportunity of writing to me before you started, 
 and I am still more so if you did find one without 
 using it to write to me. Your injustice and your 
 ingratitude are extreme, yet I should be in despair 
 if they brought you misfortune." 
 
 The tone of this is angry and indignant, but it 
 is not the tone of a woman who considers herself 
 abandoned. She has evidently parted with her 
 lover unwillingly, and with suspicion, but she 
 does not resign the right to scold him. More- 
 over, it is noticeable that he has but just started, 
 and that he had hardly put to sea before he was 
 driven into a port in Algarve. Not a critic of the 
 Portuguese Letters has known what to make of 
 this latter point, for Algarve is the strip running 
 along the extreme south coast of Portugal, and no 
 ship leaving Lisbon for France could possibly be 
 driven into ports that look right across into Africa. 
 But as we now see Chamilly slowly descending 
 the frontier from the Douro to Beja, and as we 
 presently find Mariana overwhelmed with emotion 
 at the sight of the road to Mertola, we have but 
 to look again at the map to observe that Mertola 
 would be naturally the first stage in a journey 
 continued south to the mouth of the Guadiana, 
 which is navigable from that town onwards. On 
 reaching the sea Chamilly would take ship, and 
 would most naturally be driven by the first storm 
 into some port of Algarve, from which the news 
 would promptly be brought back to Beja. When 
 we find the Portuguese nun speaking of some
 
 78 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 early confidences as made "five or six months 
 ago," and when we recollect that the capture of 
 Ferreira took place five months before the peace 
 with Spain, we can hardly doubt that the events 
 upon which the Letters are founded took place 
 between September 1667 and February 1668, 
 soon after which latter date Chamilly doubtless 
 made an excuse for setting forth for France. 
 Thus a series of minute expressions in this so-called 
 fourth letter expressions hitherto meaningless or 
 misleading are shown to be of vital importance 
 in testifying to the genuineness of the corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 Another fragment from this same letter will help 
 to complete the picture of Chamilly's desertion : 
 
 " You have taken advantage of the excuses 
 which you had for going back to France. A ship 
 was starting. Why did you not let her start ? 
 Your family had written to you. Do you not 
 know what persecutions I have endured from 
 mine ? Your honour compelled you to forsake 
 me. Have I been so solicitous about my honour ? 
 You were forced to go to serve your king. If all 
 that is said of him be true, he has no need of your 
 help, and he would have excused you. I should 
 have been only too happy had we passed our lives 
 together ; but since a cruel absence had to divide 
 us, it seems to me that I ought to be satisfied in 
 knowing that I am not faithless to you. Indeed, 
 for all the world contains would I not commit so 
 base an action. What ! have you known the 
 depths of my heart and my affection, and have 
 yet been able to persuade yourself to abandon me
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 79 
 
 for ever, and to expose me to the terror of believ- 
 ing that you will for the future only think of me to 
 sacrifice the memory of me to some new passion ! " 
 
 The freedom with which this cloistered lady 
 and her foreign lover met has been objected to as 
 improbable. But the manners of Portugal in the 
 seventeenth century gave to women of the religious 
 orders a social freedom denied to ordinary wives 
 and daughters. In the Me'moires of Ablancourt, 
 whom Chamilly attended on his first mission to 
 Lisbon, we read of royal parties of pleasure at the 
 Convent of Santa Speranza, where the nuns and 
 courtiers mingled in theatrical representations 
 before the king and queen. Another con- 
 temporary account admits that the French and 
 English were so much beloved in Portugal that 
 some liberty was allowed to them beyond what a 
 Portuguese gentleman might indulge in. It is 
 easy to see that if convents might without scandal 
 be opened to men in social intercourse, it is not 
 probable that they would be closed to a brilliant 
 foreign ally fresh from Villa Vigosa or Ferreira. 
 But we must again allow Mariana Alcaforada to 
 tell her own tale : 
 
 " Every one has noticed the entire change in 
 my mood, my manners, and my person. My 
 mother has spoken to me about it, with bitterness 
 at first, and then with a certain kindliness. I do 
 not know what I said to her in reply ; I fancy 
 I must have confessed everything to her. The 
 strictest of the nuns here are sorry to see what a 
 condition I am in ; they even treat me on account 
 of it with some consideration and some tender-
 
 8o FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ness. Everybody is touched at my love, and 
 you alone remain perfectly indifferent, writing 
 me only cold letters, full of repetitions ; half the. 
 paper is not filled, and you are rude enough to 
 let me see that you are dying with impatience to 
 be done writing. Dona Brites has been persecut- 
 ing me these last days to get me to leave my 
 room ; and fancying that it would amuse me, she 
 took me for a turn on the balcony from which 
 one has a view of Mertola ; I went with her, and 
 at once a cruel memory came back to me, a 
 memory which kept me weeping all the remainder 
 of the day. She brought me back, and I threw 
 myself on my bed, where I could but reflect a 
 thousand times over how little chance there was 
 of my ever being cured. Whatever is done to 
 solace me augments my suffering, and in the 
 remedies themselves I find intimate reasons why 
 I should be wretched. I have often seen you 
 pass that spot with an air that charmed me, and 
 I was on that balcony on that fatal day when I 
 first began to feel the symptoms of my ill-starred 
 passion. I fancied that you wished to please me, 
 although you did not know me. I persuaded 
 myself that you had noticed me among all the 
 ladies that were with me. I imagined that when 
 you drew rein, you were well pleased that I should 
 have a better sight of you, and that I should 
 admire your skill and how graceful you looked on 
 horseback. I was surprised to notice that I was 
 frightened when you took your horse through a 
 difficult place ; the fact is that I was taking a 
 secret interest in all your actions."
 
 We see that he wrote to her at first, although 
 not from that port of Algarve, in which he had 
 thought of nothing but business. It does not 
 appear that after this he ever wrote again, nor as 
 her memory loses its sharpness does she ever, after 
 this first letter, regain the same clearness of re- 
 miniscence. We may quote once more from this, 
 the most interesting of the famous five. It is 
 thus that Mariana closes her pathetic appeal : 
 
 " I want to have the portraits of your brother 
 and of your sister-in-law. Whatever is anything to 
 you is very dear to me, and I am wholly devoted 
 to what concerns you. I have no will of my own 
 left. There are moments in which it seems to me 
 that I should be humble enough to serve her 
 whom you love. . . . An officer has been wait- 
 ing for this letter for a long time ; I had made up 
 my mind to write it in such a way that you may 
 not be disgusted when you receive it, but I see 
 I have made it too extravagant. I must close it. 
 Alas ! it is out of my power to do so. I seem to 
 be talking to you when I write to you, and you 
 become a little more present to me then. . . . 
 The officer who is to take this letter reminds me 
 for the fourth time that he wishes to start. What 
 a hurry he is in ! He, no doubt, is forsaking 
 some unhappy lady in this country. Farewell ! 
 it is harder for me to finish my letter than it was 
 for you to abandon me, perhaps for ever." 
 
 The remaining letters give fewer indications of 
 date and sequence than the fourth, nor are they 
 so picturesque. But the reader will not seek the 
 Portuguese Letters, as he seeks the Memoires of 
 
 F
 
 82 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Madame de Motteville, or even the correspond- 
 ence of Madame de Sevigne, mainly for sparkling 
 incident and the pretty details of contemporary, 
 life. The value of these epistles rests in their 
 sincerity as a revelation of the heart. Poor 
 Mariana had no inclination to describe the daily 
 life of her fellow-nuns or the intrigues of society 
 in Beja. She has been deceived, the man she 
 loves is absent, and as she weeps without cessa- 
 tion, she cannot help confessing to herself that 
 she does not expect to see him back again. 
 
 " I resigned my life to you," she says in the 
 so-called first letter, " as soon as I saw you, and I 
 feel some pleasure now in sacrificing to you what 
 you will not accept. A thousand times a day I 
 send my sighs out after you ; they search for you 
 everywhere, and for all reward of so much dis- 
 quietude what do they bring me back but too 
 sincere a warning from my evil fortune, which is 
 too cruel to suffer me to deceive myself, and 
 which says to me every moment, Cease, cease, 
 unfortunate Mariana ! vainly thou dost consume 
 thyself, vainly dost seek a lover whom thou shalt 
 never see again, who has crost the ocean to 
 escape from thee, who is now in France in the 
 midst of pleasures, who gives no single moment to 
 the thought of thy sufferings, and who can well 
 dispense with all these thy needless transports." 
 
 She will not, however, yet admit that she is 
 wholly deserted. She has received a letter from 
 him, and though its tone was so far from respond- 
 ing to her own that it threw her beside herself for 
 three hours, it has re-awakened her hopes.
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 83 
 
 ft Can you ever be contented by a passion less 
 ardent than mine ? You will, perhaps, find else- 
 where more beauty (although you used to tell me 
 that I was beautiful enough) but you will never 
 find so much love again, and all the rest is 
 nothing. Do not fill out your letters with need- 
 less matter, and you may save yourself the trouble 
 of reminding me to remember you. I cannot 
 forget you, and I cannot forget, too, that you 
 made me hope that you would come back to me 
 for awhile. Ah ! why will you not spend all your 
 life here ? Were it possible for me to quit this 
 wretched cloister, I would not stay in Portugal to 
 see whether you performed your promises. I 
 would not count the cost, but would fly to seek 
 you, to follow you, to love you. I dare not 
 persuade myself that this will be ; I will not 
 nourish such a hope (though there might be 
 pleasure in delusion), for since I am doomed to 
 be unhappy, I will have no feelings inconsistent 
 with my lot." 
 
 The violent and wretched tone of the " Letters " 
 culminates in the third, which is unsurpassed as a 
 revelation of the ingenious self-torture of a sensi- 
 tive mind brooding upon its own despair. The 
 women of Paris were astonished to read such 
 pages as the following, where complex emotions 
 which they had often experienced or imagined, 
 but had never been able to formulate, suddenly 
 found perfectly direct and limpid expression : 
 
 " I cannot persuade myself to wish that you 
 may no longer be thinking about me ; and, indeed, 
 to speak sincerely, I am furiously jealous of what-
 
 84 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ever may give you happiness, and of all that may 
 touch your heart and your tastes in France. I do 
 not know why I write to you. I see well enough 
 that you will only pity me, and I do not wish for 
 your pity. I am very angry with myself when I 
 reflect upon all that I have sacrificed for you. I 
 have exposed myself to the rage of my relatives, 
 to the severity of the laws of this country against 
 nuns, and to your ingratitude, which appears to 
 me the greatest of all misfortunes. Yet, all the 
 while, I am conscious that my remorse is not 
 sincere, and that for the love of you I would with 
 all my heart run into far greater dangers than any 
 of these." 
 
 The extraordinary and at that time the unique 
 merit of the Portuguese nun, as a letter-writer, lies 
 in the fact that, in the full tempest and turmoil of 
 her passion, she never yields to the temptation of 
 giving herself up to rhetoric, or rather that whenever 
 she does make a momentary concession to this habit 
 of her age, she doubles on herself immediately, and 
 is the first to deprecate such false flowers of speech. 
 She knows that her letters are too long, although 
 she cannot keep them within bounds. It is part 
 of the torture of her spirit that she recognises 
 better than any monitor from without could teach 
 her, that her lamentations, reproaches, and 
 entreaties are as little calculated as a material 
 flood of tears would be to revive the fire upon a 
 hearth of sunken embers. As she clamours at 
 the door of memory, and makes the air resound 
 with her importunity, she is sane enough to be 
 aware all the while that these are no seductions
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 85 
 
 by which a weary heart may be refreshed and 
 re-awakened ; yet is she absolutely powerless to 
 moderate her own emotion. The result is poignant 
 to the last degree ; and from the absence of all, or 
 almost all, surrounding local colour of incident or 
 tradition, the spectacle of this distress moves and 
 excites the reader in somewhat the same fashion 
 as the loud crying of an unseen figure out-of-doors 
 in the darkness of the night may move the helpless 
 sympathy of one who listens from a window. 
 
 Nothing more is known of this shadowy 
 Mariana Alcaforada, but the author of her mis- 
 fortunes figures long and gloriously in French 
 history. His fatuity, if not his heartlessness, in 
 allowing her letters to be immediately printed, is 
 a blot upon his humanity in our eyes, but seems 
 to have abated his magnificence not a whit among 
 his contemporaries. It would be idle to inquire 
 by what means the letters came into the hands of 
 a publisher. In 1690, upon the death of the 
 translator, it was admitted that they had been 
 turned out of Portuguese into excellent French 
 by Pierre Girardin de Guilleragues, a " Gascon 
 gourmand," as Saint-Simon calls him, immortalised 
 moreover by Boileau, in a graceful couplet, as 
 being 
 
 " Born master of all arts a court can teach, 
 And skilled alike in silence and in speech." 
 
 It was Guilleragues who said of Pelisson that 
 " he abused the permission that men have to be 
 ugly." He was patronised by Madame de Main- 
 tenon and died French ambassador to the Porte
 
 86 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 in 1689. To Guilleragues is attributed the com- 
 position of the Portuguese Letters by those who 
 seek to deny that Mariana Alcaforada ever existed. 
 But in their own day no one doubted that 
 the actors in this little drama were real persons. 
 Chamilly is described by Saint-Simon as a tall, 
 heavy man, extremely good-natured and gallant 
 in fight, although to listen to and to look at, 
 giving little suggestion that he could ever have 
 inspired so romantic a passion as that revealed 
 by the Portuguese Letters. To this there is an 
 obvious reply, that Saint-Simon only knew Cha- 
 milly in his mature years, and that there is no 
 reason why a heavy dragoon should not have 
 been very attractive to a Portuguese maiden at 
 twenty-six and yet seem most unattractive^at forty- 
 six to the wittiest of memoir-writers. To the 
 Portuguese nun he undoubtedly behaved disgrace- 
 fully ill, and not at all like a Christian gentleman ; 
 but we must remember that his own age judged 
 such bad deeds as peccadillos in the free cam- 
 paign of love and war. Chamilly's subsequent 
 career was unquestionably glorious. He fought 
 the Turks in Candia, he commanded the troops of 
 the Electors of Cologne and of Munster, he won 
 deathless laurels at the famous siege of Grave ; 
 and, finally, after twenty-five campaigns, he ended 
 as Marshal of France, and married a wife who 
 was, as we may smile maliciously to read in our 
 Saint-Simon, " singularly ugly." 
 
 The success of the Portuguese Letters was 
 attested not merely by the multitude of successive 
 editions of the text, but by the imitations and
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 87 
 
 continuations which were foisted upon a credulous 
 public. Only seven months after the original 
 publication there appeared a second part contain- 
 ing seven letters, with the same date, 1669, on the 
 title-page. These did not, however, pretend to be 
 written by Mariana, but by a Portuguese lady of 
 quality. The style was very different, as the 
 publisher admitted, and the letters bear every 
 stamp of artifice and fiction. They were, how- 
 ever, greedily accepted as genuine, and the " Dame 
 Portugaise " took her place beside the "Religieuse." 
 The temptation to prolong the romance was irre- 
 sistible, and there was immediately published a 
 pamphlet of " Replies," five in number, supposed 
 to be sent by the French officer to the Portuguese 
 nun in answer to each of her letters. This came 
 from a Parisian press ; but the idea of publishing 
 the officer's letters had occurred simultaneously to 
 a provincial bookseller, and still in the same year, 
 1669, there appeared at Grenoble a volume of 
 New Replies, six in number, the first being not 
 properly a reply, but an introductory letter. This 
 last publication openly professes to be fiction. 
 The editor states in the preface that being " neither 
 a girl, nor a nun, nor even perhaps in love," he 
 cannot pretend to express the sentiments of the 
 heart with the genuine vigour of the original 
 letters ; but that, as Aulus Sabinus ventured to 
 reply to certain of the heroic epistles of Ovid, 
 though with so little success as merely to heighten 
 the lustre of those originals, so he hopes by these 
 inventions, and a mere/* cf esprit, to increase the 
 admiration of readers for Mariana's genuine
 
 88 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 correspondence. All this is very honest and very 
 legitimate, but so eager were the ladies of the 
 seventeenth century to be deluded that this 
 preface of the guileless editor was taken to 
 be a mere mystification, and the Grenoble New 
 Replies were swallowed like the rest. Some idea 
 of the popularity of the Portuguese Letters may be 
 gained, not merely from the vogue of these 
 successive imitations, but from the fact that 
 M. Eugene Asse, the latest and best of Mariana's 
 editors, has described no fewer than sixteen 
 editions of the Letters themselves, issued before 
 the close of the seventeenth century, a list which 
 would seem to be very far indeed from being 
 complete. 
 
 Rousseau was the first to start the idea that the 
 Portuguese Letters were written by a man. He 
 went upon no external evidence, but on subtle 
 and in truth very fanciful arguments regarding 
 the point of view taken by the writer. No one 
 else has seriously questioned their authenticity, 
 until quite recently, when M. Beauvois, a Bur- 
 gundian antiquary, has endeavoured to destroy 
 our faith in the existence of the Portuguese Nun. 
 This gentleman is an impassioned admirer of the 
 exploits of the Marquis of Chamilly, and it is not 
 difficult to perceive that his wish to discredit the 
 " Letters " is due to his desire to whitewash the 
 character of his hero, blackened for the present, 
 at all events to modern eyes, by the cruel abandon- 
 ment of this poor religious lady in the Beja con- 
 vent. This critic goes to the opposite extreme, 
 and allows himself to speak of Mariana's letters
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 89 
 
 as " the obsessions of a Maenad." Many of M. 
 Beauvois's acute objections are met by the re- 
 arrangement of the letters which I have suggested 
 above, and particularly by the fact that the fourth 
 of them should certainly stand the first. After a 
 careful examination of his criticism, and particu- 
 larly in the light of the important historical dates, 
 with regard to Chamilly's record in the Portuguese 
 war, which M. Beauvois has himself brought for- 
 ward, I for one am more persuaded than ever 
 that the outline of the story as we know it is true, 
 and that the letters, or something Portuguese 
 which was very like them, were actually sent 
 after the rascally belldtre when he made his way 
 back to France in 1668. Bare as the letters are, 
 there are nevertheless little touches of detail here 
 and there, little inexplicable allusions, such as a 
 real correspondence would possess, and such as 
 no forger would introduce. It would be tedious 
 in this place to dwell minutely on this sort of 
 evidence, but a single example may be given. In 
 one passage the nun writes, " Ah ! how I envy 
 the happiness of Emmanuel and of Francisque. 
 Why am not I always with you, as they are ! " 
 Nothing more is said of these beings. We are 
 left to conjecture whether they were fellow- 
 officers, or servants, or dogs, or even perhaps 
 parrots. A forger would scarcely leave two 
 meaningless names in the body of his text with- 
 out some indication of his idea. The sincerity, 
 moreover, of the style and sentiments is extra- 
 ordinary, and is observed to great advantage by 
 comparing the various continuations and replies
 
 90 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 with the five original letters. To suppose the first 
 little volume of 1669 to be a deliberate fiction 
 would be to land us in the more serious difficulty 
 of discovering in its inventor a great imaginative 
 creator of emotional romance. The hero-worship 
 of M. Beauvois has not convinced me that 
 Mariana never gazed across the olives and oranges 
 to Mertola, nor watched the cavalcade of her false 
 dragoon file down into the gorge of the Guadiana. 
 The French critics have not taken any interest 
 in the influence of the Portuguese Letters in Eng- 
 land. Yet translations and imitations of these 
 letters became very numerous in this country 
 before the close of the seventeenth century. The 
 earliest version which I have been able to trace 
 is that of Sir Roger L'Estrange, published as a 
 very tiny little book of Five Love Letters from a 
 Nun to a Cavalier, in 1678 (December 28, 1677). 
 In a short preface to the reader, the translator 
 says, "These five letters are here at your service. 
 You will find in them the lively image of an 
 extravagant and an unfortunate passion, and that 
 a woman may be flesh and blood in a cloister 
 as well as in a palace." This translation of 
 L'Estrange's went on being reprinted for fifty 
 years, and was attended on its successful course 
 from one toilet to another by a variety of imita- 
 tions, the liveliest of which is attributed to the 
 pen of the vivacious Major Richardson Pack. 
 From the first the Portuguese Letters were not 
 presented to the women of England as literature, 
 but as models of sincere letter-writing, and hence 
 they escaped mention in our solemn handbooks of
 
 A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 91 
 
 bibliography and literary history. But their in- 
 fluence was extraordinary, and by the time that 
 the Spectator had come into existence, and Richard 
 Steele was sitting over his wine, "the slave of 
 beauty," writing out of his heart to Mary Scurlock, 
 the men and women of England had learned the 
 lesson which the nun of Beja was betrayed to 
 teach them, and they could say in plain, straight- 
 forward sentences exactly what it was in their 
 souls to express to one another, without any sort 
 of trope or rhetorical ornament. 
 
 1888.
 
 JULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 
 
 THOSE who can endure an excursion into the 
 backwaters of literature may contemplate, neither 
 too seriously nor too lengthily, the career and 
 writings of Barbey d'Aurevilly. Very obscure in 
 his youth, he lived so long, and preserved his force 
 so consistently, that in his old age he became, if 
 not quite a celebrity, most certainly a notoriety. 
 At the close of his life he reached his eighty-first 
 year he was still to be seen walking the streets or 
 haunting the churches of Paris, his long, sparse 
 hair flying in the wind, his fierce eyes flashing 
 about him, his hat poised on the side of his head, 
 his famous lace frills turned back over the cuff of 
 his coat, his attitude always erect, defiant, and for- 
 midable. Down to the winter of 1 888 he preserved 
 the dandy dress of 1840, and never appeared but 
 as M. de Pontmartin has described him, in black 
 satin trousers, which fitted his old legs like a glove, 
 in a flapping, brigand wideawake, in a velvet waist- 
 coat, which revealed diamond studs and a lace 
 cravat, and in a wonderful shirt that covered the 
 most artful pair of stays. In every action, in every 
 glance, he seemed to be defying the natural decay 
 of years, and to be forcing old age to forget him 
 by dint of spirited and ceaseless self-assertion. He 
 
 was himself the prototype of all the Brassards and 
 
 92
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 93 
 
 Misnilgrands of his stories, the dandy of dandies, 
 the mummied and immortal beau. 
 
 His intellectual condition was not unlike his 
 physical one. He was a survival of the most 
 persistent. The last, by far the last, of the Roman- 
 tiques of 1835, Barbey d'Aurevilly lived on into 
 an age wholly given over to other aims and ambi- 
 tions, without changing his own ideals by an iota. 
 He was to the great men who began the revival, 
 to figures like Alfred de Vigny, as Shirley was to 
 the early Elizabethans. He continued the old tra- 
 dition, without resigning a single habit or prejudice, 
 until his mind was not a whit less old-fashioned 
 than his garments. Victor Hugo, who hated him, 
 is said to have dedicated an unpublished verse to 
 his portrait : 
 
 " Barbey d'Aurevilly, formidable imbe'cile," 
 
 But imbe'cile was not at all the right word. He 
 was absurd ; he was outrageous ; he had, per- 
 haps, by dint of resisting the decrepitude of his 
 natural powers, become a little crazy. But im- 
 becility is the very last word to use of this mutin- 
 ous, dogged, implacable old pirate of letters; 
 
 Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly was born near Valognes 
 
 (the " V "which figures in several of his stories) 
 
 on the ist of November 1808. He liked to re- 
 present himself as a scion of the bluest nobility of 
 Normandy, and he communicated to the makers 
 of dictionaries the fact that the name of his direct 
 ancestor is engraved on the tomb of William the 
 Conqueror. But some have said that the names 
 of his father and mother were never known, and
 
 94 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 others (poor d'Aurevilly !) have set him down as 
 the son of a butcher in the village of Saint-Sauveur- 
 le-Vicomte. He was at college with Maurice de 
 Gurin, and quite early, about 1830 apparently, 
 he became personally acquainted with Chateau- 
 briand. His youth seems to be wrapped up in 
 mystery ; according to one of the best informed 
 of his biographers, he vanished in 1831, and was 
 not heard of again until 1851. To these twenty 
 years of alleged disappearance, one or two remark- 
 able books of his are, however, ascribed. It appears 
 that what is perhaps the most characteristic of all 
 his writings, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell, 
 was written as early as 1842 ; and in 1845 a very 
 small edition of it was printed by an admirer of 
 the name of Trebutien, to whose affection d'Aure- 
 villy seems to have owed his very existence. It is 
 strange that so little is distinctly known about a 
 man who, late in life, attracted much curiosity and 
 attention. He was a consummate romancer, and 
 he liked to hint that he was engaged during early 
 life in intrigues of a corsair description. The truth 
 seems to be that he lived, in great obscurity, in the 
 neighbourhood of Caen, probably by the aid of 
 journalism. As early as 1825 he began to publish ; 
 but of all the productions of his youth, the only 
 one which can now be met with is the prose 
 poem of Amatde'e, written, I suppose, about 1835 ; 
 this was published by M. Paul Bourget as a curi- 
 osity immediately after Barbey d'Aurevilly's death. 
 Judged as a story, Amdidee is puerile ; it describes 
 how to a certain poet, called Somegod, who dwelt 
 on a lonely cliff, there came a young man alto-
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 95 
 
 gather wise and stately named Altai, and a frail 
 daughter of passion, who gives her name to the 
 book. These three personages converse in magni- 
 ficent language, and, the visitors presently depart- 
 ing, the volume closes. But an interest attaches 
 to the fact that in Somego'd (Quelque Dteu /) the 
 author was painting a portrait of Maurice de 
 Guerin, while the majestic Altai' is himself. 
 The conception of this book is Ossianic ; but the 
 style is often singularly beautiful, with a mar- 
 moreal splendour founded on a study of Chateau- 
 briand, and, perhaps, of Goethe, and not without 
 relation to that of Gurin himself. 
 
 The earliest surviving production of d'Aurevilly, 
 if we except Amafdee, is L 'Amour Impossible, a 
 novel published with the object of correcting the 
 effects of the poisonous Lelia of George Sand. 
 Already, in this crude book, we see something of 
 the Barbey d'Aurevilly of the future, the Dandy- 
 Paladin, the Catholic Sensualist or Diavolist, the 
 author of the few poor thoughts and the sonorous, 
 paroxysmal, abundant style. I forget whether it 
 is here or in a slightly later novel that, in hastily 
 turning the pages, I detect the sentiment, " Our 
 forefathers were wise to cut the throats of the 
 Huguenots, and very stupid not to burn Luther." 
 The late Master of Balliol is said to have asked a 
 reactionary undergraduate, "What, Sir ! would you 
 burn, would you burn ? " If he had put the question 
 to Barbey d'Aurevilly, the scented hand would have 
 been laid on the cambric bosom, and the answer 
 would have been, " Certainly I should." In the 
 midst of the infidel society and literature of the
 
 96 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Second Empire, d'Aurevilly persisted in the most 
 noisy profession of his entire loyalty to Rome, 
 but his methods of proclaiming his attachment 
 were so violent and outrageous that the Church 
 showed no gratitude to her volunteer defender. 
 This was a source of much bitterness and recrimi- 
 nation, but it is difficult to see how the author of 
 Le Pretre Marie and Une Histoire sans Nom could 
 expect pious Catholics to smile on his very peculiar 
 treatment of ecclesiastical life. 
 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly undertook to continue the 
 work of Chateaubriand, and he gave his full 
 attention to a development of the monarchical 
 neo-catholicism which that great inaugurator had 
 sketched out. He was impressed by the beauty 
 of the Roman ceremonial, and he determined to 
 express with poetic emotion the mystical majesty 
 of the symbol. It must be admitted that, although 
 his work never suggests any knowledge of or sym- 
 pathy with the spiritual part of religion, he has a 
 genuine appreciation of its externals. It would be 
 difficult to point to a more delicate and full im- 
 pression of the solemnity which attends the crepus- 
 cular light of a church at vespers than is given in 
 the opening pages of A un Diner dAthees. In 
 L ' Ensorcele'e, too, we find the author piously follow- 
 ing a chanting procession round a church,and ejacu- 
 lating, " Rien n'est beau comme cet instant solennel 
 des ceremonies catholiques." Almost every one of 
 his novels deals by preference with ecclesiastical 
 subjects, or introduces some powerful figure of a 
 priest. But it is very difficult to believe that his 
 interest in it all is other than histrionic or pheno-
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 97 
 
 menal. He likes the business of a priest, he likes 
 the furniture of a church, but there, in spite of his 
 vehement protestations, his piety seems to a candid 
 reader to have begun and ended. 
 
 For a humble and reverent child of the Catholic 
 Church, it must be confessed that Barbey d'Aure- 
 villy takes strange liberties. The mother would 
 seem to have had little control over the caprices of 
 her extremely unruly son. There is scarcely one 
 of these ultra-catholic novels of his which it is 
 conceivable that a pious family would like to see 
 lying upon its parlour table. The Devil takes a 
 prominent part in many of them, for d'Aurevilly's 
 whim is to see Satanism everywhere, and to con- 
 sider it matter of mirth ; he is like a naughty boy, 
 giggling when a rude man breaks his mother's 
 crockery. He loves to play with dangerous and 
 forbidden notions. In Le Pretre Marie (which, to 
 his lofty indignation, was forbidden to be sold in 
 Catholic shops) the hero is a renegade and inces- 
 tuous priest, who loves his own daughter, and 
 makes a hypocritical confession of error in order 
 that, by that act of perjury, he may save her life, 
 as she is dying of the agony of knowing him to 
 be an atheist. This man, the Abbe Sombreval, is 
 bewitched, is possessed of the Devil, and so is 
 Ryno de Marigny in Une Vieille Maitresse, and Las- 
 thenie de Ferjol in Une Histoire sans Nom. This is 
 one of Barbey d'Aurevilly's favourite tricks, to 
 paint an extraordinary, an abnormal condition of 
 spirit, and to avoid the psychological difficulty by 
 simply attributing it to sorcery. But he is all 
 the time rather amused by the wickedness than 
 
 G
 
 98 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 shocked at it. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime the 
 moral of which is that people of a certain grandeur 
 of temperament can be absolutely wicked with 
 impunity he frankly confesses his partiality for 
 " la plaisanterie lgerement sacrilege," and all the 
 philosophy of d'Aurevilly is revealed in that rash 
 phrase. It is not a matter of a wounded con- 
 science expressing itself with a brutal fervour, but 
 the gusto of conscious wickedness. His mind is 
 intimately akin with that of the Neapolitan lady, 
 whose story he was perhaps the first to tell, who 
 wished that it only were a sin to drink iced 
 sherbet. Barbey d'Aurevilly is a devil who may 
 or may not believe, but who always makes a point 
 of trembling. 
 
 The most interesting feature of Barbey d'Aure- 
 villy's temperament, as revealed in his imaginative 
 work, is, however, his pre-occupation with his own 
 physical life. In his youth, Byron and Alfieri were 
 the objects of his deepest idolatry ; he envied their 
 disdainful splendour of passion ; and he fashioned 
 his dream in poverty and obscurity so as to make 
 himself believe that he was of their race. He was 
 a Disraeli with whom, indeed, he has certain re- 
 lations of style but with none of Disraeli's social 
 advantages, and with a more inconsequent and 
 violent habit of imagination. Unable, from want 
 of wealth and position, to carry his dreams into 
 effect, they became exasperated and intensified, 
 and at an age when the real dandy is settling 
 down into a man of the world, Barbey d'Aurevilly 
 was spreading the wings of his fancy into the 
 infinite azure of imaginary experience. He had
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 99 
 
 convinced himself that he was a Lovelace, a Lauzun, 
 a Brummell, and the philosophy of dandyism filled 
 his thoughts far more than if he had really been 
 able to spend a stormy youth among marchionesses 
 who carried, set in diamonds in a bracelet, the 
 ends of the moustaches of viscounts. In the 
 novels of his maturity and his old age, therefore, 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly loved to introduce magnificent 
 aged dandies, whose fatuity he dwelt upon with 
 ecstasy, and in whom there is no question that he 
 saw reflections of his imaginary self. No better 
 type of this can be found than that Vicomte de 
 Brassard, an elaborate, almost enamoured, portrait 
 of whom fills the earlier pages of what is else a 
 rather dull story, Le Rideau Cramoisi. The very 
 clever, very immoral tale called Le Plus Bel Amour 
 de Don Juan which relates how a superannuated 
 but still incredibly vigorous old beau gives a 
 supper to the beautiful women of quality whom 
 he has known, and recounts to them the most 
 piquant adventure of his life is redolent of this 
 intense delight in the prolongation of enjoyment 
 by sheer refusal to admit the ravages of age. Al- 
 though my space forbids quotation, I cannot resist 
 repeating a passage which illustrates this horrible 
 fear of the loss of youth and the struggle against 
 it, more especially as it is a good example of 
 d'Aurevilly's surcharged and intepid style : 
 
 " II n'y avait pas la de ces jeunesses vert tendre, 
 de ces petites demoiselles qu'execrait Byron, qui 
 sentent la tartelette et qui, par la tournure, ne 
 sont encore que des epluchettes, mais tous ets 
 splendides et savoureux, plantureux automnes,
 
 ioo FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 epanouissements et plenitudes, seins dblouissants 
 battant leur plein majestueux au bord decouvert 
 des corsages, et, sous les camees de 1'epaule nue, 
 des bras de tout galbe, mais surtout des bras 
 puissants, de ces biceps de Sabines qui ont lutte 
 avec les Romains, et qui seraient capables de 
 s'entrelacer, pour 1'arreter, dans les rayons de la 
 roue du char de la vie." 
 
 This obsession of vanishing youth, this intense 
 determination to preserve the semblance and colour 
 of vitality, in spite of the passage of years, is, 
 however, seen to greatest advantage in a very 
 curious book of Barbey d'Aurevilly's, in some 
 aspects, indeed, the most curious which he has left 
 behind him, Du Dandyisme et de Georges BrummelL 
 This is really a work of his early maturity, for it 
 was printed in a small private edition so long ago 
 as 1845. It was not published, however, until 
 1 86 1, when it may be said to have introduced its 
 author to the world of France. Later on he wrote 
 a curious study of the fascination exercised over 
 La Grande Mademoiselle by Lauzun, Un Dandy 
 d'avant les Dandys, and these two are now published 
 in one volume, which forms that section of the 
 immense work of d'Aurevilly which best rewards 
 the curious reader. 
 
 Many writers in England, from Thomas Carlyle 
 in Sartor Resartus to our ingenious young forger 
 of paradoxes, Mr. Max Beerbohm, have dealt 
 upon that semi-feminine passion in fatuity, that 
 sublime attention to costume and deportment, 
 which marks the dandy. The type has been, as 
 d'Aurevilly does not fail to observe, mainly an
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 101 
 
 English one. We point to Beau Nash, to Byron, 
 to Lord Yarmouth, to Sheridan, and, above all, 
 " a ce Dandy royal, S. M. Georges IV. ;" but the 
 star of each of these must pale before that of 
 Brummell. These others, as was said in a different 
 matter, had " other preoccupations," but Brummell 
 was entirely absorbed, as by a solemn mission, by 
 the conduct of his person and his clothes. So far, 
 in the portraiture of such a figure, there is nothing 
 very singular in what the French novelist has skil- 
 fully and nimbly done, but it is his own attitude 
 which is so original. All other writers on the 
 dandies have had their tongues in their cheeks. 
 If they have commended, it is because to be pre- 
 posterous is to be amusing. When we read that 
 " dandyism is the least selfish of all the arts," we 
 smile, for we know that the author's design is 
 to be entertaining. But Barbey d'Aurevilly is 
 doggedly in earnest. He loves the great dandies 
 of the past as other men contemplate with ardour 
 dead poets and dead musicians. He is seriously 
 enamoured of their mode of life. He sees nothing 
 ridiculous, nothing even limited, in their self-con- 
 centration. It reminds him of the tiger and of the 
 condor ; it recalls to his imagination the vast, 
 solitary forces of Nature ; and when he contem- 
 plates Beau Brummell, his eyes fill with tears of 
 nostalgia. So would he have desired to live ; 
 thus, and not otherwise, would he fain have 
 strutted and trampled through that eighteenth 
 century to which he is for ever gazing back with 
 a fond regret. "To dress one's self," he says 
 "should be the main business of life," and with
 
 IO2 
 
 great ingenuity he dwells upon the latent but 
 positive influence which dress has had on men 
 of a nature apparently furthest removed from its 
 trivialities ; upon Pascal, for instance, upon Buffon, 
 upon Wagner. 
 
 It was natural that a writer who delighted in 
 this patrician ideal of conquering man should have 
 a limited conception of life. Women to Barbey 
 d'Aurevilly were of two varieties either nuns or 
 amorous tigresses ; they were sometimes both in 
 one. He had no idea of soft gradations in society: 
 there were the tempestuous marchioness and her 
 intriguing maid on one side ; on the other, 
 emptiness, the sordid hovels of the bourgeoisie. 
 This absence of observation or recognition of life 
 d'Aurevilly shared with the other Romantiques, 
 but in his sinister and contemptuous aristocracy 
 he passed beyond them all. Had he lived to be- 
 come acquainted with the writings of Nietzsche, 
 he would have hailed a brother-spirit, one who 
 loathed democracy and the humanitarian temper 
 as much as he did himself. But there is no 
 philosophy in Barbey d'Aurevilly, nothing but a 
 prejudice fostered and a sentiment indulged. 
 
 In referring to Nicholas Nickleby, a novel which 
 he vainly endeavoured to get through, d'Aurevilly 
 remarks : " I wish to write an essay on Dickens, 
 and at present I have only read one hundred 
 pages of his writings. But I consider that if 
 one hundred pages do not give the talent of a man, 
 they give his spirit, and the spirit of Dickens is 
 odious to me." "The vulgar Dickens," he calmly 
 remarks in Journalistes et Pole'mistes, and we laugh
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 103 
 
 at the idea of sweeping away such a record of 
 genius on the strength of a chapter or two misread 
 in Nicholas Nickleby. But Barbey d'Aurevilly was 
 not Dickens, and it really is not necessary to 
 study closely the vast body of his writings. The 
 same characteristics recur in them all, and the 
 impression may easily be weakened by vain repeti- 
 tion. In particular, a great part of the later life 
 of d'Aurevilly was occupied in writing critical 
 notices and studies for newspapers and reviews. 
 He made this, I suppose, his principal source of 
 income ; and from the moment when, in 1851, he 
 became literary critic to Le Pays to that of his 
 death, nearly forty years later, he was incessantly 
 dogmatising about literature and art. He never 
 became a critical force, he was too violent and, 
 indeed, too empty for that ; but a pen so brilliant 
 as his is always welcome with editors whose design 
 is not to be true, but to be noticeable, and to 
 escape " the obvious." The most cruel of Barbey 
 d'Aurevilly's enemies could not charge his criticism 
 with being obvious. It is intensely contentious 
 and contradictory. It treats all writers and artists 
 on the accepted nursery principle of " Go and see 
 what baby's doing, and tell him not to." This is 
 entertaining for a moment ; and if the shower of 
 abuse is spread broadly enough, some of it must 
 come down on shoulders that deserve it. But the 
 " slashing " review of yester-year is dismal reading, 
 and it cannot be said that the library of reprinted 
 criticism to which d'Aurevilly gave the general 
 title of Les (Euvres et les Hontmes is very enticing. 
 He had a great contempt for Goethe and for
 
 io 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, in whom he saw false priests con- 
 stantly leading the public away from the true 
 principle of literary expression, " le couronnement, 
 la gloire et la force de toute critique, que je 
 cherche en vain." A very ingenious writer, M. 
 Ernest Tissot, has paid Barbey d'Aurevilly the 
 compliment of taking him seriously in this matter, 
 and has written an elaborate study on what his 
 criterium was. But this is, perhaps, to inquire too 
 kindly. I doubt whether he sought with any very 
 sincere expectation of finding ; like the Persian 
 sage, " he swore, but was he sober when he 
 swore ? " Was he not rather intoxicated with his 
 self-encouraged romantic exasperation, and de- 
 termined to be fierce, independent, and uncom- 
 promising at all hazards ? Such are, at all events, 
 the doubts awakened by his indignant diatribes, 
 which once amused Paris so much, and now 
 influence no living creature. Some of his dicta, 
 in their showy way, are forcible. " La critique a 
 pour blason la croix, la balance et la glaive ; " 
 that is a capital phrase on the lips of a reviewer, 
 who makes himself the appointed Catholic censor 
 of worldly letters, and is willing to assume at once 
 the cross, the scales, and the sword. More of the 
 hoof peeps out in this : " La critique, c'est une 
 intrepidite de 1'esprit et du caractere." To a 
 nature like that of d'Aurevilly, the distinction 
 between intrepidity and arrogance is never clearly 
 defined. 
 
 It is, after all, in his novels that Barbey 
 d'Aurevilly displays his talent in its most interest- 
 ing form. His powers developed late ; and per-
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 105 
 
 haps the best constructed of all his tales is Une 
 Histoire sans Norn, which dates from 1882, when he 
 was quite an old man. In this, as in all the rest, 
 a surprising narrative is well, although extremely 
 leisurely, told, but without a trace of psychology. 
 It was impossible for d'Aurevilly to close his stories 
 ^flVctively ; in almost every case, the futility and 
 extravagance of the last few pages destroys the 
 effect of the rest. Like the Fat Boy, he wanted to 
 make your flesh creep, to leave you cataleptic 
 with horror at the end, but he had none of 
 Poe's skill in producing an effect of terror. 
 In Le Rideau Cramoisi (which is considered, I 
 cannot tell why, one of his successes) the heroine 
 dies at an embarrassing moment, without any dis- 
 ease or cause of death being suggested she 
 simply dies. But he is generally much more 
 violent than this ; at the close of A un Diner 
 cFAthe'es, which up to a certain point is ,an 
 extremely fine piece of writing, the angry parents 
 pelt one another with the mummied heart of their 
 only child ; in Le Dessous des Cartes, the key of all 
 the intrigue is discovered at last in the skeleton of 
 an infant buried in a box of mignonette. If it is 
 not by a monstrous fact, it is by an audacious feat 
 of anti-morality, that Barbey d'Aurevilly seeks to 
 harrow and terrify our imaginations. In Le Bon- 
 heur dans le Crime, Hauteclaire Stassin, the woman- 
 fencer, and the Count of Savigny, pursue their 
 wild intrigue and murder the Countess slowly, and 
 then marry each other, and live, with youth far 
 prolonged (d'Aurevilly's special idea of divine 
 blessing), without a pang of remorse, without a
 
 106 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 crumpled rose-leaf in their felicity, like two 
 magnificent plants spreading in the violent 
 moisture of a tropical forest. 
 
 On the whole, it is as a writer, pure and simple, 
 that Barbey d'Aurevilly claims most attention. 
 His style, which Paul de Saint-Victor (quite in his 
 own spirit) described as a mixture of tiger's blood 
 and honey, is full of extravagant beauty. He has 
 a strange intensity, a sensual and fantastic force, 
 in his torrent of intertwined sentences and pre- 
 posterous exclamations. The volume called Les 
 Diaboliques, which contains a group of his most 
 characteristic stories, published in 1874, may be 
 recommended to those who wish, in a single 
 example, compendiously to test the quality of 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly. He has a curious love of 
 punning, not for purposes of humour, but to 
 intensify his style : " Quel oubli et quelle oubliette " 
 (Le Dessous des Cartes), " boudoir fleur de pecher 
 ou de p6ch" (Le Plus bel Amour), "renoncer a 
 1'amour malpropre, mais jamaisa 1'amour propre" 
 (A un Diner d'Athe'es). He has audacious phrases 
 which linger in the memory : " Le Profil, c'est 
 l'6cueil de la beaut6 " (Le Bonheur dans le Crime] ; 
 " Les verres a champagne de France, un lotus qui 
 faisait [les Anglais] oublier les sombres et reli- 
 gieuses habitudes de la patrie ; " " Elle avait 1'air 
 de monter vers Dieu, les mains toutes pleines de 
 bonnes ceuvres " (Memoranda). 
 
 That Barbey d'Aurevilly will take any prominent 
 place in the history of literature is improbable. 
 He was a curiosity, a droll, obstinate survival. 
 We like to think of him in his incredible dress,
 
 BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 107 
 
 strolling through the streets of Paris, with his 
 clouded cane like a sceptre in one hand, and in 
 the other that small mirror by which every few 
 minutes he adjusted the poise of his cravat, or the 
 studious tempest of his hair. He was a wonderful 
 old fop or beau of the forties handed down to the 
 eighties in perfect preservation. As a writer he 
 was fervid, sumptuous, magnificently puerile ; I 
 have been told that he was a superb talker, that 
 his conversation was like his books, a flood of 
 paradoxical, flamboyant rhetoric. He made a 
 gallant stand against old age, he defied it long 
 with success, and when it conquered him at last, 
 he retired to his hole like a rat, and died with 
 stoic fortitude, alone, without a friend to close his 
 eyelids. It was in a wretched lodging high up in 
 a house in the Rue Rousselet, all his finery cast 
 aside, and three melancholy cats the sole mourners 
 by his body, that they found, on an April morn- 
 ing of 1889, the ruins of what had once been 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly. 
 
 1897.
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 AFTER spending the summer, as usual, in his 
 country place at Champrosay, Alphonse Daudet 
 came back no more to winter in those historic 
 rooms in the Rue de Belchasse where all the world 
 had laid at his feet the tribute of its homage and 
 curiosity. His growing infirmities had made the 
 mounting of five flights of stairs finally intolerable 
 to him. He took an apartment on the first floor, 
 No. 41, Rue de l'Universit, which was far better 
 suited to his condition, and here, in excellent spirits, 
 charmed with the change, and eager for the spring 
 to blossom in the surrounding gardens, he was 
 proposing to receive his friends at Christmas. But 
 another guest long since due, but not at that 
 moment expected, knocked first at the door of the 
 still unfinished house. On the evening of Decem- 
 ber 1 6, 1897, while he was chatting gaily at the 
 dinner-table in company with his wife and children, 
 Alphonse Daudet uttered a cry and fell back in his 
 chair. His sons flew for a doctor, but in vain ; 
 the end had come the terrible spectre so long 
 waited, so mysteriously dreaded for its attendant 
 horrors of pain and intolerable decay, had appeared 
 alone, and in the guise of a beneficent angel. The 
 last page of Ma Douleur, when it comes into our 
 hands, will be the record, by another voice than 
 
 108
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 109 
 
 Daudet's, of a death as peaceful and as benign in 
 all its circumstances as death can be. 
 
 I 
 
 It is not possible to discuss the character of 
 Alphonse Daudet without some consideration of 
 his personal conditions. In every page of his 
 brilliant, variegated, emotional books, ever trem- 
 bling into tears or flashing into laughter, the writer 
 is present to the mind of the instructed reader. 
 Few men have been born with a keener appetite 
 for life or an aptitude for more intense enjoyment. 
 Daudet was of the tribe of those who, as Keats 
 says, " burst joy's grape against their palate fine." 
 It is highly possible that, with this temperament 
 and a southern habit of life, advancing years might 
 have tended to exaggerate in him the tumult of the 
 senses ; he might have become a little gross, a 
 little noisy. But fortune willed it otherwise, and 
 this exquisite hedonist, so amorous of life and 
 youth, was refined and etherialised by a mysterious 
 and wasting anguish. It was about the close of 
 1 88 1 that, while engaged in writing Sapho, 
 Daudet became conscious of sudden thrills of 
 agonising pain in his limbs, which attacked him 
 unexpectedly, and lacerated every part of his frame 
 in turn. From this time forth, he was never free 
 from the terror of the pang, and he once used 
 a phrase regarding it, which awakens a vision of 
 Prometheus stretched on Caucasus. " La souf- 
 france, chez moi," he said, " c'est un oiseau qui se 
 pose partout, tantot ici, tantot la."
 
 no FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 It will be remembered that when Daudet pub- 
 lished L' vange'liste in 1883, he dedicated it to 
 Charcot. It was that great master of diagnosis 
 who detected in what the family physician had 
 supposed to be neuralgia the first symptoms of 
 that malady of the spinal cord to which the 
 novelist now slowly succumbed. The ravages of 
 this terrible disease, while they gradually affected 
 more and more completely his powers of loco- 
 motion, spared all the functions of the head. Since 
 the completion of Sapho, it is true, there has 
 been apparent a flagging in Daudet's constructive 
 power ; but this need not be attributed to disease. 
 In agility of conversation, in refinement of style, 
 in alertness and lucidity of mind, Daudet showed 
 to the last hour no observable decline. His cour- 
 age, on the other hand, his heroic resignation and 
 patience were qualities that raised him to a sort of 
 moral sublimity. They would have done credit to 
 the most placid of northerners, but as the orna- 
 ment of a Provencal in early middle life, the blood 
 in whose veins was quicksilver, they were exquisite 
 and astonishing. There are not many finer pictures 
 in the cabinet of modern literary history than that 
 of Alphonse Daudet waiting to be racked with 
 anguish from moment to moment, a shawl wrapped 
 round his poor knees, lifting the ivory lines of his 
 face with rapture to the beauty of a flower, or 
 pouring from his delicate lips a flood of wit and 
 tenderness and enthusiasm. It carries the thought 
 back to Scarron, who " souffrit mille fois la mort 
 avant que de perdre la vie ; " and the modern 
 instance, while no less brave, is of a rarer beauty.
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET in 
 
 These physical considerations are so important, 
 they form so essential a part of our conception of 
 Daudet and of Daudet's conception of literature, 
 that they cannot be passed over, even in a brief 
 outline of his place in the world of writers. He 
 was not one of those who shrink from being contem- 
 plated. His work was not objective as regarded 
 his own person, it was intensely one had almost 
 said it was exclusively subjective. Large portions 
 of his fiction are nothing more nor less than 
 selected autobiography, and he had no scruple in 
 letting this be perceived. He took in later life to 
 writing prefaces to his old novels, explaining the 
 conditions in which they were composed. He 
 published Trenle Ans de Paris in 1882 ; what 
 it was not quite convenient that he should nar- 
 rate himself was confessed by M. Ernest Daudet, 
 in Mon Frere et Mot. The early writings of 
 Alphonse Daudet, up to Fromont Jeune et Risler 
 Aine at least, resolve themselves, it is plain, into 
 autobiography. His only long romance of the 
 early period, Le Petit Chose, begins with the 
 sentence "Je suis n le 13 Mai 18 , dans une 
 ville du Languedoc." So speaks the hero, and 
 presently, we calculate from facts recorded, that 
 1 8 stands for 1840. Well, Alphonse Daudet 
 was born at Nimes on May 31, 1840. This 
 changing of 3 1 into 1 3 is very characteristic ; an 
 analogous alteration is often the only one which 
 the author makes in turning reality into a novel. 
 
 The drawback of such a practice is that in 
 reading the charming works of Alphonse Daudet's 
 first thirty-five years, we are divided in allegiance
 
 ii2 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 between the artist and the man. This is the 
 danger of the autobiographical method when 
 carried to so great an extreme, and confessed so 
 openly. The poor little hero of Petit Chose flying 
 from his tormentors, comes up to Paris in a pair of 
 india-rubber goloshes, having no shoes, and the 
 author makes very happy and pathetic use of this 
 little incident. I remember, however, being much 
 annoyed (I hardly know why) by discovering, as 
 I read Mon Frere et Moi, that Alphonse really 
 did come up to Paris thus, in goloshes, but with- 
 out shoes. By some perversity of temper, I felt 
 vexed that a real person should have plagiarised 
 from the invented history of Petit Chose, and 
 to this day I think it would have been better if this 
 piece of personal history had not been unveiled by 
 M. Ernest Daudet. But as a family the Daudets 
 are unsurpassed in the active way in which they 
 take their musical-box to pieces, the result being 
 that we scarcely know, at last, whether the music 
 was the primary object, or was merely secondary 
 to the mechanical ingenuity. This is a doubt 
 which never enhances our pleasure in the fine 
 arts. 
 
 The self-consciousness which coloured all the 
 manifestations of the mind of Alphonse Daudet 
 had much to do with his pathos, his really very 
 remarkable command over our tears. There is no 
 recent French writer with whom we weep so easily, 
 and the reason, without doubt, is to be found in 
 his own aptitude for weeping. If his nature were 
 harder, if he were not so sorry for himself, we 
 should not be so sorry for his creations. The
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 113 
 
 intense and sincere sensibility of Daudet disarms 
 the nerves ; there is no resisting his pathos. When 
 he chooses to melt his audience he can scarcely 
 be heard for their sobbing. I am bound to say 
 that I think he sometimes carries this sensibility to 
 an illegitimate extreme ; it makes, for instance, a 
 great part of Jack too painful for endurance. 
 In this otherwise admirable book the author 
 becomes like the too emotional attorney, Baines 
 Carew, in the Bab Ballads; he seems to " lie 
 flat upon the floor, convulsed with sympathetic 
 sob," until the reader, bent on pleasure, " toddles 
 off next door," and gives the case to M. de 
 Maupassant or M. Bourget. 
 
 Yet this pathetic sensibility,if occasionally pushed 
 to excess, has been one of the most vivid of the 
 qualities which have endeared Alphonse Daudet 
 to thousands of readers. He has a sense of the 
 hysterical sadness of life, the melancholy which 
 arises in the breast without cause at some common- 
 place conjunction of incidents, the terror of vague 
 future ill, the groundless depressions and faint fore- 
 bodings which strike men and women like the 
 vision of a spectre at noon-day. Of these neurotic 
 fallacies Daudet is a master ; he knows how to 
 make us shudder with the pictures of them, as, 
 consummately, in Avec Trots Mille Cent Francs. 
 Pure melodious pathos, produced by the careful 
 balance of elements common to all human frailty, 
 and harmonised by a beautiful balance of style, 
 we discover frequently in the Conies du Lundi, 
 in the Alsatian stories, and everywhere in Jack. 
 To the last, a novel in Alphonse Daudet's hands 
 
 H
 
 ii 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 was apt to be, what he calls one of his great 
 books, " un livre de pitie, de colere et d'ironie," 
 and the irony and anger were commonly founded 
 upon the pity. In particular, Le Petit Chose is 
 all pity : the arrival of the telegram that the boy 
 is afraid to deliver, the extreme lachrymosity of 
 Jacques, the agony of the pion in sound of the keys 
 of M. Viot (a species of educational Mr. Carker), 
 the fate of Mme. Eyssette taking refuge among her 
 stingy provincial relations almost every incident 
 in this very pretty book is founded upon the 
 exercise of slightly exaggerated sensibility. The 
 author's voice trembles as he tells the tale ; when 
 he laughs, as every now and then he does so 
 gaily, we give a sigh of relief, for we were 
 beginning to fear that he would break down 
 altogether. 
 
 II 
 
 From this dangerous facility in telling a tale of 
 tears about himself Alphonse Daudet was delivered 
 by developing a really marvellous talent for ex- 
 patiating on the external and decorative side of 
 life. Out of the wreckage of his experimental 
 writings he has saved for us the Letlres de mon 
 Moulin and the Contes Choisis which contain, 
 with Le Petit Chose, all that needs trouble the 
 general reader, although the amateur of litera- 
 ture examines with interest (and finds entirely 
 Daudesque) those early volumes of verse, Les 
 Amoureuses, of 1857, and La Double Con- 
 version of 1 86 1. But Lettres de mon Moulin 
 is the one youthful book of A. Daudet which the
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 115 
 
 most hurried student of modern French literature 
 cannot afford to overlook. In its own way, and 
 at its best, there is simply nothing that surpasses 
 it. A short story of mediaeval court life better 
 than La Mule du Pape has not been told. It 
 is not possible to point to an idyll of pastoral 
 adventure of the meditative class more classic in 
 Its graceful purity than Les foiles. As a 
 masterpiece of picturesque and ironic study of the 
 life of elderly persons in a village, Les Vieux 
 stands where " Cranford " stands, since sheer per- 
 fection knows neither first nor last. There are 
 Corsican and Algerian sketches in this incompar- 
 able volume ; but those which rise to the memory 
 first, and are most thoroughly characteristic, are 
 surely those which deal with country life and legend 
 in the dreamy heart of Provence. " Dance and 
 Provencal song and sunburnt mirth " that is 
 what we recall when we think of the Lettres de 
 mon Moulin. 
 
 From his ruined mill at Fortvielle, " situated in 
 the valley of the Rhone, in the very heart of 
 Provence, on a hillside clothed with pine-trees and 
 green oaks, the said mill, deserted for more 
 than twenty years and incapable of grinding, as 
 appeareth from the wild vines, mosses, rosemaries, 
 and other parasitic growths which climb to the 
 ends of its sails," from this mill, honourably leased 
 at PampeYigouste, in presence of two witnesses, 
 Francet Mamai, fife-player, and Louiset, called Le 
 Quique, cross-bearer to the White Penitents, 
 Alphonse Daudet writes to his friends, or records 
 a story, as the whim takes him. He recounts
 
 n6 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 legends that illustrate the habits and prejudices of 
 the folks around. He visits the poet Mistral, he 
 accompanies local sportsmen on their walks, he- 
 spends his nights with the customs officers. Some- 
 times, to gain intenser naivete, to get closer still to 
 the heart of things, he borrows the voice of a goat, 
 of a partridge, of a butterfly. And the main object 
 of it all is to render the external impression of this 
 Proven9al life more delicately, more radiantly, 
 more intimately than has ever been done before. 
 
 It is very difficult to analyse the skill with 
 which Daudet contrives to produce this sense 
 of real things seen intensely through the bright- 
 coloured atmosphere of his talent. His economy 
 of words in the best examples of this branch of his 
 work is notable. The curious reader of his little 
 story, "The Beacon of the Bloody Isles," may 
 ask himself how it would be possible to enhance 
 the mysterious dazzlement caused by the emerging 
 of the writer from the dark winding stairs up into 
 the blaze of light exhibited above : 
 
 " En entrant j'etais ebloui. Ces cuivres, ces 
 etains, ces reflecteurs de metal blanc, ces murs de 
 cristal bomb qui tournaient avec des grands cercles 
 bleuatres, tout ce miroitement, tout ce cliquetis 
 de lumieres, me donnait un moment de vertige." 
 
 What could be more masterly than that ? It is 
 said in the fewest possible words, yet so that an 
 impression, in a high degree bewildering and com- 
 plex, is accurately presented to us. Scarcely less 
 marvellous is the interior, in Les Vieux, where, 
 under the miraculous influence of the Life of 
 St. Irenaeus, read aloud by a little pensioner in
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 117 
 
 a blue blouse, not the old gentleman and lady 
 only, but the canaries in their cage, the flies on 
 the pane, and all the other elements of still life 
 are plunged in deepest sleep at noon. And of 
 the fantasia about Valencia oranges in the winter 
 streets of Paris, and of the scene in "The Two 
 Inns," which every one has praised, and of the 
 description of the phantom visitors who come un- 
 invited to supper with M. Majeste, and of the series 
 of idyllic vignettes "en Camargue," what shall be 
 said ? the enumeration of Alphonse Daudet's suc- 
 cesses in this direction becomes a mere catalogue. 
 It is particularly to be observed that with his in- 
 cessant verbal invention, we are conscious of no 
 strain after effect. Daudet is never pretentious, 
 and it requires some concentration of mind, some 
 going backward over the steps of his sentences, to 
 perceive what a magic of continual buoyancy it is 
 that has carried us along with so swift a precision. 
 When Alphonse Daudet began to write in Paris, 
 a new set of critical ideas and creative aspirations 
 were setting the young men in motion. In poetry, 
 the example of Baudelaire in noting impressions, 
 and in widening the artistic repertory, was having 
 an electrical influence, while Daudet and Zola, 
 in conjunction with those elder brethren of theirs, 
 Flaubert and the Goncourts, were endeavouring 
 to make of the practice of novel-writing some- 
 thing more solid, brilliant, and exact than had 
 been attempted before. This is no place to touch 
 on what will eventually occupy the historian of 
 literature,' Alphonse Daudet's place in the ranks of 
 the naturalists. But it is important to note that he
 
 n8 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 possessed one quality denied to his distinguished 
 friends, denied even to Flaubert, namely, his grace- 
 ful rapidity. As M. Jules Claretie said of him the 
 other day, he was " un re"aliste ai!6," and he was 
 preserved from the dulness and pedestrian jog-trot 
 of prosy naturalism by this winged lightness of his, 
 this agility in sensation, and illuminating prompti- 
 tude in expression. His hand was always light, 
 among the tribe of those who never knew when 
 to stop. Daudet could not fall into the error of 
 Zola in his "symphonies of odours," nor destroy 
 the vitality of a study like Che'rie, as Edmond de 
 Goncourt did, by the pedantic superfetation of 
 documentary evidence. He was a creature of the 
 sun and wind, like the cicala that the Greek poets 
 sung of, intoxicated with a dew-drop, and flinging 
 itself impetuously into the air, while it struck 
 melody from its wings with its own flying feet. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thus palpitating with observation, thus, as he 
 himself said, " hypnotist par la r6alite," filled to the 
 brim of his quivering nature by the twin sources 
 of pictorial and of moral sensitiveness, seeing and 
 feeling with almost abnormal intensity, his sails 
 puffed out with the pride of life and the glory 
 of visual sensation, Daudet prepared himself by 
 a myriad experiments for the true business of his 
 career. After a somewhat lengthy and arduous 
 apprenticeship as an observer of nature and of 
 himself, armed with those little green books of 
 notes, those cahiers of which we have heard
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 119 
 
 so much, he set out to be a great historian 
 of French manners in the second half of the 
 nineteenth century. In 1874 he made a notable 
 sensation with Fromont Jeune et Risler Ame, and, 
 almost simultaneously with Jack. But these were 
 immediately excelled by Le Nabab (1877), a tren- 
 chant satire of the Second Empire and the Third 
 Republic. Then followed, in a very different key, 
 that extremely delicate study of the dynastic idea 
 in bankruptcy, which he called Les Rois en Exil 
 (1879). Daudet had built up an edifice of fiction 
 about his old patron, the Due de Morny, in Le 
 Nabab; he returned to politics in Nunta Roumestan 
 (1881), and crystallised his invention round the 
 legend of Gambetta. This book, in my judgment, 
 marked the apogee of Alphonse Daudet's genius; 
 never again, so it seems to me, did he write a 
 novel quite so large, quite so masterly in all its 
 parts, as Numa Roumeslan. But L' Evangeliste 
 (1883), a satiric picture of fanatical Protestantism, 
 had brilliant parts, and a great simplicity of action ; 
 while in Sapho (1884), which M. Jules Lemaitre 
 has called " simplement la ' Manon Lescaut ' de 
 ce siecle," Daudet produced an elaborate study of 
 that obsession of the feminine, which is so dear to 
 our Gallic neighbours. The consensus of French 
 criticism, I think, puts Sapho, where I venture to 
 put Numa Roumestan, at the head of Daudet's 
 novels. After this came L'Immortel (1888), Rose 
 et Ninette (1892), even later stories, never quite 
 without charm, but steadily declining in imagina- 
 tion and vitality, so that the books on which 
 Daudet bases his claim to be regarded as a great
 
 120 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 novelist are seven, and they range from Jack to 
 Sapho, culminating as I most obstinately hold, in 
 Numa Roumestan. 
 
 In looking over these seven extraordinary books, 
 which we read in succession at their first appear- 
 ance with an enthusiasm that may have carried 
 the critical faculty away, we are conscious of the 
 brilliant ; and solid effect which they still produce. 
 They stand midway between the rigidly naturalistic 
 and the consciously psychological sets of novels 
 which France has seen flourish during the last 
 twenty-five years, and on the whole, perhaps, they 
 are standing the test of time better than either. 
 The moment we were fairly launched, so long 
 ago, upon the narrative of Fromont Jeune et Risler 
 Ame, as soon as we became acquainted with " the 
 blooming and sonorous Delobelle," as Mr. Henry 
 James so happily calls him, when, again, a very 
 little later, we were introduced to all the flatulent 
 humbugs of the Maison Moronval in Jack, we 
 acknowledged that here was come at last a great 
 French novelist, with whom the Anglo-Saxon reader 
 could commune with unspeakable delight. This 
 meridional, who cared so little for England, who 
 could never read an English sentence, seemed from 
 a certain limited point of view to run in the very 
 channel of British fiction. He has been called 
 (alas ! poor man, it was a thorn in his flesh !) the 
 French Dickens, but he has aspects in which he 
 seems Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope as well, 
 even Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. 
 A whole repertory of such parallelisms might be 
 drawn out, if we examined Daudet not wisely but 
 too well.
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 121 
 
 The truth seems to be that, with all his violent 
 southern colour and temperament, his pathos, his 
 humour, his preference for the extravagant and 
 superficial parts of character and conduct had a 
 greater resemblance to the English than to the 
 French tradition of invented narrative. This is 
 true of works written before Alphonse Daudet 
 could possibly have touched an English story. 
 We talk of his affinity to Dickens, but that relation 
 is much more strongly marked in Le Petit Chose 
 than in any of Daudet's mature works. In the 
 very beginning of that story, the formidable rage 
 of M. Eyssette, and the episode of Annou who 
 marries in desperation because she has lost her 
 " place," are more like pure Dickens than any- 
 thing in Fromont Jeune. It is quite certain, from 
 what he has protested over and over again (and 
 did he not fight poor M. Albert Delpit that he 
 might seal his protest in blood ?), that Daudet's 
 knowledge of all English literature, the works of 
 Dickens included, was extremely exiguous. You 
 could probably have drawn it through the eye of a 
 needle without crushing it. It remains true, none 
 the less, that in his idea of how to entertain by a 
 novel, how to write a thrilling story of pity, anger, 
 and irony, he came much nearer than any other 
 Frenchman to the English standpoint. When we 
 add to this the really extraordinary chastity and 
 delicacy of his language, the tact with which, even 
 in a book like Sapho, he avoids all occasion of 
 offence, and has therefore been a well of pure and 
 safe delight to thousands of young Englishwomen, 
 it is not to be wondered at that the non-critical
 
 122 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 class of British readers look upon Alphonse 
 Daudet as the most sympathetic of Continental 
 novelists. He is certainly the one who offers 
 them the smallest chance of springes and pitfalls 
 along their innocent pathway. 
 
 In his great novels, the art of Daudet is seen in 
 his arrangement and adaptation of things that he 
 has experienced, not in his invention. He was 
 never happy when he detached himself from the 
 thing absolutely observed and noted. For most 
 readers, I suppose, the later chapters of Le Petit 
 Chose are ruined by the absurd episode of Irma 
 Borel, the Creole, a figure laboriously invented a la 
 Paul de Kock, with no faint knowledge of any 
 actual prototype. It is interesting to compare 
 this failure with the solid success of the portrait 
 of Sapho fifteen years later, when Daudet had 
 made himself acquainted with this type of woman, 
 and had noted her characteristics with his mature 
 clairvoyance. Even in his more purely fantastic 
 creations, surely, the difference between what 
 Daudet has seen and has not seen is instantly felt. 
 What a distinction there is between Tartarin in 
 Tarascon, in Algeria, on the Righi where Daudet 
 had accompanied him and Tartarin in the South 
 Seas, where his creator had to trust to books and 
 fancy ! I am inclined to push this so far as even 
 to question the value of Wood's Town, a story 
 which many admirers of Daudet have signalled for 
 special eulogy. This is a tale of a peninsula 
 somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, where a tropic 
 city is built, at first with success, but only to be 
 presently overwhelmed by the onset of the virgin
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 123 
 
 forest, which defies all the exertions of the inhabi- 
 tants ; lianas are flung from roof to roof, the 
 municipal buildings are roped to one another by 
 chains of prickly-pear, yuccas pierce the floors 
 with their spines, and fig-trees rend the walls 
 apart ; at last the population has to take flight in 
 ships, the masts of which are already like forest- 
 trees, so laden are they with parasitic vegetation. 
 The whole forms a fine piece of melodramatic 
 extravagance, but one feels what an infinitely 
 truer, and, therefore, infinitely more vivid picture 
 of such a scene Mr. Cable could have written in 
 the days when he was still interested in The 
 Grandissimes and Mme. Delphine. 
 
 IV 
 
 In all the creations of Daudet, as we have said, 
 the fountain of tears lies very close to the surface. 
 There is, however, one eminent exception, and it is 
 possible that this, in its sunny gaiety, its unruffled 
 high spirits, may eventually outlast the remainder. 
 All his life through, Daudet was fascinated by the 
 mirthful side of southern exaggeration. He set 
 himself to invent a figure which should unite all 
 the qualities of the meridional, a being in whom 
 the hallucination of adventurous experiences should 
 be carried to its drollest excess. The result was 
 pure frolic : the Prodigious Feats of Tartarin de 
 Tarascon (1872). Tartarin the boaster, the 
 mighty hunter before the Lord, " le roi des 
 hassceurs de casquettes," has bragged so long 
 and so loudly that even Tarascon demands con-
 
 i2 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 firmation. And so he sets forth, and at Algiers he 
 shoots a lion an old, tame, blind lion that has 
 been taught to hold a platter in its mouth and 
 beg at the doors of mosques. He returns to 
 Tarascon^still boasting, and bringing with him a 
 mangy camel, "which has seen me shoot all my 
 lions." He reposes again on the confidence of 
 Tarascon. Then in 1885, Tartarin sets forth 
 anew, this time to climb the Alps, being President 
 of the Tarascon Alpine Club, and once more forced 
 to prove his prowess. Glorious are his incred- 
 ible ascents and accidental adventures. After 
 a thousand farcical drolleries, gulled and gulling, 
 back he comes to Tarascon, with its blinding dust 
 and its blinding sunlight, to the country where it 
 is too bright and too hot to attempt to tell the 
 truth. Still later, Daudet made an effort to carry 
 a colony from Tarascon to the shores of the Pacific 
 Ocean ; but this time he was less vivacious and 
 more cynical. For sheer fun and merriment, the 
 two earlier books about Tartarin remain, however, 
 unexcelled. There is nothing else like them in 
 recent French literature, and those who object to 
 Daudet's other stories here confess themselves 
 disarmed. Tarascon itself, the little dry town on 
 the Rhone, meanwhile accentuates the joke and 
 adds to it by an increasing exasperation against 
 the great man of letters who has made its tragi- 
 comical exaltations so ridiculous and famous. I 
 have but recently made the personal observation 
 that it is impossible to purchase the works of 
 Daudet in the book-shops of the still-indignant 
 Tarascon,
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 125 
 
 Two years before his death M. Alphonse Daudet 
 paid his first and only visit to London, accom- 
 panied by his entire family by his whole smala, 
 as he said, like an Arab sheikh. Those who were 
 privileged to meet him then for the first time 
 were astonished at the inconsistences of his 
 physical condition. To see Daudet struggling 
 with infinite distress up a low flight of stairs was 
 to witness what seemed the last caducity of a 
 worn-out frame. But his lower limbs only were 
 paralysed ; and once seated at table, and a little 
 rested after the tortures of locomotion, a sort of 
 youth reblossomed in him. Under the wild locks 
 of hair, still thick though striped with grey, the 
 eyes preserved their vivacity large and liquid 
 eyes, intermittently concentrated in the effort to 
 see distinctly, now floating in a dream, now 
 focussed (as it were) in an act of curiosity. The 
 entire physical and phenomenal aspect of Alphonse 
 Daudet in these late years presented these contra- 
 dictions. He would sit silent and almost motion- 
 less ; suddenly his head, arms, and chest would 
 be vibrated with electrical movements, the long 
 white fingers would twitch in his beard, and then 
 from the lips a tide of speech would pour a 
 flood of coloured words. On the occasion when 
 I met him at dinner, I recollect that at dessert, 
 after a long silence, he was suddenly moved to 
 describe, quite briefly, the melon-harvest at Nimes 
 when he was a boy. It was an instance, no doubt, 
 of the habitual magic of his style, sensuous and
 
 126 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 pictorial at its best ; in a moment we saw before 
 us the masses of golden-yellow and crimson and 
 sea-green fruit in the little white market-place, 
 with the incomparable light of a Proven9al morn- 
 ing bathing it all in crystal. Every word seemed 
 the freshest and the most inevitable that a man 
 could possibly use in painting such a scene, and 
 there was not a superfluous epithet. 
 
 This little apologue about the melons took us 
 back to the Daudet with whom we first made ac- 
 quaintance, the magician of the Lettres de mon Moulin. 
 That aged figure, trembling with the inroads of 
 paralysis, became in a flash our charming friend, 
 Petit Chose, sobbing under the boughs of the 
 pomegranate for a blood-red flower to remind 
 him of his childish joys. Those loose wisps of 
 hair had been dark clusters of firm curls around 
 the brows of the poet of Les Amoureuses. It was 
 pleasant for one fated to see this beloved writer 
 only in the period of his decay to feel thus that 
 the emblems of youth were still about him. The 
 spirit had not surrendered to the sad physical 
 decline, and so, for all its distressing obviousness, 
 the latter did not produce an overpowering 
 sensation of melancholy. It emphasised the 
 impression one had formed in reading his books : 
 with Daudet all the ideas were concrete and 
 positive. He had no thought, properly speaking, 
 but only a ceaseless flow of violent and pictorial 
 observations, as intense as they were volatile. 
 These had to be noted down in haste as they 
 arrived, or else a fresh sensation would come and 
 banish them for ever. He was an impressionist
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 127 
 
 painter, the colours on whose palette were words of 
 an indescribable abundance, variety, and exactitude. 
 
 For some years, it is hardly to be questioned 
 that Alphonse Daudet was the leading novelist of 
 the world. From 1877, when he published Le 
 Nabab, to 1881, when he reached the apex of his 
 glory in Numa Roumestan, he had no rival. That 
 was a position which it was impossible that he 
 should retain. 
 
 It is too early to attempt to fix the position 
 which Alphonse Daudet will hold in French 
 literature. In spite of the extraordinary pro- 
 fessional manifestation produced immediately after 
 his death in Paris, it was easy to see that he no 
 longer stood in the affections of unprejudiced 
 readers quite where he did. In 1888 it would 
 have required considerable courage to suggest 
 that Daudet was not in the very first rank of 
 novel-writers ; in 1898, even the special pleading 
 of friendship scarcely urged so much as this. It 
 is inevitable, if we subject Daudet to the only test 
 which suits his very splendid and honourable 
 career, that we should hesitate in placing him 
 with the great creative minds. His beautiful talent 
 is dwarfed when we compare it with Balzac, with 
 Tourgenieff, with Flaubert, even with Maupassant. 
 He is vivacious, brilliant, pathetic, exuberant, but 
 he is not subtle ; his gifts are on the surface. He 
 observes rather than imagines ; he belongs to the 
 fascinating, but too often ephemeral class of 
 writers who manufacture types, and develop what 
 the Elizabethans used to call "humours." And 
 this he does, not by an exercise of fancy, not by a
 
 128 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 penetrating flash of intuition, but as a " realist," 
 as one who depends on little green books of notes, 
 and docketed bundles of pieces justificatives. 
 
 But we need not be ungracious and dwell on 
 these shortcomings in a genius so charming, so 
 intimately designed to please. Whether his figures 
 were invented or noted, they live brilliantly in our 
 memories. Who will lose the impression, so 
 amazingly vivid, left by the " Cabecilla " in the 
 Conies Chotsis, or by Les Femmes d' Artistes, " ce livre 
 si beau, si cruel," as Guy de Maupassant called it ? 
 Who will forget the cunning, timid Jansoulet as he 
 came out of Tunis to seek his fortune in Paris ? 
 Who the turbulent Numa Roumestan, or that 
 barber's block, the handsome Valmajour, with his 
 languishing airs and his tambourine ? Who Queen 
 Fredrique when she discovers that the diamonds 
 of Illyria are paste ? and who Mme. Ebsen in 
 her final interview with Eline ? The love of life, 
 of light, of the surface of all beautiful things, the 
 ornament of all human creations, illuminates the 
 books of Alphonse Daudet. The only thing he hated 
 was the horrible little octopus-woman, the Fanny 
 Legrand or Sidonie Chebe, who has no other object 
 or function than to wreck the lives of weak young 
 men. To her, perhaps, he is cruel ; she was hardly 
 worth his steel. But everything else he loves to 
 contemplate ; even when he laughs at Tarascon 
 he loves it ; and in an age when the cynical and 
 the sinister take so wide a possession of literature, 
 our thanks are eternally due to a man who built 
 up for us a world of hope and light and benignity.
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF ZOLA 
 
 IT is by his huge novels, and principally by those 
 of the Rougon-Macquart series, that Zola is known 
 to the public and to the critics. Nevertheless, he 
 found time during the forty years of his busy 
 literary career to publish about as many small 
 stories, now comprised in four separate volumes. 
 It is natural that his novels should present so very 
 much wider and more attractive a subject for 
 analysis that, so far as I can discover, even in 
 France no critic has hitherto taken the shorter 
 productions separately, and discussed Zola as a 
 maker of contes. Yet there is a very distinct 
 interest in seeing how such a thunderer or 
 bellower on the trumpet can breathe through 
 silver ; and, as a matter of fact, the short stories 
 reveal a Zola considerably dissimilar to the author 
 of Nana and of La Terre a much more optimistic, 
 romantic, and gentle writer. If, moreover, he 
 had nowhere assailed the decencies more severely 
 than he does in these thirty or forty short stories, 
 he would never have been named among the 
 enemies of Mrs. Grundy, and the gates of the 
 Palais Mazarin would long ago have been opened 
 to receive him. It is, indeed, to a lion with his 
 mane en papillotes that I here desire to attract the 
 attention of English readers ; to a man-eating 
 
 129 T
 
 130 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 monster, indeed, but to one who is on his best 
 behaviour and blinking in the warm sunshine of 
 Provence. 
 
 I 
 
 The first public appearance of Zola in any form 
 was made as a writer of a short story. A southern 
 journal, La Provence, published at Aix, brought 
 out in 1859 a little conte entitled La Fee Amoureuse. 
 When this was written, in 1858, the future novelist 
 was a student of eighteen, attending the rhetoric 
 classes at the Lyc6e St. Louis ; when it was 
 printed, life in Paris, far from his delicious South, 
 was beginning to open before him, harsh, vague, 
 with a threat of poverty and failure. La Fee 
 Amoureuse may still be read by the curious in the 
 Contes a Ninon. It is a fantastic little piece, in the 
 taste of the eighteenth-century trifles of Crebillon 
 or Boufflers, written with considerable care in an 
 over-luscious vein a fairy tale about an enchanted 
 bud of sweet marjoram, which expands and 
 reveals the amorous fay, guardian of the loves of 
 Prince Lo'is and the fair Odette. This is a moon- 
 light-coloured piece of unrecognisable Zola, indeed, 
 belonging to the period of his lost essay on " The 
 Blind Milton dictating to his Elder Daughter, 
 while the Younger accompanies him upon the 
 Harp," a piece which many have sighed in vain 
 to see. 
 
 He was twenty when, in 1860, during the course 
 of blackening reams of paper with poems a la 
 Musset, he turned, in the aerial garret, or lantern 
 above the garret of 35 Rue St. Victor, to the
 
 ZOLA 131 
 
 composition of a second story Le Garnet de Danse. 
 This is addressed to Ninon, the ideal lady of all 
 Zola's early writings the fleet and jocund virgin 
 of the South, in whom he romantically personifies 
 the Provence after which his whole soul was 
 thirsting in the desert of Paris. This is an 
 exquisite piece of writing a little too studied, per- 
 haps, too full of opulent and voluptuous adjectives ; 
 written, as we may plainly see, under the influence 
 of Th6ophile Gautier. The story, such as it is, is 
 a conversation between Georgette and the pro- 
 gramme-card of her last night's ball. What 
 interest Le Garnet de Danse possesses it owes to the 
 style, especially that of the opening pages, in 
 which the joyous Provengal life is elegantly de- 
 scribed. The young man, still stumbling in the 
 wrong path, had at least become a writer. 
 
 For the next two years Zola was starving, and 
 vainly striving to be a poet. Another " belvedere," 
 as Paul Alexis calls it, another glazed garret above 
 the garret, received him in the Rue Neuve St. 
 Etienne du Mont. Here the squalor of Paris was 
 around him ; the young idealist from the forests 
 and lagoons of Provence found himself lost in a 
 loud and horrid world of quarrels, oaths, and dirt, 
 of popping beer-bottles and yelling women. A 
 year, at the age of two-and-twenty, spent in this 
 atmosphere of sordid and noisy vice, left its mark 
 for ever on the spirit of the young observer. He 
 lived on bread and coffee, with two sous' worth of 
 apples upon gala days. He had, on one occasion, 
 even to make an Arab of himself, sitting with 
 the bed-wraps draped about him, because he had
 
 132 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 pawned his clothes. All the time, serene and 
 ardent, he was writing modern imitations of 
 Dante's Divina Commedia, epics on the genesis of 
 the world, didactic hymns to Religion, and love- 
 songs by the gross. Towards the close of 1861 
 this happy misery, this wise folly, came to an 
 end ; he obtained a clerkship in the famous 
 publishing house of M. Hachette. 
 
 But after these two years of poverty and hard- 
 ship he began to write a few things which were 
 not in verse. Early in 1862 he again addressed 
 to the visionary Ninon a short story called Le 
 Sang. He confesses himself weary, as Ninon 
 also must be, of the coquettings of the rose and 
 the infidelities of the butterfly. He will tell her 
 a terrible tale of real life. But, in fact, he is 
 absolutely in the clouds of the worst romanticism. 
 Four soldiers, round a camp-fire, suffer agonies of 
 ghostly adventure, in the manner of Hofmann or 
 of Petrus Borel. We seem to have returned to 
 the age of 1830, with its vampires and its ghouls. 
 Simp/ice, which comes next in point of date, is 
 far more characteristic, and here, indeed, we find 
 one talent of the future novelist already developed. 
 Simplice is the son of a worldly king, who despises 
 him for his innocence ; the prince slips away into 
 the primeval forest and lives with dragon-flies and 
 water-lilies. In the personal life given to the forest 
 itself, as well as to its inhabitants, we have some- 
 thing very like the future idealisations in L'Abbe 
 Mount, although the touch is yet timid and the 
 flashes of romantic insight fugitive. Simplice is 
 an exceedingly pretty fairy story, curiously like
 
 ZOLA 133 
 
 what Mrs. Alfred Gatty used to write for senti- 
 mental English girls and boys : it was probably 
 inspired to some extent by George Sand. 
 
 On a somewhat larger scale is Les Voleurs el 
 I'Ane, which belongs to the same period of com- 
 position. It is delightful to find Zola describing 
 his garret as " full of flowers and of light, and so 
 high up that sometimes one hears the angels talk- 
 ing on the roof." His story describes a summer 
 day's adventure on the Seine, an improvised picnic 
 of strangers on a grassy island of elms, a siesta 
 disturbed by the somewhat stagey trick of a fan- 
 tastic coquette. According to his faithful bio- 
 grapher, Paul Alexis, the author, towards the 
 close of 1862, chose another lodging, again a 
 romantic chamber, overlooking this time the whole 
 extent of the cemetery of Montparnasse. In this 
 elegiacal retreat he composed two short stories, 
 Soeur des Pauvres and Celle qui m'aime. Of 
 these, the former was written as a commission 
 for the young Zola's employer, M. Hachette, who 
 wanted a tale appropriate for a children's news- 
 paper which his firm was publishing. After read- 
 ing what his clerk submitted to him, the publisher 
 is said to have remarked, " Vous etes un rSvolteV' 
 and to have returned him the manuscript as 
 "too revolutionary." Soeur des Pauvres is a tire- 
 some fable, and it is difficult to understand why 
 Zola has continued to preserve it among his 
 writings. It belongs to the class of semi-realistic 
 stories which Tolstoi has since then composed 
 with such admirable skill. But Zola is not happy 
 among saintly visitants to little holy girls, nor
 
 134 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 among pieces of gold that turn into bats and rats 
 in the hands of selfish peasants. Why this ano- 
 dyne little religious fable should ever have been 
 considered revolutionary, it is impossible to con- 
 ceive. 
 
 Of a very different order is Celle qui m'aime, 
 a story of real power. Outside a tent, in the 
 suburbs of Paris, a man in a magician's dress 
 stands beating a drum and inviting the passers-by 
 to enter and gaze on the realisation of their 
 dreams, the face of her who loves you. The 
 author is persuaded to go in, and he finds himself 
 in the midst of an assemblage of men and boys, 
 women and girls, who pass up in turn to look 
 through a glass trap in a box. In the description 
 of the various types, as they file by, of the aspect 
 of the interior of the tent, there is the touch of a 
 new hand. The vividness of the study is not 
 maintained ; it passes off into romanesque ex- 
 travagance, but for a few moments the attentive 
 listener, who goes back to these early stories, is 
 conscious that he has heard the genuine accent of 
 the master of Naturalism. 
 
 Months passed, and the young Provencal seemed 
 to be making but little progress in the world. His 
 poems definitely failed to find a publisher, and for 
 a while he seems to have flagged even in the pro- 
 duction of prose. Towards the beginning of 1864, 
 however, he put together the seven stories which I 
 have already mentioned, added to them a short 
 novel entitled Aventures du Grand Stdoine, pre- 
 fixed a fanciful and very prettily turned address 
 A Ninon, and carried off the collection to a new
 
 ZOLA 135 
 
 publisher, M. Hetzel. It was accepted, and issued 
 in October of the same year. Zola's first book 
 appeared under the title of Contes a Ninon. This 
 volume was very well received by the reviewers, 
 but ten years passed before the growing fame of 
 its author carried it beyond its first edition of one 
 thousand copies. 
 
 There is no critical impropriety in consider- 
 ing these early stories, since Zola never allowed 
 them, as he allowed several of his subsequent 
 novels, to pass out of print. Nor, from the point 
 of view of style, is there anything to be ashamed 
 of in them. They are written with an uncertain 
 and an imitative, but always with a careful hand, 
 and some passages of natural description, if a little 
 too precious, are excellently modulated. What is 
 really very curious in the first Contes a Ninon is the 
 optimistic tone, the sentimentality, the luscious 
 idealism. The young man takes a cobweb for his 
 canvas, and paints upon it in rainbow-dew with a 
 peacock's feather. Except, for a brief moment, 
 in Celleq ui m'aime, there is not a phrase that 
 suggests the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart 
 novels, and it is an amusing circumstance that, 
 while Zola has not only been practising, but very 
 sternly and vivaciously preaching, the gospel of 
 Realism, this innocent volume of fairy stories 
 should all the time have been figuring among his 
 works. The humble student who should turn from 
 the master's criticism to find an example in his 
 writings, and who should fall by chance on the 
 Contes a Ninon, would be liable to no small distress 
 of bewilderment.
 
 136 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 II 
 
 Ten years later, in 1874, Zola published a second 
 volume of short stories, entitled Nouveaux Contes a 
 Ninon. His position, his literary character, had in 
 the meantime undergone a profound modification. 
 In 1874 he was no longer unknown to the public 
 or to himself. He had already published four of 
 the Rougon - Macquart novels, embodying the 
 natural and social history of a French family 
 during the Second Empire. He was scandalous 
 and famous, and already bore a great turbulent 
 name in literature and criticism. The Nouveaux 
 Conies a Ninon, composed at intervals during that 
 period of stormy evolution, have the extraordinary 
 interest which attends the incidental work thrown 
 off by a great author during the early and noisy 
 manhood of his talent. After 1864 Zola had 
 written one unsuccessful novel after another, until 
 at last, in Therese Raquin, with its magnificent study 
 of crime chastised by its own hideous after-gust, 
 he produced a really remarkable performance. 
 The scene in which the paralytic mother tries to 
 denounce the domestic murderers was in itself 
 enough to prove that France possessed one 
 novelist the more. 
 
 This was late in 1867, when M. Zola was in his 
 twenty-eighth year. A phrase of Louis Ulbach's, 
 in reviewing The'rese Raquin, which he called " lit- 
 terature putride," is regarded as having started the 
 question of Naturalism, and M. Zola who had not, 
 up to that time, had any notion of founding a 
 school, or even of moving in any definite direc-
 
 ZOLA 137 
 
 tion, was led to adopt the theories which we 
 identify with his name during the angry dispute 
 with Ulbach. In 1865 he had begun to be drawn 
 towards Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and to 
 feel, as he puts it, that in the salons of the Parnas- 
 sians he was growing more and more out of his 
 element " among so many impenitent romantiques." 
 Meanwhile he was for ever feeding the furnaces of 
 journalism, scorched and desiccated by the blaze 
 of public life, by the daily struggle for bread. 
 He was roughly affronting the taste of those who 
 differed from him, with rude hands he was thrust- 
 ing out of his path the timid, the dull, the old- 
 fashioned. The spectacle of these years of Zola's 
 life is not altogether a pleasant one, but it leaves 
 on us the impression of a colossal purpose pursued 
 with force and courage. In 1871 the first of the 
 Rougon-Macquart novels appeared, and the author 
 was fairly launched on his career. He was writ- 
 ing books of large size, in which he was endea- 
 vouring to tell the truth about modern life with 
 absolute veracity, no matter how squalid, or ugly, 
 or venomous that truth might be. 
 
 But during the whole of this tempestuous decade 
 Zola, in his hot battlefield of Paris, heard the 
 voice of Ninon calling to him from the leafy 
 hollows, from behind the hawthorn hedges, of 
 his own dewy Provence the cool Provence of 
 earliest flowery spring. When he caught these 
 accents whistling to his memory from the past, 
 and could no longer resist answering them, he 
 was accustomed to write a little conte, light and 
 innocent, and brief enough to be the note of a
 
 138 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 caged bird from indoors answering its mate in the 
 trees of the garden. This is the real secret of 
 the utterly incongruous tone of the Nouveaux Conies 
 when we compare them with the Cure'e and Made- 
 leine Fe'rat of the same period. It would be utterly 
 to misunderstand the nature of Zola to complain, 
 as Pierre Loti did the other day, that the coarse- 
 ness and cynicism of the naturalistic novel, the 
 tone of a ball at Belleville, could not sincerely 
 co-exist with a love of beauty, or with a nostalgia 
 for youth and country pleasures. In the short 
 stories of the period of which we are speaking, 
 that poet who dies in most middle-aged men 
 lived on for Zola, artificially, in a crystal box 
 carefully addressed " a Ninon la-bas," a box into 
 which, at intervals, the master of the Realists 
 slipped a document of the most refined ideality. 
 
 Of these tiny stories there are twelve of them 
 within one hundred pages not all are quite 
 worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too 
 much in Les Epaules de la Marquise, and M. 
 Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent 
 devote of quality more successfully than Zola did 
 in Le Jeune. But most of them are very 
 charming. Here is Le Grand Michu, a study 
 of gallant, stupid boyhood ; here Les Paradis 
 des Chats, one of the author's rare escapes into 
 humour. In Le Forgeron, with its story of the 
 jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and 
 happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very 
 thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a pro- 
 found criticism of life. Le Petit Village is in- 
 teresting to us here, because, with its pathetic
 
 ZOLA 139 
 
 picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of 
 Zola's studies of war. In other of these stories 
 the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty 
 Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown 
 fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of ren- 
 dezvous under the wings of the larks, of moonlight 
 strolls in the bosquets of a chateau. In every 
 one, without exception, is absent that tone of 
 brutality which we associate with the notion of 
 Zola's genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral 
 sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment. 
 
 The volume of Nouveaux Conies a Ninon closes 
 with a story which is much longer and consider- 
 ably more important than the rest. Les Quatre 
 Journe'es de Jean Gourdon deserves to rank 
 among the very best things to which Zola has 
 signed his name. It is a study of four typical 
 days in the life of a Provencal peasant of the 
 better sort, told by the man himself. In the first 
 of these it is spring : Jean Gourdon is eighteen 
 years of age, and he steals away from the house of 
 his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may 
 meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of 
 the broad Durance. His uncle follows and cap- 
 tures him, but the threatened sermon turns into a 
 benediction, the priestly malediction into an im- 
 passioned song to the blossoming springtide. Babet 
 and Jean receive the old man's blessing on their 
 betrothal. 
 
 Next follows a day in summer, five years later ; 
 Jean, as a soldier in the Italian war, goes through 
 the horrors of a battle and is wounded, but not 
 dangerously, in the shoulder. Just as he marches
 
 i 4 o FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 into action he receives a letter from Uncle Lazare 
 and Babet, full of tender fears and tremors ; he 
 reads it when he recovers consciousness after the 
 battle. Presently he creeps off to help his ex- 
 cellent colonel, and they support one another till 
 both are carried off to hospital. This episode, 
 which has something in common with the Sevas- 
 topol of Tolstoi, is exceedingly ingenious in its 
 observation of the sentiments of a common man 
 under fire. 
 
 The third part of the story occurs fifteen years 
 later. Jean and Babet have now long been mar- 
 ried, and Uncle Lazare, in extreme old age, has 
 given up his cure, and lives with them in their 
 farm by the river. All things have prospered 
 with them save one. They are rich, healthy, 
 devoted to one another, respected by all their 
 neighbours ; but there is a single happiness lack- 
 ing they have no child. And now, in the high 
 autumn splendour when the corn and the grapes 
 are ripe, and the lovely Durance winds like a 
 riband of white satin through the gold and purple 
 of the landscape this gift also is to be theirs. 
 A little son is born to them in the midst of the 
 vintage weather, and the old uncle, to whom life 
 has now no further good thing to offer, drops 
 painlessly from life, shaken down like a blown leaf 
 by his excess of joy, on the evening of the birthday 
 of the child. 
 
 The optimistic tone has hitherto been so con- 
 sistently preserved, that we must almost resent the 
 tragedy of the fourth day. This is eighteen years 
 later, and Jean is now an elderly man. His son
 
 ZOLA 141 
 
 Jacques is in early manhood. In the midst of 
 their felicity, on a winter's night, the Durance 
 rises in spate, and all are swept away. It is 
 impossible, in a brief sketch, to give an impression 
 of the charm and romantic sweetness of this little 
 masterpiece, a veritable hymn to the Ninon of 
 Provence ; but it raises many curious reflections 
 to consider that this exquisitely pathetic pastoral, 
 with all its gracious and tender personages, should 
 have been written by the master of Naturalism, 
 the author of Germinal and of Pot-Bouille. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In 1878, Zola, who had long been wishing for 
 a place whither to escape from the roar of Paris, 
 bought a little property on the right bank of the 
 Seine, between Poissy and Meulan, where he built 
 himself the house which he inhabited to the last, 
 and which he made so famous. Mdan, the village 
 in which this property is placed, is a very quiet 
 hamlet of less than two hundred inhabitants, abso- 
 lutely unillustrious, save that, according to tradition, 
 Charles the Bold was baptized in the font of its 
 parish church. The river lies before it, with its 
 rich meadows, its poplars, its willow groves ; a 
 delicious and somnolent air of peace hangs over 
 it, though so close to Paris. Thither the master's 
 particular friends and disciples soon began to 
 gather : that enthusiastic Boswell, Paul Alexis ; 
 Guy de Maupassant, a stalwart oarsman, in his 
 skiff, from Rouen ; others, whose names were 
 soon to come prominently forward in connection
 
 i 4 2 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 with that naturalistic school of which Zola was the 
 leader. 
 
 It was in 1880 that the little hamlet on the 
 Poissy Road awoke to find itself made famous by 
 the publication of a volume which marks an epoch 
 in French literature, and still more in the history of 
 the short story. Les Soirees de Me'dan was a mani- 
 festo by the naturalists, the most definite and the 
 most defiant which had up to that time been made. 
 It consisted of six short stories, several of which 
 were of remarkable excellence, and all of which 
 awakened an amount of discussion almost unpre- 
 cedented. Zola came first with LAttaque du 
 Moulin, which is rather a short novel than a 
 genuine conte. The next story was Boule de Suif, 
 a veritable masterpiece in a new vein, by an 
 entirely new novelist, a certain M. Guy de Mau- 
 passant, thirty years of age, who had been pre- 
 sented to Zola, with warm recommendations, by 
 Gustave Flaubert. The other contributors were 
 M. Henri Card, who also had as yet published 
 nothing, a man who seems to have greatly im- 
 pressed all his associates, but who has done little 
 or nothing to justify their hopes ; M. Joris Karel 
 Huysmans, older than the rest, and already some- 
 what distinguished for picturesque, malodorous 
 novels ; M. Lon Hennique, a youth from Guade- 
 loupe, who had attracted attention by a very odd 
 and powerful novel, La De'voue'e, the story of an 
 inventor who murders his daughter that he may 
 employ her fortune on perfecting his machine ; 
 and finally, the faithful Paul Alexis, a native, like 
 Zola himself, of Aix in Provence, and full of the
 
 ZOLA 143 
 
 perfervid extravagance of the South. The thread 
 on which the whole book is hung is the supposition 
 that these stories are brought to Mdan to be read 
 of an evening to Zola, and that he leads off by 
 telling a tale of his own. 
 
 Nothing need be said here, however, of the 
 works of those disciples who placed themselves 
 under the flag of Mdan, and little of that story in 
 which, with his accustomed bonhomie of a good 
 giant, Zola accepted their comradeship and con- 
 sented to march with them. The Attack on the 
 Mill is very well known to English readers, who, 
 even when they have not met with it in the origi- 
 nal, have been empowered to estimate its force 
 and truth as a narrative. Whenever Zola writes 
 of war, he writes seriously and well. Like the 
 Julien of his late reminiscences, he has never loved 
 war for its own sake. He has little of the mad 
 and pompous chivalry of the typical Frenchman 
 in his nature. He sees war as the disturber, the 
 annihilator; he recognises in it mainly a destructive, 
 stupid, unintelligible force, set in motion by those 
 in power for the discomfort of ordinary beings, of 
 workers like himself. But in the course of three 
 European wars those of his childhood, of his 
 youth, of his maturity he has come to see 
 beneath the surface, and in La Debacle he almost 
 agrees with our young Jacobin poets of one hun- 
 dred years ago, that Slaughter is God's daughter. 
 
 In this connection, and as a commentary on 
 The Attack on the Mill, I would commend to 
 the earnest attention of readers the three short 
 papers entitled Trots Guerres. Nothing on the
 
 i 4 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 subject has been written more picturesque, nor, in 
 its simple way, more poignant, than this triple chain 
 of reminiscences. Whether Louis and Julien ex- 
 isted under those forms, or whether the episodes 
 which they illustrate are fictitious, matters little or 
 nothing. The brothers are natural enough, de- 
 lightful enough, to belong to the world of fiction, 
 and if their story is, in the historical sense, true, it 
 is one of those rare instances in which fact is better 
 than fancy. The crisis under which the timid 
 Julien, having learned the death of his spirited 
 martial brother, is not broken down, but merely 
 frozen into a cold soldierly passion, and spends 
 the remainder of the campaign he, the poet, the 
 nestler by the fireside, the timid club-man in 
 watching behind hedges for Prussians to shoot or 
 stab, is one of the most extraordinary and most 
 interesting that a novelist has ever tried to describe. 
 And the light that it throws on war as a disturber 
 of the moral nature, as a dynamitic force explod- 
 ing in the midst of an elaborately co-related 
 society, is unsurpassed, even by the studies which 
 Count Lyof Tolstoi has made in a similar direction. 
 It is unsurpassed, because it is essentially without 
 prejudice. It admits the discomfort, the horrible 
 vexation and shame of war, and it tears aside the 
 conventional purple and tinsel of it ; but at the 
 same time it admits, not without a sigh, that even 
 this clumsy artifice may be the only one available 
 for the cleansing of the people.
 
 ZOLA 145 
 
 IV 
 
 In 1883, Zola published a third volume of short 
 stories, under the title of the opening one, Le 
 Capitaine Burle. This collection contains the 
 delicate series of brief semi-autobiographical essays 
 called Aux Champs, little studies of past impression, 
 touched with a charm which is almost kindred to 
 that of Robert Louis Stevenson's memories. With 
 this exception, the volume consists of four short 
 stories, and of a set of little death-bed anecdotes, 
 called Comment on Meurt. This latter is hardly in 
 the writer's best style, and suffers by suggesting the 
 immeasurably finer and deeper studies of the same 
 kind which the genius of Tolstoi has elaborated. 
 Of these little sketches of death, one alone, that 
 of Madame Rousseau, the stationer's wife, is quite 
 of the best class. This is an excellent episode 
 from the sort of Parisian life which Zola under- 
 stands best, the lower middle class, the small and 
 active shopkeeper, who just contrives to be re- 
 spectable and no more. The others seem to be 
 invented rather than observed. 
 
 The four stories which make up the bulk of this 
 book are almost typical examples of Zola's mature 
 style. They are worked out with extreme care, 
 they display in every turn the skill of the practised 
 narrator, they are solid and yet buoyant in style, 
 and the construction of each may be said to be 
 faultless. It is faultless to a fault ; in other words, 
 the error of the author is to be mechanically 
 and inevitably correct. It is difficult to define 
 wherein the over-elaboration shows itself, but in 
 
 K
 
 146 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 every case the close of the story leaves us sceptical 
 and cold. The denouement is too brilliant and con- 
 clusive, the threads are drawn together with too 
 much evidence of preoccupation. The impression 
 is not so much of a true tale told as of an extra- 
 ordinary situation frigidly written up to and 
 accounted for. In each case a certain social 
 condition is described at the beginning, and a 
 totally opposite condition is discovered at the end 
 of the story. We are tempted to believe that the 
 author determined to do this, to turn the whole 
 box of bricks absolutely topsy-turvy. This dis- 
 regard of the soft and supple contours of nature, 
 this rugged air of molten metal, takes away from 
 the pleasure we should otherwise legitimately 
 receive from the exhibition of so much fancy, 
 so much knowledge, so many proofs of obser- 
 vation. 
 
 The story which gives its name to the book, 
 Le Capilaine Burle, is perhaps the best, because 
 it has least of this air of artifice. In a military 
 county town, a captain, who lives with his anxious 
 mother and his little pallid, motherless son, sinks 
 into vicious excesses, and pilfers from the regiment 
 to pay for his vices. It is a great object with the 
 excellent major, who discovers this condition, to 
 save his friend the captain in some way which 
 will prevent an open scandal, and leave the child 
 free for ultimate success in the army. After try- 
 ing every method, and discovering that the moral 
 nature of the captain is altogether too soft and too 
 far sunken to be redeemed, as the inevitable hour 
 of publicity approaches, the major insults his friend
 
 ZOLA 147 
 
 in a caf, so as to give him an opportunity of fight- 
 ing a duel and dying honourably. This is done, 
 and the scandal is evaded, without, however, any 
 good being thereby secured to the family, for the 
 little boy dies of weakness and his grandmother 
 starves. Still, the name of Burle has not been 
 dragged through the mud. 
 
 Zola has rarely displayed the quality of humour, 
 but it is present in the story called La Fete a 
 Coqueville. Coqueville is the name given to a 
 very remote Norman fishing-village, set in a gorge 
 of rocks, and almost inaccessible except from the 
 sea. Here a sturdy population of some hundred 
 and eighty souls, all sprung from one or other of 
 two rival families, live in the condition of a tiny 
 Verona, torn between contending interests. A 
 ship laden with liqueurs is wrecked on the rocks 
 outside, and one precious cask after another comes 
 riding into Coqueville over the breakers. The 
 villagers, to whom brandy itself has hitherto been 
 the rarest of luxuries, spend a glorious week of per- 
 fumed inebriety, sucking splinters that drip with 
 b6ndictine, catching noyau in iron cups, and 
 supping up curacao from the bottom of a boat. 
 Upon this happy shore chartreuse flows like cider, 
 and trappistine is drunk out of a mug. The rarest 
 drinks of the world Chios mastic and Servian 
 sliwowitz, Jamaica rum and arrack, creme de 
 moka and raki drip among the mackerel nets 
 and deluge the seaweed. In the presence of this 
 extraordinary and fantastic bacchanal all the dis- 
 putes of the rival families are forgotten, class 
 prejudices are drowned, and the mayor's rich
 
 148 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 daughter marries the poorest of the fisher-sons 
 of the enemy's camp. It is very amusingly and 
 very picturesquely told, but spoiled a little by 
 Zola's pet sin the overcrowding of details, the 
 theatrical completeness and orchestral big-drum 
 of the final scene. Too many barrels of liqueur 
 come in, the village becomes too universally 
 drunk, the scene at last becomes too Lydian for 
 credence. 
 
 In the two remaining stories of this collection 
 Pour une Nuit d' Amour and L'Inondation 
 the fault of mechanical construction is still 
 more plainly obvious. Each of these narratives 
 begins with a carefully accentuated picture of a 
 serene life : in the first instance, that of a timid 
 lad sequestered in a country town ; in the second, 
 that of a prosperous farmer, surrounded by his 
 family and enjoying all the delights of material 
 and moral success. In each case this serenity is 
 but the prelude to events of the most appalling 
 tragedy a tragedy which does not merely strike 
 or wound, but positively annihilates. The story 
 called L'Inondation, which describes the results 
 of a bore on the Garonne, would be as pathetic 
 as it is enthralling, exciting, and effective, if the 
 destruction were not so absolutely complete, if the 
 persons so carefully enumerated at the opening of 
 the piece were not all of them sacrificed, and, as 
 in the once popular song called "An 'Orrible Tale," 
 each by some different death of peculiar ingenuity. 
 As to Pour une Nuit d 1 Amour, it is not needful 
 to do more than say that it is one of the most 
 repulsive productions ever published by its author,
 
 ZOLA 149 
 
 and a vivid exception to the general innocuous 
 character of his short stories. 
 
 No little interest, to the practical student of 
 literature, attaches to the fact that in L'lnonda- 
 tton Zola is really re-writing, in a more elaborate 
 form, the fourth section of his Jean Gourdon. 
 Here, as there, a farmer who has lived in the 
 greatest prosperity, close to a great river, is 
 stripped of everything of his house, his wealth, 
 and his family by a sudden rising of the waters. 
 It is unusual for an author thus to re-edit a work, 
 or tell the same tale a second time at fuller length, 
 but the sequences of incidents will be found to be 
 closely identical, although the later is by far the 
 larger and the more populous story. It is not 
 uninteresting to the technical student to compare 
 the two pieces, the composition of which was 
 separated by about ten years. 
 
 V 
 
 Finally, in 1884, Zola published a fourth col- 
 lection, named, after the first of the series, Nats 
 Micoulin. This volume contained in all six stories, 
 each of considerable extent. I do not propose 
 to dwell at any length on the contents of this 
 book, partly because they belong to the finished 
 period of naturalism, and seem more like castaway 
 fragments of the Rougon-Macquart epos than like 
 independent creations, but also because they clash 
 with the picture I have sought to draw of an 
 optimistic and romantic Zola returning from time 
 to time to the short story as a shelter from his
 
 150 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 theories. Of these tales, one or two are trifling 
 and passably insipid ; the Parisian sketches called 
 Nantas and Madame Neigon have little to be said 
 in favour of their existence. Here Zola seems 
 desirous to prove to us that he could write as 
 good Octave Feuillet, if he chose, as the author of 
 Monsieur de Cantors himself. In Les Coquillages de 
 M. Chabre, which I confess I read when it first 
 appeared, and have now re-read with amusement, 
 we see the heavy Zola endeavouring to sport as 
 gracefully as M. de Maupassant, and in the same 
 style. The impression of buoyant Atlantic seas 
 and hollow caverns is well rendered in this most 
 unedifying story. Nat's Micoulin, which gives its 
 name to the book, is a disagreeable tale of seduc- 
 tion and revenge in Provence, narrated with the 
 usual ponderous conscientiousness. In each of 
 the last mentioned the background of landscape 
 is so vivid that we half forgive the faults of the 
 narrative. 
 
 The two remaining stories in the book are 
 more remarkable, and one of them, at least, is of 
 positive value. It is curious that in La Mort 
 d' Olivier Be'cailles and Jacques Damour Zola, should 
 in the same volume present versions of the Enoch 
 Arden story, the now familiar episode of the man 
 who is supposed to be dead, and comes back to 
 find his wife re-married. Olivier B6caille is a 
 poor clerk, lately arrived in Paris with his wife ; 
 he is in wretched health, and has always been 
 subject to cataleptic seizures. In one of these he 
 falls into a state of syncope so prolonged that 
 they believe him to be dead, and bury him. He
 
 ZOLA 151 
 
 manages to break out of his coffin in the cemetery, 
 and is picked up fainting by a philanthropic 
 doctor. He has a long illness, at the end of 
 which he cannot discover what has become of his 
 wife. After a long search, he finds that she has 
 married a very excellent young fellow, a neigh- 
 bour ; and in the face of her happiness, Olivier 
 Becaille has not the courage to disturb her. Like 
 Tennyson's "strong, heroic soul," he passes out 
 into the silence and the darkness. 
 
 The exceedingly powerful story called Jacques 
 Damour treats the same idea, but with far greater 
 mastery, and in a less conventional manner. 
 Jacques Damour is a Parisian artisan, who be- 
 comes demoralised during the siege, and joins the 
 Commune. He is captured by the Versailles 
 army, and sentenced to penal servitude in New 
 Caledonia, leaving a wife and a little girl behind 
 him in Paris. After some years, in company with 
 two or three other convicts, he makes an attempt 
 to escape. He, in fact, succeeds in escaping, 
 with one companion, the rest being drowned 
 before they get out of the colony. One of the 
 dead men being mistaken for him, Jacques 
 Damour is reported home deceased. When, after 
 credible adventures, and at the declaration of the 
 amnesty, he returns to Paris, his wife and daughter 
 have disappeared. At length he finds the former 
 married to a prosperous butcher in the Batignolles, 
 and he summons up courage, egged on by a 
 rascally friend, to go to the 'shop in midday and 
 claim his lawful wife. The successive scenes in 
 the shop, and the final one, in which the ruddy
 
 152 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 butcher, sure of his advantage over this squalid 
 and prematurely wasted ex-convict, bids Felicie 
 take her choice, are superb. Zola has done 
 nothing more forcible or life-like. The poor old 
 Damour retires, but he still has a daughter to 
 discover. The finale of the tale is excessively 
 unfitted for the young person, and no serious 
 critic could do otherwise than blame it. But, at 
 the same time, I am hardened enough to admit 
 that I think it very true to life and not a little 
 humorous, which, I hope, is not equivalent to a 
 moral commendation. We may, if we like, wish 
 that Zola had never written Jacques Damour, but 
 nothing can prevent it from being a superbly 
 constructed and supported piece of narrative, 
 marred by unusually few of the mechanical faults 
 of his later work. 
 
 The consideration of the optimistic and some- 
 times even sentimental short stories of Zola helps 
 to reveal to a candid reader the undercurrent of 
 pity which exists even in the most " naturalistic " 
 of his romances. It cannot be too often insisted 
 upon that, although he tried to write books as 
 scientific as anything by Pasteur or Claude Bernard, 
 he simply could not do it. His innate romanticism 
 would break through, and, for all his efforts, it 
 made itself apparent even when he strove with the 
 greatest violence to conceal it. In his contes he 
 does not try to fight against his native idealism, 
 and they are, in consequence, perhaps the most 
 genuinely characteristic productions of his pen 
 which exist. 
 
 1892.
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 
 
 ON the nth of February 1898, carried off by 
 a brief attack of pneumonia, one of the most 
 original of the contemporary writers of France 
 passed away almost unobserved. All his life 
 through, the actions of Ferdinand Fabre were 
 inopportune, and certainly so ambitious an author 
 should not have died in the very central heat of 
 the Zola trial. He was just going to be elected, 
 moreover, into the French Academy. After 
 several misunderstandings and two rebuffs, he 
 was safe at last. He was standing for the chair 
 of Meilhac, and " sur de son affaire." For a very 
 long while the Academy had looked askance at 
 Fabre, in spite of his genius and the purity of his 
 books. His attitude seemed too much like that 
 of an unfrocked priest ; he dealt with the world 
 of religion too intimately for one who stood quite 
 outside. Years ago, Cardinal Perraud is reported 
 to have said, " I may go as far as Loti but as 
 far as Fabre, never ! " Yet every one gave way 
 at last to the gentle charm of the Cevenol novelist. 
 Taine and Renan had been his supporters ; a 
 later generation, MM. HaleVy, Claretie, and Jules 
 Lemaitre in particular, were now his ardent 
 friends. The Cardinals were appeased, and the 
 author of L'Abbe Tigrane was to be an Immortal 
 at last. Ferdinand Fabre would not have been 
 
 153
 
 154 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 himself if he had not chosen that moment for the 
 date of his decease. All his life through he was 
 isolated, a little awkward, not in the central 
 stream ; but for all that his was a talent so 
 marked and so individual that it came scarcely 
 short of genius. Taine said long ago that one 
 man, and one man only, had in these recent years 
 understood the soul of the average French priest, 
 and that one man was Ferdinand Fabre. He 
 cared little for humanity unless it wore a cassock, 
 but, if it did, his study of its peculiarities was 
 absolutely untiring. His books are galleries of 
 the portraits of priests, and he is to French fiction 
 what Zurbaran is to Spanish painting. 
 
 I 
 
 Ferdinand Fabre was born in 1830 at B6darieux, 
 in the Herault, that department which lies between 
 the southern masses of the Cvennes Mountains 
 and the lagoons of the Mediterranean. This is 
 one of the most exquisite districts in France ; just 
 above Bedarieux, the great moors or garrigues 
 begin to rise, and brilliant little rivers, the Orb and 
 its tributaries, wind and dash between woodland 
 and meadow, hurrying to the hot plains and the 
 fiery Gulf of Lyons. But, up there in the Espin- 
 ouze, all is crystal-fresh and dewy-cool, a mild 
 mountain-country positively starred with churches, 
 since if this is one of the poorest it is certainly one 
 of the most pious parts of France. This zone of 
 broken moorland along the north-western edge of 
 the Herault is Fabre's province ; it belongs to him
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 155 
 
 as the Berry belongs to George Sand or Dorset- 
 shire to Mr. Hardy. He is its discoverer, its 
 panegyrist, its satirist. It was as little known to 
 Frenchmen, when he began to write, as Pata- 
 gonia ; and in volume after volume he has made 
 them familiar with its scenery and its population. 
 For most French readers to-day, the Lower 
 Cevennes are what Ferdinand Fabre has chosen to 
 represent them. 
 
 When the boy was born, his father was a suc- 
 cessful local architect, who had taken advantage 
 of a tide of prosperity which, on the revival of the 
 cloth-trade, was sweeping into Bedarieux, to half- 
 rebuild the town. But the elder Fabre was 
 tempted by his success to enter into speculations 
 which were unlucky ; and, in particular, a certain 
 too ambitious high-road (often to be mentioned in 
 his son's novels), between Agde on the sea and 
 Castres on the farther side of the mountains, 
 completed his ruin. In 1842, when the boy was 
 twelve, the family were on the brink of bankruptcy. 
 His uncle, the Abbe Fulcran Fabre, priest of the 
 neighbouring parish of Camplong, offered to take 
 Ferdinand to himself for awhile. In Ma Vocation 
 the novelist has given an enchanting picture of 
 how his uncle fetched him on foot, and led him, 
 without a word, through almond plantations 
 thronged with thrushes and over brawling water- 
 courses, till they reached an open little wood in 
 sight of the moors, where Ferdinand was allowed 
 to feast upon mulberries, while Uncle Fulcran 
 touched, for the first time, on the delicate question 
 whether his little garrulous nephew had or had not
 
 156 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 a call to the priesthood. \ Uncle Fulcran Fabre is 
 a type which recurs in every novel that Ferdinand 
 afterwards wrote. Sometimes, as in Mon Oncle 
 Ce'lestin, he has practically the whole book to him- 
 self ; more often he is a secondary character. 
 But he was a perpetual model to his nephew, and 
 whenever a naif, devoted country priest or an 
 eccentric and holy professor of ecclesiastical his- 
 tory was needed for foreground or background, the 
 memory of Uncle Fulcran was always ready. 
 
 The " vocation " takes a great place in all the 
 psychological struggles of Ferdinand Fabre's 
 heroes. It offers, indeed, the difficulty which 
 must inevitably rise in the breast of every generous 
 and religious youth who feels drawn to adopt the 
 service of the Catholic Church. How is he to 
 know whether this enthusiasm which rises in his 
 soul, this rapture, this devotion, is the veritable 
 and enduring fragrance of Lebanon, the all-needful 
 odor suavitatis ? This doubt long harassed the 
 breast of Ferdinand Fabre himself. In that poor 
 country of the C6vennes, to have the care of a 
 parish, to be sheltered by a presbytere by a par- 
 sonage or manse, as we should say is to have 
 settled very comfortably the problem of subsist- 
 ence. The manse will shelter a mother, at need a 
 sister or an aged father ; it reconstructs a home 
 for such a shattered family as the Fabres were 
 now. Great, though unconscious, pressure was 
 therefore put upon the lad to make inevitable his 
 " vocation." He was sent to the Little Seminary 
 at St. Pons de Thomieres, where he was educated 
 under M. l'Abb6 Dubreuil, a man whose ambitions
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 157 
 
 were at once lettered and ecclesiastical, and who, 
 although Director of the famous Academie des 
 Jeux Floraux, eventually rose to be Archbishop of 
 Avignon. 
 
 During this time, at the urgent request of his 
 uncle at Camplong, Ferdinand Fabre kept a daily 
 journal. It was started in the hope that cultivat- 
 ing the expression of pious sentiments might make 
 their ebullition spontaneous, but the boy soon 
 began to jot down, instead of pious ejaculations, 
 all the external things he noticed : the birds in the 
 copses, the talk of the neighbours, even at last the 
 oddities and the disputes of the excellent clergy- 
 men his schoolmasters. When the Abbe Fulcran 
 died in 1871, his papers were burned and most of 
 Ferdinand's journals with them ; but the latest and 
 therefore most valuable cahier survived, and is the 
 source from which he extracted that absorbingly 
 interesting fragment of autobiography, Ma Vocation. 
 This shows us why, in spite of all the pressure of 
 his people, and in spite of the entreaties of his 
 amiable professors at the Great Seminary of Mont- 
 pellier, the natural man was too strong in 
 Ferdinand Fabre to permit him to take the final 
 vows. In his nineteenth year, on the night of the 
 23rd of June 1848, after an agony of prayer, he 
 had a vision in his cell. A great light filled the 
 room ; he saw heaven opened, and the Son of 
 God at the right hand of the Father. He ap- 
 proached in worship, but a wind howled him out 
 of heaven, and a sovereign voice cried, " It is not 
 the will of God that thou shouldst be a priest." 
 He rose up, calm though broken-hearted ; as soon
 
 158 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 as morning broke, without hesitation he wrote his 
 decision to his family, and of the " vocation " of 
 Ferdinand Fabre there was an end. 
 
 There could be no question of the sincerity of 
 a life so begun, although from the very first there 
 may be traced in it an element of incompatibility, 
 of gaucherie. Whatever may be said of the clerical 
 novels of Fabre, they are at least built out of a 
 loving experience. And, in 1889, replying to 
 some accuser, he employed words which must be 
 quoted here, for they are essential to a comprehen- 
 sion of the man and his work. They were 
 addressed to his wife, dilectce uxort, and they take a 
 double pathos from this circumstance. They are 
 the words of the man who had laid his hand to 
 the plough, and had turned away because life was 
 too sweet : 
 
 " Je ne suis pas al!6 a 1'Eglise de propos dIib6r6 
 pour la peindre et pour la juger, encore moins 
 pour faire d'elle metier et marchandise ; 1'Eglise 
 est venue a moi, s'est imposed a moi par la force 
 d'une longue fr6quentation, par les Emotions 
 poignantes de ma jeunesse, par un gout tenace de 
 mon esprit, ouvert de bonne heure a elle, a elle 
 seule, et j'ai crit tout de long de 1'aune, naive- 
 ment. . . . Je demeurais confin dans mon coin 
 troit, dans mon 'diocese,' comme aurait dit 
 Sainte-Beuve. . . . De la une s6rie de livres sur 
 les desservants, les cur6s, les chanoines, les 
 veques." 
 
 But if the Church was to be his theme and his 
 obsession, there was something else in the blood 
 of Ferdinand Fabre. There was the balsam-laden
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 159 
 
 atmosphere of the great moorlands of the 
 Cevennes. At first it seemed as though he were 
 to be torn away from this natural perfume no less 
 than from the odour of incense. He was sent, 
 after attemping the study of medicine at Mont- 
 pellier, to Paris, where he was articled as clerk to 
 a lawyer. The oppression of an office was intoler- 
 able to him, and he broke away, trying, as so 
 many thousands do, to make a living by journalism, 
 by the untrained and unaccomplished pen. In 
 1853 he published the inevitable volume of verses, 
 Les Feuilles de Lierre. It seemed at first as if these 
 neglected ivy-leaves would cover the poor lad's 
 coffin, for, under poverty and privation, his health 
 completely broke down. He managed to creep back 
 to Bedarieux, and in the air of the moors he soon 
 recovered. But how he occupied himself during 
 the next eight or ten years does not seem to have 
 been recorded. His life was probably a very idle 
 one ; with a loaf of bread and a cup of wine 
 beneath the bough, youth passes merrily and 
 cheaply in that delicious country of the Herault. 
 
 In the sixties he reappeared in Paris, and at 
 the age of thirty-two, in 1862, he brought out his 
 first novel, Les Courbezon : Scenes de la Vie Cle'ri- 
 cale. George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life had 
 appeared a few years earlier ; the new French 
 novelist resembled her less than he did Anthony 
 Trollope, to whom, with considerable clairvoy- 
 ance, M. Am6dee Pichot immediately compared 
 him. In spite of the limited interests involved 
 and the rural crudity of the scene the book was 
 all about the life of country priests in the
 
 162 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Fabre, with all their agreeable qualities, so mani- 
 festly inferior to it ? And to this question there 
 is no reply, except to say that on one solitary 
 occasion the author of very pleasant, characteristic 
 and notable books, which were not quite master- 
 pieces, shot up in the air and became a writer 
 almost of the first class. I hardly know whether 
 it is worth while to observe that the scene of 
 L'Abbe Tigrane, although analogous to that which 
 Fabre elsewhere portrayed, was not identical with 
 it, and perhaps this slight detachment from his 
 beloved C6vennes gave the novelist a seeming 
 touch of freedom. 
 
 The historical conditions which give poignancy 
 of interest to the ecclesiastical novels of Ferdinand 
 Fabre are the re-assertion in France of the 
 monastic orders proscribed by the Revolution, and 
 the opposition offered to them by the parochial 
 clergy. The battle which rages in these stormy 
 books is that between Roman and Gallican ambi- 
 tion. The names of Lacordaire and Lamennais 
 are scarcely mentioned in the pages of Fabre, 1 
 but the study of their lives forms an excellent pre- 
 paration for the enjoyment of stories like L'Abbe 
 Tigrane and Lucifer. The events which thrilled 
 the Church of France about the year 1840, the 
 subjection of the prelates to Roman authority, 
 the hostility of the Government, the resistance 
 here and there of an ambitious and headstrong 
 Gallican all this must in some measure be recol- 
 
 1 I should except the curious anecdote of the asceticism of Lamennais 
 which is told by the arch -priest Rupert in the sixteenth chapter of 
 Lucifer.
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 163 
 
 lected to make the intrinsic purpose of Fabre's 
 novels, which Taine had qualified as indispensable 
 to the historian of modern France, intelligible. 
 If we recollect Archbishop de Qulen and his pro- 
 tection of the Peregrine Brethren ; if we think 
 of Lacordaire (on the I2th of February 1841) 
 mounting the pulpit of Notre-Dame in the for- 
 bidden white habit of St. Dominic ; if we recall 
 the turmoil which preceded the arrival of Mon- 
 seigneur Afire at Paris, we shall find ourselves 
 prepared by historic experience for the curious 
 ambitions and excitements which animate the 
 clerical novels of Fabre. 
 
 The devout little city of Lormieres, where the 
 scene of L'Abbe Tigrane is laid, is a sort of clerical 
 ante-chamber to Paradise. It stands in a wild 
 defile of the Eastern Pyrenees, somewhere be- 
 tween Toulouse and Perpignan ; it is not the 
 capital of a department, but a little stronghold of 
 ancient religion, left untouched in its poverty and 
 its devotion, overlooked in the general redistribu- 
 tion of dioceses. The Abb6 Rufin Capdepont, 
 about the year 1866, finds himself Vicar-General 
 of its Cathedral Church of St. Irenee ; he is a 
 fierce, domineering man, some fifty years of age, 
 devoured by ambition and eating his heart out in 
 this forgotten corner of Christendom. He is by 
 conviction, but still more by temper, a Gallican of 
 the Gallicans, and his misery is to see the prin- 
 ciples of the Concordat gradually being swept 
 away by the tide of the Orders setting in from 
 Rome. The present bishop of Lormieres, M. de 
 Roquebrun, is a charming and courtly ^ person,
 
 162 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Fabre, with all their agreeable qualities, so mani- 
 festly inferior to it ? And to this question there 
 is no reply, except to say that on one solitary 
 occasion the author of very pleasant, characteristic 
 and notable books, which were not quite master- 
 pieces, shot up in the air and became a writer 
 almost of the first class. I hardly know whether 
 it is worth while to observe that the scene of 
 L'Abbe' Tigrane, although analogous to that which 
 Fabre elsewhere portrayed, was not identical with 
 it, and perhaps this slight detachment from his 
 beloved Cevennes gave the novelist a seeming 
 touch of freedom. 
 
 The historical conditions which give poignancy 
 of interest to the ecclesiastical novels of Ferdinand 
 Fabre are the re-assertion in France of the 
 monastic orders proscribed by the Revolution, and 
 the opposition offered to them by the parochial 
 clergy. The battle which rages in these stormy 
 books is that between Roman and Gallican ambi- 
 tion. The names of Lacordaire and Lamennais 
 are scarcely mentioned in the pages of Fabre, 1 
 but the study of their lives forms an excellent pre- 
 paration for the enjoyment of stories like L'Abbe 
 Tigrane and Lucifer. The events which thrilled 
 the Church of France about the year 1840, the 
 subjection of the prelates to Roman authority, 
 the hostility of the Government, the resistance 
 here and there of an ambitious and headstrong 
 Gallican all this must in some measure be recol- 
 
 1 I should except the curious anecdote of the asceticism of Lamennais 
 which is told by the arch-priest Rupert in the sixteenth chapter of 
 Lucifer.
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 163 
 
 lected to make the intrinsic purpose of Fabre's 
 novels, which Taine had qualified as indispensable 
 to the historian of modern France, intelligible. 
 If we recollect Archbishop de Qulen and his pro- 
 tection of the Peregrine Brethren ; if we think 
 of Lacordaire (on the i2th of February 1841) 
 mounting the pulpit of Notre-Dame in the for- 
 bidden white habit of St. Dominic ; if we recall 
 the turmoil which preceded the arrival of Mon- 
 seigneur Afire at Paris, we shall find ourselves 
 prepared by historic experience for the curious 
 ambitions and excitements which animate the 
 clerical novels of Fabre. 
 
 The devout little city of Lormieres, where the 
 scene of L'Abbe Tigrane is laid, is a sort of clerical 
 ante-chamber to Paradise. It stands in a wild 
 defile of the Eastern Pyrenees, somewhere be- 
 tween Toulouse and Perpignan ; it is not the 
 capital of a department, but a little stronghold of 
 ancient religion, left untouched in its poverty and 
 its devotion, overlooked in the general redistribu- 
 tion of dioceses. The Abbe Rufin Capdepont, 
 about the year 1866, finds himself Vicar-General 
 of its Cathedral Church of St. Irenee ; he is a 
 fierce, domineering man, some fifty years of age, 
 devoured by ambition and eating his heart out in 
 this forgotten corner of Christendom. He is by 
 conviction, but still more by temper, a Gallican of 
 the Gallicans, and his misery is to see the prin- 
 ciples of the Concordat gradually being swept 
 away by the tide of the Orders setting in from 
 Rome. The present bishop of Lormieres, M. de 
 Roquebrun, is a charming and courtly /person,
 
 164 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 but he is under the thumb of the Regulars, and 
 gives all the offices which fall vacant to Domini- 
 cans or Lazarists. He is twenty years older. than 
 Rufin Capdepont, who has determined to succeed 
 him, but whom every year of delay embitters and 
 disheartens. 
 
 Rufin Capdepont is built in the mould of the 
 unscrupulous conquerors of life. The son of a 
 peasant of the Pyrenees and of a Basque-Spanish 
 mother, he is a creature like a tiger, all sinuosity 
 and sleekness when things go well, but ready in a 
 moment to show claws and fangs on the slightest 
 opposition, and to stir with a roar that cows the 
 forest. His rude violence, his Gallicanism, the 
 hatred he inspires, the absence of spiritual unction 
 all these make his chances of promotion rarer ; 
 on the other side are ranked his magnificent in- 
 tellect, his swift judgment, his absolutely imperial 
 confidence in himself, and his vigilant activity. 
 When they remind him of his mean origin, he 
 remembers that Pope John XXII. was humbly 
 born hard by at Cahors, and that Urban IV. was 
 the son of a cobbler at Troyes. 
 
 What the episcopate means to an ambitious 
 priest is constantly impressed on his readers by 
 Ferdinand Fabre. Yesterday, a private soldier in 
 an army of one hundred thousand men, the 
 bishop is to-day a general, grandee of the Holy 
 Roman Church, received ad limina apostolorum as 
 a sovereign, and by the Pope as " Venerable 
 Brother." As this ineffable prize seems slipping 
 from the grasp of Rufin Capdepont, his violence 
 becomes insupportable. At school his tyranny
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 165 
 
 had gained him the nickname of Tigranes, from 
 his likeness to the Armenian tyrant king of kings ; 
 now to all the chapter and diocese of Lormieres 
 he is 1'Abbe Tigran, a name to frighten children 
 with. At last, after a wild encounter, his in- 
 solence brings on an attack of apoplexy in the 
 bishop, and the hour of success or final failure 
 seems approaching. But the bishop recovers, 
 and in a scene absolutely admirable in execution 
 contrives to turn a public ceremony, carefully 
 prepared by Capdepont to humiliate him, into a 
 splendid triumph. The bishop, still illuminated 
 with the prestige of this coup, departs for Rome in 
 the company of his beloved secretary, the Abbe 
 Ternisien, who he designs shall succeed him in 
 the diocese Capdebont is left behind, wounded, 
 sulky,hardly approachable, a feline monster who 
 has missed his spring. 
 
 But from Paris comes a telegram announcing 
 the sudden death of Monsieur de Roquebrun, and 
 Capdepont, as Vicar-General, is in provisional 
 command of the diocese. The body of the 
 bishop is brought back to Lormieres, but Capde- 
 pont, frenzied with hatred and passion, refuses to 
 admit it to the cathedral. The Abbe Ternisien, 
 however, and the other friends of the last regime, 
 contrive to open the cathedral at dead of night, 
 and a furtive but magnificent ceremony is per- 
 formed, under the roar of a terrific thunderstorm, 
 in defiance of the wishes of Capdepont. The 
 report spreads that not he, but Ternisien, is to be 
 bishop, and the clergy do not conceal their joy. 
 But the tale is not true ; Rome supports the strong
 
 166 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 man, the priest with the iron hand, in spite of his 
 scandalous ferocity and his Gallican tendencies. 
 In the hour of his sickening suspense, Capdepont 
 has acted like a brute and a maniac, but with the 
 dawning of success his tact returns. He excuses 
 his violent acts as the result of illness ; he humbles 
 himself to the beaten party, he purrs to his clergy, 
 he rubs himself like a great cat against the com- 
 fortable knees of Rome. He soon rises to be 
 Archbishop, and we leave him walking at 'night in 
 the garden of his palace and thinking of the Tiara. 
 " Who knows ? " with a delirious glitter in his eyes, 
 " who knows ? " 
 
 With L'Abbe Tigrane must be read Lucifer, 
 which is the converse of the picture. In Rufin 
 Capdepont we see the culmination of personal 
 ambition in an ecclesiastic who is yet devoted 
 through the inmost fibres of his being to the 
 interests of the Church. In the story of Bernard 
 Jourfier we follow the career of a priest who is 
 without individual ambition, but inspired by in- 
 tense convictions which are not in their essence 
 clerical. Hence Jourfier, with all his virtues, 
 fails, while Capdepont, with all his faults, succeeds, 
 because the latter possesses, while the former 
 does not possess, the "vocation." Jourfier, who 
 resembles Capdepont in several, perhaps in 
 too many, traits of character, is led by his in- 
 domitable obstinacy to oppose the full tide of 
 the monastic orders covering France with their 
 swarms. We are made to feel the incumbrance 
 of the Congregations, their elaborate systems of 
 espionage, and the insult of their direct appeal to
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 167 
 
 Rome over the heads of the bishops. We realise 
 how intolerable the bondage of the Jesuits must 
 have been to an independent and somewhat 
 savage Gallican cleric of 1845, and what oppor- 
 tunities were to be found for annoying and de- 
 pressing him if he showed any resistance. 
 
 The young Abbe Bernard Jourfier is the grand- 
 son and the son of men who took a prominent 
 part in the foundation and maintenance of the 
 First Republic. Although he himself has gone 
 into the Church, he retains an extreme pride in 
 the memory of the Spartans of his family. To 
 resist the pretensions of the Regulars becomes 
 with him a passion and a duty, and for expressing 
 these views, and for repulsing the advances of 
 Jesuits, who see in him the making of a magni- 
 ficent preacher, Jourfier is humiliated and hurt by 
 being hurried from one miserable succursale in 
 the mountains to another, where his manse is a 
 cottage in some rocky combe (like the Devonshire 
 " coomb "). At last his chance comes to him ; he 
 is given a parish in the lowest and poorest part of 
 the episcopal city of Mireval. Here his splendid 
 gifts as an orator and his zeal for the poor soon 
 make him prominent, though not with the other 
 clergy popular. His appearance his forehead 
 broad like that of a young bull, his great brown 
 flashing eyes, his square chin, thick neck and in- 
 comparable voice would be eminently attractive 
 if the temper of the man were not so hard and 
 repellent, so calculated to bruise such softer 
 natures as come in his way. 
 
 The reputation of Jourfier grows so steadily,
 
 168 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 that the Chapter is unable to refuse him a canon's 
 stall in the Cathedral of St. Optat. But he is 
 haunted by his mundane devil, the voice which 
 whispers that, with ail his austerity, chastity, and 
 elevation of heart, he is not truly called of God 
 to the priesthood. So he flings himself into 
 ecclesiastical history, and publishes in successive 
 volumes a great chronicle of the Church, inter- 
 penetrated by Gallican ideas, and breathing from 
 every page a spirit of sturdy independence which, 
 though orthodox, is far from gratifying Rome. 
 This history is rapidly accepted as a masterpiece 
 throughout France, and makes him universally 
 known. Still he wraps himself in his isolation, 
 when the fall of the Empire suddenly calls him 
 from his study, and he has to prevent the citizens 
 of Mireval from wrecking their cathedral and 
 insulting their craven bishop. Gambetta, who 
 knew his father, and values Jourfier himself, 
 procures that he shall be appointed Bishop of 
 Sylvanes. The mitre, so passionately desired by 
 Capdepont, is only a matter of terror and dis- 
 traction to Jourfier. He is on the point of refus- 
 ing it, when it is pointed out to him that his 
 episcopal authority will enable him to make a 
 successful stand against the Orders. 
 
 This decides him, and he goes to Sylvanes to 
 be consecrated. But he has not yet been pre- 
 conised by the Pope, and he makes the fatal 
 mistake of lingering in his diocese, harassing the 
 Congregations, who all denounce him to the 
 Pope. At length, in deep melancholy and failing 
 health, he sets out for Rome, and is subjected to
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 169 
 
 all the delays, inconveniences, and petty humilia- 
 tions which Rome knows how to inflict on those 
 who annoy her. The Pope sees him, but without 
 geniality ; he has to endure an interview with the 
 Prefect of the Congregations, Cardinal Finella, in 
 which the pride of Lucifer is crushed like a pebble 
 under a hammer. He is preconised, but in the 
 most scornful way, on sufferance, because Rome 
 does not find it convenient to embroil herself with 
 the French Republic, and he returns, a broken 
 man, to Sylvanes. Even his dearest friends, the 
 amiable and charming trio of Gallican canons, 
 who have followed him from Mireval, and to 
 find offices for whom he has roughly displaced 
 Jesuit fathers, find the bishop's temper intolerable. 
 His palace is built, like a fortress, on a rocky 
 eminence over the city, and one wild Christmas 
 night the body of the tormented bishop is dis- 
 covered, crushed, at the foot of the cliff, whether 
 in suicide cast over, or flung by a false delirious 
 step as he wandered in the rain. This endless 
 combat with the Church of which he was a 
 member, had ended, as it was bound to end, in 
 madness and despair. 
 
 As a psychological study Lucifer is more in- 
 teresting, perhaps, than LAbbe Tigrane, because 
 more complex, but it is far from being so admir- 
 ably executed. As the story proceeds, Jourfier's 
 state of soul somewhat evades the reader. His 
 want of tact in dealing with his diocese and with 
 the Pope are so excessive that they deprive him 
 of our sympathy, and internal evidence is not 
 wanting to show that Fabre, having brought his
 
 170 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Gallican professor of history to the prelacy, did 
 not quite know what to do with him then. To 
 make him mad and tumble him over a parapet 
 seems inadequate to the patient reader, who has 
 been absorbed in the intellectual and spiritual 
 problems presented. But the early portions of 
 the book are excellent indeed. Some of the epi- 
 sodes which soften and humanise the severity of 
 the central interest are charming; the career of 
 Jourfier's beloved nephew, the Abbe Jean Mon- 
 tagnol, who is irresistibly drawn towards the Jesuits, 
 and at last is positively kidnapped by them from 
 the clutches of his terrible uncle; the gentle old 
 archpriest Rupert, always in a flutter of timidity, 
 yet with the loyalty of steel ; the Canon Coulazou, 
 who watches Jourfier with the devotion of a dog 
 through his long misanthropic trances ; these turn 
 Lucifer into an enchanting gallery of serious clerical 
 portraits. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But there are other faces in the priestly portrait- 
 gallery which Ferdinand Fabre has painted, and 
 some of them more lovable than those of Tigrane 
 and Lucifer. To any one who desires an easy 
 introduction to the novelist, no book can be more 
 warmly recommended than that which bears the 
 title of LAbbe Roitelet, or, as we might put it, 
 "The Rev. Mr. Wren" (1890). Here we find 
 ourselves in a variety of those poverty-stricken 
 mountain parishes, starving under the granite peaks 
 of the CeVennes, which Fabre was the first writer 
 of the imagination to explore; groups of squalid
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 171 
 
 huts, sprinkled and tumbled about rocky slopes, 
 hanging perilously over ravines split by tumul- 
 tuous rivulets that race in uproar down to the 
 valleys of the Orb or the Tarn. Here we discover, 
 assiduously but wearily devoted to the service 
 of these parched communities, the Abbe Cyprien 
 Coupiac, called Roitelet, or the Wren, because he 
 is the smallest priest in any diocese of France. 
 This tiny little man, a peasant in his simplicity and 
 his shyness, has one ungovernable passion, which 
 got him into trouble in his student-days at Mont- 
 pellier, and does his reputation wrong even among 
 the rocks of the black Espinouze : that is his in- 
 fatuation for all kinds of birds. He is like St. 
 Bonaventure, who loved all flying things that drink 
 the light, rorem bibentes alque lumen; but he goes 
 farther, for he loves them to the neglect of his 
 duties. 
 
 Complaints are made of Coupiac's intense devo- 
 tion to his aviary, and he is rudely moved to a still 
 more distant parish ; but even here a flight of what 
 seem to be Pallas's sand-grouse is his ruin. He is 
 summoned before the bishop at Montpellier, and 
 thither goes the little trembling man, a mere wren 
 of humanity, to excuse himself for his quaint and 
 innocent vice. Happily, the bishop is a man of 
 the world, less narrow than his subalterns, and 
 in a most charming scene he comforts the little 
 ornithological penitent, and even brings him down 
 from his terrible exile among the rocks to a small 
 and poor but genial parish in the chestnut wood- 
 lands among his own folk, where he can be happy. 
 For a while the Abbe Coupiac is very careful to
 
 172 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 avoid all Vogclweiden or places where birds do con- 
 gregate, and when he meets a goldfinch or a 
 wryneck is most particular to look in the opposite 
 direction; but in process of time he succumbs, 
 and his manse becomes an aviary, like its prede- 
 cessors. A terrible lesson cures the poor little man 
 at last. An eagle is caught alive in his parish, 
 and he cannot resist undertaking to cure its broken 
 wing. He does so, and with such success that he 
 loses his heart to this enormous pet. Alas ! the 
 affection is not reciprocated, and one morning, 
 without any warning, the eagle picks out one of 
 the abbe's eyes. With some difficulty Coupiac is 
 safely nursed to health again, but his love of birds 
 is gone. 
 
 However, it is his nature, shrinking from rough 
 human faces, to find consolation in his dumb 
 parishioners ; he is conscious to pain of that 
 "voisinage et cousinage entre l'homme et les 
 autres animaux " of which Charron, the friend of 
 Montaigne, speaks. So he extends a fatherly, 
 clerical protection over the flocks and herds of 
 Cabrerolles, and he revives a quaint and obso- 
 lescent custom by which, on Christmas night, the 
 Cevenol cattle are brought to the door of their 
 parish church to listen to the service, and after- 
 wards are blessed by the priest. The book ends 
 with a sort of canticle of yule-tide, in which the 
 patient kine, with faint tramplings and lowings, 
 take modestly their appointed part ; and these rites 
 at the midnight mass are described as Mr. Thomas 
 Hardy might have described them if Dorchester had 
 been B6darieux. In the whole of this beautiful
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 173 
 
 little novel Ferdinand Fabre is combating what he 
 paints as a besetting sin of his beloved Cevenols - 
 their indifference and even cruelty to animals and 
 birds, from which the very clergy seem to be not 
 always exempt. 
 
 To yet another of his exclusively clerical novels 
 but brief reference must here be made, although 
 it has been a general favourite. In Mon Oncle 
 Ce'lestin (1881) we have a study of the entirely 
 single and tender-hearted country priest a Ter- 
 tullian in the pulpit, an infant out of it, a creature 
 all compact of spiritual and puerile qualities. His 
 innocent benevolence leads him blindfold to a de- 
 plorable scandal, his inexperience to a terrible 
 quarrel with a rival archaeologist, who drives 
 C61estin almost to desperation. His enemies at 
 length push him so far that they determine the 
 bishop to suspend him so that he becomes revoque ; 
 but his health had long been undermined, and he 
 is fortunate in dying just before this terrible news 
 can be broken to him. This tragic story is laid 
 in scenes of extraordinary physical beauty; in no 
 book of his has Fabre contrived to paint the sublime 
 and varied landscape of the Cevennes in more de- 
 licious colours. In Celestin, who has the charge 
 of a youthful and enthusiastically devoted nephew, 
 Fabre has unquestionably had recourse to his 
 recollections of the life at Camplong when he was 
 a child, in the company of his sainted uncle, the 
 Abbe Fulcran. 
 
 In the whole company of Ferdinand Fabre's 
 priests the reader will not find the type which 
 he will perhaps most confidently await that,
 
 174 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 namely, of the cleric who is untrue to his vows 
 of chastity. There is here no Abb Mouret caught 
 in the mesh of physical pleasures, and atoning for 
 his faute in a pinchbeck Garden of Eden. The 
 impure priest, according to Fabre, is a dream of 
 the Voltairean imagination. His churchmen are 
 sternly celibate ; their first and most inevitable 
 duty has been to conquer the flesh at the price 
 of their blood ; as he conceives them, there is no 
 place in their thoughts at all for the movements 
 of a vain concupiscence. The solitary shadow of 
 the Abbe Vignerte, suspended for sins of this class, 
 does indeed flit across the background of Lucifer, 
 but only as a horror and a portent. In some 
 of these priests, as they grow middle-aged, there 
 comes that terror of women which M. Anatole 
 France notes so amusingly in Le Mannequin cf Osier. 
 The austere Abb Jourfier trembles in all his limbs 
 when a woman, even an old peasant- wife, calls him 
 to the confessional. He obeys the call, but he 
 would rather be told to climb the snowy peak of 
 the highest Cevennes and stay there. 
 
 To make such characters attractive and enter- 
 taining is, manifestly, extremely difficult. Fabre 
 succeeds in doing it by means of his tact, his 
 exhaustive knowledge of varieties of the clerical 
 species, and, most of all perhaps, by the intensity 
 of his own curiosity and interest. His attitude 
 towards his creations becomes, at critical moments, 
 very amusing. " The reader will hardly credit what 
 was his horrible reply," Fabre will say, or " How 
 can we explain such an extreme violence in our 
 principal personage ?" He forgets that these people
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 175 
 
 are imaginary, and he calls upon us, with eager 
 complacency, to observe what strange things they 
 are saying and doing. His vivacious sincerity per- 
 mits him to put forth with success novel after novel, 
 from which the female element is entirely excluded. 
 In his principal books love is not mentioned, and 
 women take no part at all. Mon Oncle Celestin is 
 hardly an exception, because the female figures in- 
 troduced are those of a spiteful virago and a girl 
 of clouded intelligence, who are merely machines 
 to lift into higher prominence the sufferings and 
 the lustrous virtues of the Abb6 Celestin. Through 
 the dramatic excitement, the nerve-storm, of L'Abbe 
 Tigrane there never is visible so much as the flutter 
 of a petticoat ; in Lucifer, the interesting and pathetic 
 chapter on the text Domine, ad adjiivandtim me festina 
 dismisses the subject in a manner which gives no 
 encouragement to levity. Those who wish to 
 laugh with Ariosto or to snigger with Aretine 
 must not come to Ferdinand Fabre. He has not 
 faith, he pretends to no vocation ; but that reli- 
 gious life upon which he looks back in a sort 
 of ceaseless nostalgia confronts him in its purest 
 and most loyal aspect. 
 
 IV 
 
 The priest is not absolutely the only subject 
 which preoccupies Ferdinand Fabre; he is inter- 
 ested in the truant also. Wild nature is, in his 
 eyes, the great and most dangerous rival of the 
 Seminary, and has its notable victories. One of 
 the prettiest books of his later years, Monsieur Jean
 
 176 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 (1886), tells how a precocious boy, brought up in 
 the manse of Camplong at last Fabre inextricably 
 confounded autobiography with fiction is tempted 
 to go off on an innocent excursion with a fiery- 
 blooded gipsy girl called Mariette. The whole 
 novel is occupied by a recital of what they saw 
 and what they did during their two days' esca- 
 pade, and offers the author one of those oppor- 
 tunities which he loves for dealing almost in an 
 excess of naivete with the incidents of a pastoral 
 life. Less pretty, and less complete, but treated 
 with greater force and conviction, is the tale of 
 Toussaint Galabru (1887), which tells how a good 
 little boy 'of twelve years old fell into the grievous 
 sin of going a-poaching on Sunday morning with 
 two desperate characters who were more than old 
 enough to know better. The story itself is nothing. 
 What is delicious is the reflection of the boy's can- 
 did and timid but adventurous soul, and the pas- 
 sage before his eyes of the innumerable creatures 
 of the woodland. At every step there is a stir 
 in the oleanders or a flutter among the chestnut- 
 leaves, and ever and anon, through a break in the 
 copses, there peep forth against the rich blue 
 sky the white peaks of the mountains. Toussaint 
 Galabru is the only book known to me in the 
 French language which might really have been 
 written by Richard Jefferies, with some revision, 
 perhaps, by Mr. Thomas Hardy. 
 
 One curious book by Ferdinand Fabre demands 
 mention in a general survey of his work. It 
 stands quite apart, in one sense, from his custom- 
 ary labours ; in another sense it offers the quintes-
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 177 
 
 sence of them. The only story which he has 
 published in which everything is sacrificed to 
 beauty of form is Le Chevrier (1867), which 
 deserves a term commonly misused, and always 
 dubious ; it may be called a " prose-poem." In 
 his other books the style is sturdy, rustic and 
 plain, with frequent use of patois and a certain 
 thickness or heaviness of expression. His phrases 
 are abrupt, not always quite lucid ; there can be no 
 question, although he protested violently against 
 the attribution, that Fabre studied the manner of 
 Balzac, not always to his advantage. But in Le 
 Chevrier which is a sort of discouraged Daphnts 
 and Chloe of the CeVennes he deliberately com- 
 posed a work in modulated and elaborate num- 
 bers. It might be the translation of a poem in 
 Provenal or Spanish ; we seem in reading it to 
 divine the vanished form of verse. 
 
 It is, moreover, written in a highly artificial lan- 
 guage, partly in Cvenol patois, partly in French of 
 the sixteenth century, imitated, it is evident, from 
 the style of Amyot and Montaigne. Le Chevrier 
 begins, in ordinary French, by describing how the 
 author goes up into the Larzac, a bleak little 
 plateau that smells of rosemary and wild thyme in 
 the gorges of the High Cevennes, for the purpose 
 of shooting hares, and how he takes with him an 
 elderly goatherd, Eran Erembert, famous for his 
 skill in sport. But one day the snow shuts them 
 up in the farmhouse, and Eran is cajoled into 
 telling his life's history. This he does in the afore- 
 said mixture of patois and Renaissance French, 
 fairly but not invariably sustained. It is a story 
 
 M
 
 178 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 of passionate love, ill requited. Eran has loved a 
 pretty foundling, called Felice, but she prefers his 
 master's son, a handsome ne'er-do-weel, called 
 Frdry, whom she marries. Eran turns from her 
 to Frangon, a still more beautiful but worthless 
 girl, and wastes his life with her. Fredry dies at 
 last, and Eran constrains Felice to marry him ; but 
 her heart is elsewhere, and she drowns herself. It 
 is a sad, impassioned tale, embroidered on every 
 page with love of the High Cvenol country and 
 knowledge of its pastoral rites and customs. 
 
 The scene is curious, because of its various 
 elements. The snow, congealing around a neigh- 
 bouring peak in the Larzac, falls upon the branches 
 of a date-palm in the courtyard of the farmhouse 
 at Mirande, and on the peacocks, humped up and 
 ruffled in its branches. But through all the picture, 
 with its incongruities of a southern mountain 
 country, moves the cabrade, the docile flock of 
 goats, with Sacripant, a noble pedigree billy, at 
 their head, and these animals, closely attending 
 upon Eran their herd, seem to form a chorus in 
 the classico-rustic tragedy. And all the country, 
 bare as it is,- is eminently giboyeux; it stirs and 
 rustles with the incessant movement of those living 
 creatures which Ferdinand Fabre loves to describe. 
 And here, for once, he gives himself up to the 
 primitive powers of love ; the priest is kept out of 
 sight, or scarcely mars the rich fermentation of life 
 with glimpses of his soutane and his crucifix. 
 
 Le Chcvrier has never enjoyed any success in 
 France, where its archaic pastoralism was mis- 
 apprehended from the first. But it was much
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 179 
 
 admired by Walter Pater, who once went so far as 
 to talk about translating it. The novelist of the 
 Cvennes had an early and an ardent reader in 
 Pater, to whom I owe my own introduction to 
 Ferdinand Fabre. Unfortunately, the only indica- 
 tion of this interest which survives, so far as I 
 know, is an article in the privately printed Essays 
 from the Guardian, where Pater reviews one of 
 Fabre's weakest works, the novel called Norine 
 (1889). He says some delicate things about this 
 idyllic tale, which he ingeniously calls " a sym- 
 phony in cherries and goldfinches." But what 
 one would have welcomed would have been a 
 serious examination of one of the great celibate 
 novels, L'Abbe Tigrane or Lucifer. The former of 
 these, I know, attracted Pater almost more than any 
 other recent French work in fiction. He found, 
 as Taine did, a solid psychological value in these 
 studies of the strictly ecclesiastical passions the 
 jealousies, the ambitions, the violent and masterful 
 movements of types that were exclusively clerical. 
 And the struggle which is the incident of life really 
 important to Fabre, the tension caused by the 
 divine " vocation " on the one hand and the cry 
 of physical nature on the other, this was of the 
 highest interest to Pater also. He was delighted, 
 moreover, with the upland freshness, the shrewd 
 and cleanly brightness of Fabre's country stories, 
 so infinitely removed from what we indolently 
 conceive that we shall find in " a French novel." 
 
 An English writer, of higher rank than Fabre, 
 was revealing the Cevennes to English readers just 
 when the Frenchman was publishing his mountain
 
 i8o FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 stories. If we have been reading Le Chevrier, 
 it will be found amusing to take up again the 
 Through the Ce'vennes with a Donkey of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. The route which the Scotchman took 
 was from Le Monastier to Alais, across the north- 
 eastern portion of the mountain-range, while Fabre 
 almost exclusively haunts the south-western slopes 
 in the Herault. Stevenson brings before us a bleak 
 and stubborn landscape, far less genial than the 
 wooded uplands of Bedarieux. But in both 
 pictures much is alike. The bare moors on the 
 tops of the Cevennes are the same in each case, 
 and when we read Stevenson's rhapsody on the 
 view from the high ridge of the Mimerte, it might 
 well be a page translated from one of the novels 
 of Ferdinand Fabre. But the closest parallel with 
 the Frenchman is always Mr. Thomas Hardy, 
 whom in his rustic chapters he closely resembles 
 even in style. Yet here again we have the national 
 advantage, since Fabre has no humour, or exceed- 
 ingly little. 
 
 Fabre is a solitary, stationary figure in the 
 current history of French literature. He is the 
 gauche and somewhat suspicious country bumpkin 
 in the urban congregation of the wits. He has 
 not a word to say about " schools " and " ten- 
 dencies " ; he is not an adept in nevrosite d' artiste. 
 It is odd to think of this rugged Cevenol as a con- 
 temporary of Daudet and Goncourt, Sardou and 
 Bourget ; he has nothing whatever in common 
 with them. You must be interested in his affairs, 
 for he pretends to no interest in yours. Like 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling's " Native-Born," Ferdinand
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 181 
 
 Fabre seems to say, " Let a fellow sing of the little 
 things he cares about " ; and what these are we 
 have seen. They are found among the winding 
 paths that lead up through the oleander-marshes, 
 through the vineyards, through the chestnuts, to 
 the moorlands and the windy peaks ; they are 
 walking beside the patient flocks of goats, when 
 Sacripant is marching at their head ; they are the 
 poachers and the reapers, the begging friars and 
 the sportsmen, all the quiet, rude population of 
 those shrouded hamlets of the Herault Most of 
 all they are those abbes and canons, those humble, 
 tremulous parish priests and benevolently arrogant 
 prelates, whom he understands more intimately 
 than any other author has done who has ever 
 written. Persuade him to speak to you of these, 
 and you will be enchanted ; yet never forget that 
 his themes are limited and his mode of delivery 
 monotonous. 
 
 1898.
 
 A FIRST SIGHT OF;^VERLAINE 
 
 IN 1893 the thoughts of a certain pilgrim were a 
 good deal occupied by the theories and experi- 
 ments which a section of the younger French 
 poets were engaged upon. In this country, the 
 Symbolists and Decadents of Paris had been 
 laughed at and parodied, but, with the exception 
 of Mr. Arthur Symons, no English critic had given 
 their tentatives any serious attention. I became 
 much interested not wholly converted, certainly, 
 but considerably impressed as I studied, not what 
 was said about them by their enemies, but what 
 they wrote themselves. Among them all, there 
 was but one, M. Mallarme, whom I knew person- 
 ally ; him I had met, more than twenty years 
 before, carrying the vast folio of his Manet-Poe 
 through the length and breadth of London, dis- 
 appointed but not discouraged. I learned that 
 there were certain haunts where these later De- 
 cadents might be observed in large numbers, drawn 
 together by the gregarious attraction of verse. I 
 determined to haunt that neighbourhood with a 
 butterfly-net, and see what delicate creatures with 
 powdery wings I could catch. And, above all, 
 was it not understood that that vaster lepidopter, 
 that giant hawk-moth, Paul Verlaine, uncoiled his 
 proboscis in the same absinthe-corollas ? 
 
 Timidity, doubtless, would have brought the
 
 VERLAINE 183 
 
 scheme to nought, if, unfolding it to Mr. Henry 
 Harland, who knows his Paris like the palm of his 
 hand, he had not, with enthusiastic kindness, offered 
 to become my cicerone. He was far from sharing 
 my interest in the Symbolo-decadent movement, 
 and the ideas of the " poetes abscons comme la 
 lune " left him a little cold, yet he entered at once 
 into the sport of the idea. To race up and down 
 the Boulevard St. Michel, catching live poets in 
 shoals, what a charming game ! So, with a beating 
 heart and under this gallant guidance, I started on 
 a beautiful April morning to try my luck as an 
 entomologist. This is not the occasion to speak 
 of the butterflies which we successfully captured 
 during this and the following days and nights ; the 
 expedition was a great success. But, all the time, 
 the hope of capturing that really substantial moth, 
 Verlaine, was uppermost, and this is how it was 
 realised. 
 
 As every one knows, the broad Boulevard St. 
 Michel runs almost due south from the Palais 
 de Justice to the Gardens of the Luxembourg. 
 Through the greater part of its course, it is 
 principally (so it strikes one) composed of restau- 
 rants and brasseries, rather dull in the daytime, 
 excessively blazing and gay at night. To the 
 critical entomologist the eastern side of this street 
 is known as the chief, indeed almost the only 
 habitat of poeta symbolans, which, however, occurs 
 here in vast numbers. Each of the leaders of a 
 school has his particular caf6, where he is to be 
 found at an hour and in a chair known to the 
 habitue's of the place. So Dryden sat at Will's and
 
 184 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Addison at Button's, when chocolate and ratafia, I 
 suppose, took the place of absinthe. M. Jean 
 Mor6as sits in great circumstance at the Restau- 
 rant d'Harcourt or he did three years ago and 
 there I enjoyed much surprising and stimulating 
 conversation. But Verlaine where was he ? 
 At his caf6, the Francois-Premier, we were told 
 that he had not been seen for four days. " There 
 is a letter for him he must be ill," said Madame; 
 and we felt what the tiger-hunter feels when the 
 tiger has gone to visit a friend in another valley. 
 But to persist is to succeed. 
 
 The last of three days devoted to this fascinat- 
 ing sport had arrived. I had seen Symbolists and 
 Decadents to my heart's content. I had learned 
 that Victor Hugo was not a poet at all, and that 
 M. Vi61-Grirfin was a splendid bard ; I had heard 
 that neither Victor Hugo nor M. Vi61e-Grimn had 
 a spark of talent, but that M. Charles Morice was 
 the real Simon Pure. I had heard a great many 
 conflicting opinions stated without hesitation and 
 with a delightful violence ; I had heard a great 
 many verses recited which I did not understand 
 because I was a foreigner, and could not have 
 understood if I had been a Frenchman. I had 
 quaffed a number of highly indigestible drinks, 
 and had enjoyed myself very much. But I had 
 not seen Verlaine, and poor Mr. Harland was in 
 despair. We invited some of the poets to dine 
 with us that night (this is the etiquette of the 
 " Boul' Mich'") at the Restaurant d'Harcourt, and 
 a very entertaining meal we had. M. Moras was 
 in the chair, and a poetess with a charming name
 
 VERLAINE 185 
 
 decorated us all with sprays of the narcissus poeticus. 
 I suppose that the company was what is called 
 " a little mixed," but I am sure it was very lyrical. 
 I had the honour of giving my arm to a most 
 amiable lady, the Queen of Golconda, whose 
 precise rank among the crowned heads of Europe 
 is, I am afraid, but vaguely determined. The 
 dinner was simple, but distinctly good ; the chair- 
 man was in magnificent form, un vrai chef d'e'cole, 
 and between each of the courses somebody in- 
 toned his own verses at the top of his voice. 
 The windows were wide open on to the Boule- 
 vard, but there was no public expression of 
 surprise. 
 
 It was all excessively amusing, but deep down 
 in my consciousness, tolling like a little bell, there 
 continued to sound the words, " We haven't seen 
 Verlaine." I confessed as much at last to the 
 sovereign of Golconda, and she was graciously 
 pleased to say that she would make a great effort. 
 She was kind enough, I believe, to send out a sort 
 of search-party. Meanwhile, we adjourned to an- 
 other caf, to drink other things, and our company 
 grew like a rolling snowball. I was losing all 
 hope, and we were descending the Boulevard, our 
 faces set for home ; the Queen of Golconda was 
 hanging heavily on my arm, and having formed 
 a flattering misconception as to my age, was warn- 
 ing me against the temptations of Paris, when two 
 more poets, a male and a female, most amiably 
 hurried to meet us with the intoxicating news that 
 Verlaine had been seen to dart into a little place 
 called the Caf Soleil d'Or. Thither we accord-
 
 186 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ingly hied, buoyed up by hope, and our party, 
 now containing a dozen persons (all poets), rushed 
 into an almost empty drinking-shop. But no 
 Verlaine was to be seen. M. Mor6as then col- 
 lected us round a table, and fresh grenadines were 
 ordered. 
 
 Where I sat, by the elbow of M. Moreas, I was 
 opposite an open door, absolutely dark, leading 
 down, by oblique stairs, to a cellar. As I idly 
 watched this square of blackness I suddenly saw 
 some ghostly shape fluttering at the bottom of it. 
 It took the form of a strange bald head, bobbing 
 close to the ground. Although it was so dim and 
 vague, an idea crossed my mind. Not daring to 
 speak, I touched M. Moreas, and so drew his 
 attention to it. " Pas un mot, pas un geste, 
 Monsieur ! " he whispered, and then, instructed 
 in the guile of his race, insidtas Danaiim, the 
 eminent author of Les Cantilenes rose, making a 
 vague detour towards the street, and then plunged 
 at the cellar door. There was a prolonged scuffle 
 and a rolling downstairs ; then M. Moreas re- 
 appeared, triumphant ; behind him something 
 flopped up out of the darkness like an owl, 
 a timid shambling figure in a soft black hat, with 
 jerking hands, and it peeped with intention to 
 disappear again. But there were cries of " Venez 
 done, Maitre," and by-and-by Verlaine was per- 
 suaded to emerge definitely and to sit by me. 
 
 I had been prepared for strange eccentricities of 
 garb, but he was very decently dressed ; he re- 
 ferred at once to the fact, and explained that this 
 was the suit which had been bought for him to
 
 VERLAINE 187 
 
 lecture in, in Belgium. He was particularly proud 
 of a real white shirt ; " C'est ma chemise de con- 
 ference," he said, and shot out the cuffs of it with 
 pardonable pride. He was full of his experiences 
 of Belgium, and in particular he said some very 
 pretty things about Bruges and its beguinages, and 
 how much he should like to spend the rest of his 
 life there. Yet it seemed less the mediaeval build- 
 ings which had attracted him than a museum of 
 old lace. He spoke with a veiled utterance, diffi- 
 cult for me to follow. Not for an instant would 
 he take off his hat, so that I could not see the 
 Socratic dome of forehead which figures in all 
 the caricatures. I thought his countenance very 
 Chinese, and I may perhaps say here that when 
 he was in London in 1894 I called him a Chinese 
 philosopher. He replied : " Chinois comme vous 
 voulez, mais philosophe non pas ! " 
 
 On this first occasion (April 2, 1893), recita- 
 tions were called for, and Verlaine repeated his 
 Clair de Lune : 
 
 " Votre ame est un pay sage choisi 
 
 Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques 
 Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi 
 Tristes sous leurs deguisements fantasques," 
 
 and presently, with a strange indifference to all 
 incongruities of scene and company, part of his 
 wonderful Mon Dteu ma dit : 
 
 " J'ai re"pondu : ' Seigneur, vous avez dit mon ame. 
 C'est vrai que je vous cherche et ne vous trouve pas. 
 Mais vous aimer ! Voyez comme je suis en has, 
 Vous dont 1'amour toujours monte comme la flamme
 
 i88 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 ' Vous, la source de paix que toute soif reclame, 
 He'las ! Voyez un peu tous mes tristes combats ! 
 Oserai-je adorer la trace de vos pas, 
 Sur ces genoux saignants d'un rampement infame ?'" 
 
 He recited in a low voice, without gesticulation, 
 very delicately. Then M. Moras, in exactly the 
 opposite manner, with roarings of a bull and with 
 modulated sawings of the air with his hand, in- 
 toned an eclogue addressed by himself to Verlaine 
 as "Tityre." And so the exciting evening closed, 
 the passionate shepherd in question presently dis- 
 appearing again down those mysterious stairs. 
 And we, out into the soft April night and the 
 budding smell of the trees. 
 
 1896.
 
 THE IRONY OF M. ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 IF we are asked, What is the most entertaining 
 intelligence at this moment working in the world 
 of letters ? I do not see that we can escape from 
 replying, That of M. Anatole France. Nor is it 
 merely that he is sprightly and amusing in him- 
 self ; he is much more than that. He indicates 
 a direction of European feeling ; he expresses a 
 mood of European thought. Excessively weary 
 of all the moral effort that was applied to literature 
 in the eighties, all the searchings into theories and 
 proclaimings of gospels, all the fuss and strain of 
 Ibsen and Tolstoi and Zola, that the better kind 
 of reader should make a volte-face was inevitable. 
 This general consequence might have been fore- 
 seen, but hardly that M. Anatole France, in his 
 quiet beginnings, was preparing to take the position 
 of a leader in letters. He, obviously, has dreamed 
 of no such thing ; he has merely gone on develop- 
 ing and emancipating his individuality. He has 
 taken advantage of his growing popularity to be 
 more and more courageously himself ; and doubt- 
 less he is surprised, as we are, to find that he has 
 noiselessly expanded into one of the leading 
 intellectual forces of our day. 
 
 After a period of enthusiasm, we expect a great 
 
 suspicion of enthusiasts to set in. M. Anatole 
 
 189
 
 190 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 France is what they used to call a Pyrrhonist in 
 the seventeenth century a sceptic, one who 
 doubts whether it is worth while to struggle 
 insanely against the trend of things. The man 
 who continues to cross the road leisurely, although 
 the cyclists' bells are ringing, is a Pyrrhonist and 
 in a very special sense, for the ancient philosopher 
 who gives his name to the class made himself 
 conspicuous by refusing to get out of the way of 
 careering chariots. After a burst of moral excite- 
 ment, a storm of fads and fanaticism, there is 
 bound to set in calm weather and the reign of 
 indifferentism. The ever-subtle Pascal noticed 
 this, and remarked on the importance to scepticism 
 of working on a basis of ethical sensitiveness. 
 " Rien fortifie plus le pyrrhonisme," he says, " que 
 ce qu'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens." The 
 talent of M. Anatole France is like a beautiful 
 pallid flower that has grown out of a root fed on 
 rich juices of moral strenuousness. He would 
 not be so delicately balanced, so sportive, so 
 elegantly and wilfully unattached to any moral 
 system, if he had not been preceded by masters 
 of such a gloomy earnestness. 
 
 LE MANNEQUIN D'OsiER 
 
 After many efforts, more or less imperfectly 
 successful, M. France seems at last to have dis- 
 covered a medium absolutely favourable to his 
 genius. He has pursued his ideal of graceful 
 scepticism from period to period. He has sought 
 to discover it in the life of late antiquity (Thais), in
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 191 
 
 the ironic naivete of the Middle Ages (Balthasar 
 and Le Puits de Sainte Claire), in the humours of 
 eighteenth-century deism (La Rotisserie de la Reine 
 Pe'dauque and M. Jerome Coignard), in the criticism 
 of contemporary books (La Vie Litteraire), in pure 
 philosophical paradox (Le Jar din d Epicure). Only 
 once, in my opinion, has he ceased to be loyal to 
 that sagesse et elegance which are his instinctive 
 aim ; only once in that crude Le Lys Rouge, 
 which is so unworthy of his genius in everything 
 but style. With this exception, through fifteen 
 delightful volumes he has been conscientiously 
 searching for his appropriate medium, and, surely, 
 he has found it at last. He has found it in that 
 unnamed town of the north of France, where he 
 listens to the echoes and reverberations of the life 
 of to-day, and repeats them naively and maliciously 
 to us out of his mocking, resonant lips. 
 
 The two books which M. Anatole France 
 published in 1897 belong to the new cate- 
 gory. Perhaps it was not every reader of 
 L'Orme du Mail who noticed the words " Histoire 
 Contemporaine" at the top of the title-page. But 
 they are repeated on that of Le Mannequin 
 d'Osier, and they evidently have a significance. 
 Is this M. Anatole France's mode of indicating 
 to us that he is starting on some such colossal 
 enterprise as a Come'die Humaine, or a series like 
 Les Rougon Macquart? Nothing quite so alarming 
 as this, probably, but doubtless a series of some 
 sort is intended ; and, already, it is well to warn 
 the impetuous reader not to open Le Mannequin 
 d'Osier till he has mastered L'Orme du Mail, at the
 
 192 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 risk of failing to comprehend the situation. The 
 one of these books is a direct continuation of 
 the other. 
 
 There was no plot in L'Orme du Mail. We were 
 introduced, or rather invisibly suspended within, 
 a provincial city of France of to-day, where, under 
 all species of decorous exteriors, intrigues were 
 being pushed forward, domestic dramas conducted, 
 the hollowness of intellectual pretensions con- 
 cealed, and even for M. Anatole France knows 
 the value of the savage note in his exquisite 
 concert brutal crimes committed. With a skill 
 all his own, he interested us in the typical indi- 
 vidualities in this anthill of a town, and he knows 
 how to produce his effects with so light and yet so 
 firm a hand, that he never for a moment wearied 
 us, or allowed us to forget his purpose. He has 
 become no less persuaded than was Montaigne 
 himself of the fact that man is in his essence 
 " ondoyant et divers," and he will teach us to see 
 these incongruities, no longer in some fabulous 
 Jerome Coignard, but in the very forms of 
 humanity which elbow us daily in the street. He 
 will do this with the expenditure of that humour 
 which alone makes the Pyrrhonist attitude toler- 
 able, and he will scatter the perfume of his gaiety 
 in gusts so delicate and pure that it shall pervade 
 his books from end to end, yet never for a 
 moment betrays the author into farce or caricature. 
 He will, moreover, lift his dialogue on to a plane 
 of culture much higher than is customary even in 
 French novels, where the standard of allusion and 
 topic in conversation has always been more
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 193 
 
 instructed than in English stories of a similar 
 class. He will examine, with all his array of wit 
 and tolerance and paradoxical scepticism, how the 
 minds of average men and women are affected by 
 the current questions of the hour. 
 
 Readers of L'Orme du Mail were prepared for 
 the entertainment which was bound to follow. 
 They were familiar with the battle royal for the 
 vacant mitre which was silently raging between 
 M. 1'Abbe Lantaigne and M. 1'Abbe Guitrel ; they 
 sympathised with the difficulties of the preset, M. 
 Worms-Clavelin, so little anxious to make himself 
 disagreeable, and so good-natured and clever 
 underneath his irradicable vulgarity ; they had 
 listened with eagerness to the afternoon conver- 
 sations in the bookshop of M. Paillot ; they had 
 hung over the back of the seat in the shadow of 
 the great elm-tree on the Mall, to overhear the 
 endless amiable wranglings of M. Lantaigne and 
 the Latin professor, M. Bergeret, the only persons 
 in the whole town who "s'interessaient aux idees 
 generates. " They had thrilled over the murder of 
 Madame Houssieu, and laughed at the sophisti- 
 cations of M. de Terremondre, the antiquary. 
 L'Orme du Mail ended like a volume of Tristram 
 Shandy, nowhere in particular. We laid it down 
 with the sentence, " Noemi est de force a faire 
 un eveque;" saying to ourselves, "Will she do 
 it ? " And now that we have read Le Mannequin 
 a" Osier, we know as little as ever what she 
 can do. 
 
 But we know many other things, and we are 
 not quite happy. Le Mannequin a' Osier is not so 
 
 N
 
 194 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 gay a book as its predecessor, and the Pyrrhonism 
 of M. Anatole France seems to have deepened 
 upon him. The air of insouciance which hung 
 over the sun-lighted Mall has faded away. M. 
 Bergeret sits there no longer, or but very seldom, 
 arguing with M. l'Abb Lantaigne ; the clouds are 
 closing down on the fierce Abb himself, and he 
 will never be Bishop of Tourcoing. In the new 
 book, M. Bergeret, who took a secondary place in 
 L'Orme du Mail, comes into predominance. His 
 sorrows and squalor, the misfortunes of his 
 domestic life, his consciousness of his own tri- 
 viality of character and mediocrity of brain 
 those are subjected to cruel analysis. The differ- 
 ence between L'Orme du Mail and Le Mannequin 
 dOsier is that between the tone of Sterne and of 
 Swift. The comparison of Madame Bergeret, by 
 her husband, to an obsolete and inaccurate Latin 
 lexicon is extremely in the manner of A Tale oj 
 a Tub, and the horribly cynical and entertaining 
 discussion as to the criminal responsibility of the 
 young butcher Lecceur who has murdered an 
 old woman in circumstances of the least attenuated 
 hideousness, but who gains the sympathy of the 
 prison chaplain is exactly in the temper of the 
 " Examination of Certain Abuses." It is curious 
 to find this Swift-like tone proceeding out of the 
 Shandean spirit which has of late marked the 
 humour of M. Anatole France. He is so little 
 occupied with English ideas that he is certainly 
 unconscious of the remarkable resemblance be- 
 tween his reflections as to the nationalisation of 
 certain forms of private property at the Revolution
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 195 
 
 " en quelque sorte un retour a 1'ancien regime," 
 and a famous page of Carlyle. 
 
 Around that dressmaker's dummy of Madame 
 Bergeret, which gives its name to the book, there 
 gather innumerable ideas, whimsical, melancholy, 
 cpntradictory, ingenious, profound. The peculiar 
 obscurity and helplessness of poor M. Bergeret, 
 compiling a Virgilius Nauticus with his desk cramped 
 by an enormous plaster cylinder in front of it, and 
 the terrible dummy behind it, exacerbated by his 
 indigence and his mediocrity, by the infidelities 
 of Madame Bergeret and the instability of his 
 favourite pupils, his abject passivity, like that of a 
 delicate, sentient thing, possessing neither tongue, 
 nor hands, nor feet all this forms in the end a 
 sinister picture. Is M. Anatole France mocking 
 his own kith and kin ? Is the most brilliant 
 man of letters that the modern system of education 
 in France has produced holding that very system 
 up to ridicule ? We might warn him to take care 
 that the fate of Orpheus does not overtake him, 
 were not his tact and rapidity equal to his pene- 
 tration. We are quite sure that, like M. Bergeret, 
 when M. Roux recited his incomprehensible poem 
 in vers tibres, M. Anatole France will always know 
 the right moment to be silent " for fear of affront- 
 ing the Unknown Beauty." 
 
 HlSTOIRE COMIQUE 
 
 The intelligent part of the English public has 
 been successfully dragooned into the idea that M. 
 Anatole France is the most ingenious of the
 
 196 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 younger writers of Europe. It is extraordinary, 
 but very fortunate, that the firm expression of an 
 opinion on the part of a few expert persons whose 
 views are founded on principle and reason still 
 exercises a very great authority on the better class 
 of readers. When it ceases to do so the reign of 
 chaos will have set in. However, it is for the 
 present admitted in this country that M. Anatole 
 France, not merely is not as the Georges Ohnets 
 are, but that he is a great master of imagination 
 and style. Yet, one can but wonder how many 
 of his dutiful English admirers really enjoy his 
 books how many, that is to say, go deeper down 
 than the epigrams and the picturesqueness ; how 
 many perceive, in colloquial phrase, what it is he 
 is " driving at," and, having perceived, still admire 
 and enjoy. It is not so difficult to understand 
 that there are English people who appreciate the 
 writings of Ibsen and of Tolstoi, and even, to sink 
 fathoms below these, of D'Annunzio, because 
 although all these are exotic in their relation to 
 our national habits of mind, they are direct. But 
 Anatole France do his English admirers realise 
 what a heinous crime he commits ? for all his 
 lucidity and gentleness and charm, Anatole France 
 is primarily, he is almost exclusively, an ironist. 
 
 In the literary decalogue of the English reader 
 the severest prohibition is " Thou shalt not commit 
 irony ! " This is the unpardonable offence. What- 
 ever sentiments a writer wishes to enforce, he has 
 a chance of toleration in this country, if he takes 
 care to make his language exactly tally with his 
 intention. But once let him adopt a contrary
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 197 
 
 method, and endeavour to inculcate his meaning 
 in words of a different sense, and his auditors fly 
 from him. No one who has endeavoured for the 
 last hundred years to use irony in England as an 
 imaginative medium has escaped failure. How- 
 ever popular he has been until that moment, his 
 admirers then slip away from him, silently, as 
 Tennyson's did when he wrote the later sections 
 of Maud, and still more strikingly as Matthew 
 Arnold's did when he published Friendship's 
 Garland. The result of the employment of irony 
 in this country is that people steal noiselessly 
 away from the ironist as if he had been guilty in 
 their presence of a social incongruity. Is it 
 because the great example of irony in our lan- 
 guage is the cruel dissimulation of Swift ? Is it 
 that our nation was wounded so deeply by that 
 sarcastic pen that it has suspected ever since, 
 in every ironic humorist, "the smiler with the 
 knife " ? 
 
 But the irony of M. Anatole France, like that 
 of Renan, and to a much higher degree, is, on the 
 contrary, beneficent. It is a tender and consola- 
 tory raillery, based upon compassion. His greatest 
 delight is found in observing the inconsistencies, 
 the illusions of human life, but never for the pur- 
 pose of wounding us in them, or with them. His 
 genius is essentially benevolent and pitiful. This 
 must not, however, blind us to the fact that he is 
 an ironist, and perhaps the most original in his 
 own sphere who has ever existed. Unless we 
 see this plainly, we are not prepared to compre- 
 hend him at all, and if our temperaments are so
 
 198 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Anglo-Saxon as to be impervious to this form of 
 approach, we shall do best to cease to pretend 
 that we appreciate M. Anatole France. To come 
 to a case in point, the very title of the Histoire 
 Comique is a dissimulation. The idea of calling 
 this tale of anguish and disillusion a " funny story" 
 would certainly baffle us, if we did not, quite by 
 chance, in the course of a conversation, come 
 upon the explanation. Constantin Marc, discuss- 
 ing the suicide of the actor Chevalier, " le trouvait 
 comique, c'est-a-dire appartenant aux comediens." 
 And this gives the keynote to the title and to the 
 tale ; it is a story about men and women who 
 deal with the phenomenal sides of things, and 
 who act life instead of experiencing it. It is a 
 book in which the personages, with the greatest 
 calmness, do and say the most terrible things, and 
 the irony consists in the mingled gravity and levity 
 with which they do and say them. 
 
 The design of the author, as always as most 
 of all in that most exquisite of his books, Le Jardin 
 d Epicure is to warn mankind against being too 
 knowing and too elaborate. Be simple, he says, 
 and be content to be deceived, or you cannot be 
 happy. Doctor Trublet, in the Histoire Comique, 
 the wise physician who attends the theatre, and 
 whom the actresses call Socrates, exclaims, " Je 
 tiens boutique de mensonges. Je soulage, je con- 
 sole. Peut-on consoler et soulager sans mentir ? " 
 This is a characteristic Anatolian paradox, and no 
 one who has followed the author's teaching will 
 find any difficulty in comprehending it. Over and 
 over again he has preached that intelligence is
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 199 
 
 vanity, that the more we know about life the less 
 we can endure the anguish of its impact. He says 
 somewhere is it not in Le Lys Rouge? that the 
 soul of man feeds on chimeras. Take this fabulous 
 nourishment from us, and you spread the banquet 
 of science before us in vain. We starve on the 
 insufficiency of a diet which has been deprived of 
 all our absurd traditional errors, " nos idees betes, 
 augustes et salutaires." It is strange that all the 
 subtlety of this marvellous brain should have found 
 its way back to the axiom, Unless ye become as 
 little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven. 
 
 These reflections may bewilder those who take 
 up the Histoire Comique as a work of mere enter- 
 tainment. They may even be scandalised by the 
 story ; and indeed to find it edifying at all, it is 
 needful to be prepared for edification. Novelists 
 are like the three doctors whom, at a critical 
 moment, Mme. Douce recommends to be called 
 in. They were all clever doctors, but Mme. Douce 
 could not find the address of the first, the second 
 had a bad character, and the third was dead. M. 
 Anatole France belongs to the first category, but 
 we must take care that we know his address. In 
 the Histoire Comique he has quitted his series called 
 Histoire Contemporaine, and, we regret, M. Bergerat. 
 Nor has he returned, as we admit we hoped he 
 had done, to the Rotisserie de la Reine Pe'dauque, 
 and the enchanting humours of his eighteenth cen- 
 tury. He has written a novel of to-day, of the 
 same class as Le Lys Rouge. He has taken the 
 coulisses of a great theatre as the scene of the very
 
 200 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 simple intrigue of his story, which is, as always 
 with M. Anatole France, more of a chronicle than 
 a novel, and extremely simple in construction. 
 
 He has chosen the theatre for his scene, one 
 may conjecture, because of the advantage it offers 
 to a narrator who wishes to distinguish sharply 
 between emotions and acts. It troubles M. Anatole 
 France that people are never natural. They 
 scarcely ever say a thing because they think it. 
 They say it because it seems the proper thing to 
 say, and it is extremely rare to find any one who is 
 perfectly natural. In this book Felicie Nanteuil 
 congratulates herself that her lover, Robert de 
 Ligny, is natural ; but that is her illusion ; he is 
 not. This contrast between what people feel and 
 think and what they say is projected in the highest 
 relief upon the theatre. A violent symbol of this is 
 shown in the great scene where the actress, fresh 
 from the funeral of the man whose jealousy has 
 destroyed her happiness for ever, is obliged, at a 
 rehearsal, to repeat over and over the phrase, 
 t( Mon cousin, je suis eveillee toute joyeuse ce 
 matin." 
 
 It would perhaps be difficult to point to a single 
 book which M. Anatole France has published in 
 which his theory that only two things, beauty and 
 goodness, are of any importance in life, seems at 
 first sight to be less prominent than in his Histotre 
 Comique. But it prevails here, too, we shall find, 
 if we are not hasty in judgment. And if we do 
 not care to examine the philosophy of the story, 
 and to reconcile its paradoxes with ethical truth, 
 we can at least enjoy the sobriety, the precision,
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE 201 
 
 the elasticity of its faultless style. If the reader 
 prefers to do so, he may take Histoire Comique 
 simply as a melancholy and somewhat sensuous 
 illustration of the unreasonable madness of love, 
 and of the insufficiency of art, with all its discipline, 
 to regulate the turbulent spirit of youth. 
 
 1903.
 
 PIERRE LOTI 
 
 IT is one of the advantages of foreign criticism 
 that it can stand a little aloof from the movement 
 of a literature, and be unaffected by the passing 
 fluctuations of fashion. It is not obliged to take 
 into consideration the political or social accidents 
 which may affect the reputation of an author at 
 home. The sensitive and dreamy traveller whose 
 name stands at the head of this page was, for ten 
 years after his first appearance with that delicious 
 fantasia which he called Raharu, but which the 
 public insisted on knowing as Le Manage de Loti, 
 the spoiled favourite of the Parisian press. His 
 writings of this first period have been frequently 
 examined in England, by no one, however, so 
 delicately and exhaustively as by Mr. Henry 
 James. In 1891 "Pierre Loti" (whose real name, 
 of course, is Captain Louis Marie Julien Viaud) 
 was elected a member of the French Academy. 
 His candidature began in mischief, as we read in 
 the Journal of Goncourt, and in jest it ended. His 
 discours de reception may have been a very diverting 
 document, but it could not be considered a wise 
 one. The merry sailor had his joke, and lost his 
 public that is to say, not to exaggerate, he alien- 
 ated the graver part of it. Since that time there 
 has been a marked disposition in French criticism
 
 PIERRE LOTI 203 
 
 to reduce Pierre Loti's pretentions, to insist upon 
 " showing him his place." If the attention paid 
 him before was excessive, so has been the neglect 
 which has since been his portion. Neither the 
 one nor the other has been perfectly sane ; neither 
 one nor the other should prevent a foreign critic 
 from endeavouring, from the vantage-ground of 
 distance, to discover the place in contemporary 
 literature held by an artist whose range is limited, 
 but who possesses exquisite sensibilities and a rare 
 faculty of notation. In the following pages I have 
 successively examined the main publications of 
 Pierre Loti since the crisis in his literary fortunes. 
 
 LE DESERT 
 
 This is the first work of importance which 
 Pierre Loti has published since he was made an 
 Academician, for Fantome d' Orient exceeded the 
 permission given to its author to be sentimental 
 and languishing, while Matelot, in spite of certain 
 tender pages, was distinctly below his mark. The 
 disturbance caused by his surprising entry into the 
 Mazarin Palace must now have passed away, for 
 in his new book he is eminently himself again. 
 This, at all events, is du meilleur Loti, and the 
 patient readers of fifteen previous volumes know 
 what that means. There is no more curious pheno- 
 menon in the existing world of letters than the 
 fascination of Loti. Here is a man and a writer 
 of a thousand faults, and we forgive them all. He 
 is a gallant sailor, and he recounts to us his 
 timidities and his effeminacies ; we do not care.
 
 204 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 He is absolutely without what we call " taste " ; 
 he exploits the weakness of his mother and the 
 death-bed of his aunt ; it makes no difference to 
 us. Irritated travellers of the precise cast say that 
 he is inaccurate ; no matter. Moralists throw up 
 their hands and their eyes at Aziyad6 and Chrysan- 
 theme and Suleima ; well, for the moment, we are 
 tired of being moral. The fact is, that for those 
 who have passed under the spell of Loti, he is irre- 
 sistible. He wields the authority of the charmer, 
 of the magician, and he leads us whither he 
 chooses. The critical spirit is powerless against 
 a pen so delicately sensitive, so capable of play- 
 ing with masterly effect on all the finer stops of 
 our emotions. 
 
 Even the sempiternal youth of Loti, however, is 
 waning away, and we are sensible in Le Desert 
 that the vitality of the writer is not what it was 
 when he made his first escapades in Senegambia, 
 in Montenegro, in Tahiti. Doubtless, the austerity 
 of the theme excludes indiscretion ; there is little 
 room for scandal in the monastery of Mount Sinai 
 or in the desert of Tih. But the secret of the 
 sovereign charm of Loti has always been the 
 exactitude with which his writing has transcribed 
 his finest and most fleeting emotions. He has 
 held up his pages like wax tablets and has pressed 
 them to his heart. This deep sincerity, not really 
 obscured to any degree by his transparent affecta- 
 tions, has given his successive books their poig- 
 nancy. And he has always known how to combine 
 this sincerity with tact, no living writer under- 
 standing more artfully how to arrange and to
 
 PIERRE LOTI 205 
 
 suggest, to heighten mystery or to arrest an 
 indolent attention. Hence it would not be like 
 him to conceal the advances of middle age, or to 
 attempt to deceive us. We find in Le Desert a 
 Loti who is as faithful to his forty-five years as 
 the author of Le Roman dun Spahi was to his five- 
 and-twenty. The curiosity in mankind, and in 
 particular in himself, seems to have grown less 
 acute ; the outlook on the world is clearer and 
 firmer, less agitated and less hysterical. The 
 central charm, the exquisite manner of expressing 
 perfectly lucid impressions, remains absolutely 
 unmodified. 
 
 The book is the record of an expedition which 
 occupied just four weeks. Armed with a safe- 
 conduct from the powerful Seid, Omar El 
 Senoussi El Hosni, at the end of February of 
 last year, and in company of a noble friend 
 whose name does not occur in his pages, although 
 it constantly occupied the newspapers of Paris, 
 Pierre Loti started from Cairo on his way to 
 Palestine. His great design was to pass through 
 the heart of Idumaea, by the route of Petra, it 
 having been ten years since any European had 
 crossed that portion of the desert. The sheik of 
 Petra, it appears, is in revolt against both Turkey 
 and Egypt, and has closed a route which in 
 Stanley's day was open and comparatively easy. 
 Loti was unable, as will be seen, to achieve his 
 purpose, but a unique fortune befell him. In the 
 meanwhile, he started by Suez, landing on the 
 other side of the gulf, ascended Sinai, descended 
 again eastward, reached the sea, and marched
 
 206 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 beside it up to the head of the bay, halting in 
 that strange little town of Akabah, which repre- 
 sents the Eziongaber of Scripture and the ^Elama 
 of the Crusaders. From this point he should 
 have started for Petra ; but as that proved quite 
 impossible, the expedition held a little to the west 
 and proceeded north through the singular and 
 rarely visited desert of Tih, the land of the 
 Midianites and the Amalekites. On Good Friday 
 they crossed the frontier of Palestine, and three 
 days later dismounted in one of the most ancient 
 and most mysterious cities in the world, Gaza of 
 the Philistines, a land of ruins and of dust, a 
 cluster of aged minarets and domes girdled by 
 palm-trees. The book closes with the words, 
 "To-morrow, at break of day, we shall start for 
 Jerusalem." 
 
 The sentiment of the desert has never been so 
 finely rendered before. Without emphasis, in his 
 calm, progressive manner, Loti contrives to plunge 
 us gradually in the colour and silence and desola- 
 tion of the wilderness. His talent for bringing up 
 before the eye delicate and complicated schemes 
 of aerial colour was never more admirably exer- 
 cised. He makes us realise that we have left 
 behind us the littleness and squalor of humanity, 
 lost in the hushed immensity of the landscape. 
 There are no crises in his narrative ; it proceeds 
 slowly onward, and, by a strange natural magic 
 in the narrator, we sweep onward with him. The 
 absence of salient features concentrates our atten- 
 tion on the vast outlines of the scene. As they 
 left the shores of the Gulf of Suez, the travellers
 
 PIERRE LOTI 207 
 
 quitted their European dress, and with it they 
 seemed to have left the western world behind. 
 Every night, as they camped in darkness, the 
 granite peaks still incandescent about them, the 
 air full of warm aromatic perfumes, they descended 
 into a life without a future and without a past, 
 into a dim land somewhere behind the sun and 
 the moon. 
 
 This is the class of impression which Pierre 
 Loti is particularly fortunate in rendering. We 
 turn from his pages to those of a traveller who 
 was, in his own class, an admirable writer, a quick 
 and just observer. Forty years before Loti set 
 forth, Canon (afterwards Dean) Stanley attempted 
 almost exactly the same adventure, and his " Sinai 
 and Palestine " is still a classic. It is very instruc- 
 tive to see how the same scenes struck two such 
 distinct minds, both so intelligent and subtle, 
 but the one a philosopher, the other an artist. 
 One of the most singular spots on the earth's 
 surface must be the desolate shore of the still 
 more desolate Gulf of Akabah. This is how 
 Stanley regarded it : 
 
 " What a sea ! what a shore ! From the dim 
 silvery mountains on the further Arabian coast, 
 over the blue waters of the sea, melting into 
 colourless clearness as they roll up the shelly 
 beach that beach red with the red sand, or red 
 granite gravel, that pours down from the cliffs 
 above those cliffs sometimes deep red, some- 
 times yellow and purple, and above them all the 
 blue cloudless sky of Arabia. Of the red sand 
 and rocks I have spoken ; but, besides these,
 
 208 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 fragments of red coral are for ever being thrown 
 up from the shores below, and it is these coralline 
 forests which form the true ' weeds ' of this fan- 
 tastic sea. But, above all, never did I see such 
 shells. Far as your eye can reach you can see 
 the beach whitening with them, like bleaching 
 bones." 
 
 This is eloquent, and Stanley is seldom so much 
 moved. But how much broader is the palette on 
 Loti's thumb, and how much more vivid is his 
 fragment of the same landscape : 
 
 " L'ensemble des choses est rose, mais il est 
 comme barr6 en son milieu par une longue bande 
 infinie, presque noire a force d'etre intensement 
 bleue, et qu'il faudrait peindre avec du bleu de 
 Prusse pur 16gerement z6br6 de vert 6meraude. 
 Cette bande, c'est la mer, 1'invraisemblable mer 
 d'Akabah ; elle coupe le desert en deux, nette- 
 ment, crument ; elle en fait deux parts, deux 
 zones d'une couleur d'hortensia, d'un rose exquis 
 de nuage de soir, ou, par opposition avec ces 
 eaux aux couleurs trop violentes et aux contours 
 trop durs, tout semble vaporeux, indecis a force 
 de miroiter et d'blouir, ou tout tincelle de nacre, 
 de granit et de mica, oil tout tremble de chaleur 
 et de mirage." 
 
 The analysis of such a passage as this, and it is 
 not exceptionally remarkable, tends to show the 
 reader what a singular, perhaps what an un- 
 precedented gift Loti has for recording, with 
 absolute precision, the shades and details of a 
 visual effect. His travels in the desert, where 
 there is scarcely anything but elementary forms
 
 PIERRE LOTI 209 
 
 of light and colour to be seen, have given him an 
 unparalleled opportunity for the exercise of a 
 talent which is less frequent than we are apt to 
 suppose, and which no recent French writer has 
 possessed in equal measure. There are pages of 
 Le Desert with which there is nothing in European 
 literature, of their limited class, to compare, except 
 certain of the atmospheric pictures in Fromentin's 
 two books and in Modern Painters. How bad this 
 sort of thing can be in clumsy hands, the gaudy 
 sunsets of William Black remind us. We turn in 
 horror from the thought, and re-read the descrip- 
 tions in Le Desert of morning and evening from 
 the ramparts of the monastery on Mount Sinai, of 
 the enchanted oasis of Oued-el-A'in, of the ceme- 
 tery of Akabah at midnight. These, and a score 
 more pictures, seem to pass in the very reality of 
 vision before our eyes, as the author quietly rolls 
 them out of the magic lantern of his journal. 
 
 The lover of adventure will find nothing to 
 excite him in Loti's panorama. The Bedouins 
 were amiable and exacting, the expedition never 
 lost its way, such dangers as threatened it proved 
 merely to be mirages. If the travellers met a 
 panther in a cave, it merely opened half a yellow 
 eye ; if robbers hovered in the distance, they 
 never came within rifle shot. Mr. Rider Haggard 
 would make our flesh creep in a single paragraph 
 more than the amiable French pilgrim does in his 
 whole volume. In the deep and sonorous desert 
 Loti went to seek, not a sword, but peace. One 
 central impression remains with the reader, of a 
 great empty red land, a silent Edom, red as when. 
 
 O
 
 210 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Diodorus Siculus described it two thousand years 
 ago, unchanging in its dry and resonant sterility. 
 Loti's book is simply the record of a peaceful 
 promenade, on the backs of swaying dromedaries, 
 across a broad corner of this vague and rose- 
 coloured infinity. 
 
 1895. 
 
 JERUSALEM 
 
 In the midst of that persistent and maddening 
 search for novelty which is the malady, and at the 
 same time the absurdity, of our feverish age, there is 
 present in most of us an instinct of a diametrically 
 opposite nature. If no quarter of a century has 
 ever flung itself against the brazen door of the 
 future with so crazy a determination to break into 
 its secrets, to know, at all hazards, what to-morrow 
 is to be like, it is equally certain that no previous 
 epoch has observed with so deep an attention the 
 relics of the extreme past, nor listened with an ear 
 bent so low for a whisper from the childhood of 
 the world. The bustle of modern life cannot 
 destroy our primal sense of the impressiveness of 
 mystery, and nothing within our range of ideas is 
 so mysterious as the life which those led who im- 
 printed on the face of our earth indelible marks of 
 their force two or even three thousand years ago. 
 Of all the human forces which interest and perplex, 
 those of the founders of religion overpower the 
 imagination most. If we can discover on this 
 earth a city which has been the cradle, not of one 
 mode of faith, but of many modes, we may be 
 sure that around the crumbling and defaced walls
 
 PIER.RE LOTI 211 
 
 of that city a peculiar enchantment must depend. 
 There is but one such place in the world, and no 
 processes of civilisation, no removal of barriers, no 
 telegraphs or railways, can part the idea of Jeru- 
 salem from its extraordinary charm of sacrosanct 
 remoteness. The peculiar sentiment of Zion is 
 well expressed for us in the volume which Pierre 
 Loti has dedicated to it, a book which none 
 of those who propose to visit the Holy Land 
 should fail to pack away in their trunks. M. 
 Loti is the charmer par excellence among living 
 writers. To him in higher degree than to any one 
 else is given the power of making us see the object 
 he describes, and of flooding the vision in the true, 
 or at all events the effective, emotional atmosphere. 
 He has no humour, or at least he does not allow 
 it to intrude into his work. To take up a book on 
 the Holy Land, and to find it jocose what an 
 appalling thing that would be ! We fancy that 
 Jerusalem is one of the few cities which Mark 
 Twain has never described. May he long be 
 prevented from visiting it ! A sense of humour is 
 an excellent thing in its place ; but the ancient 
 and mysterious cradles of religion are not its 
 proper fields of exercise. Mr. Jerome's Three 
 Men do very well in a Boat ; but it would require 
 the temper of an archimandrite to sojourn with 
 them in Jerusalem. M. Loti is never funny ; but 
 he is pre-eminently sensitive, acute, and sym- 
 pathetic. 
 
 With most of us theidea of Jerusalem was founded 
 in childhood. We retain the impression of a 
 clean, brilliantly white city, with flat roofs and a few
 
 212 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 scattered domes, perched on the crag of a mountain, 
 while precipices yawn below it and a broken desert 
 spreads around. To enhance the whiteness of the 
 shining town, the sky had usually been surcharged 
 with tempest by the artist. We formed the notion 
 that if we could climb to its neatly-fashioned gates 
 and escape the terrors of the dark gulfs below, 
 something very exquisite above all, very fresh, 
 trim, and lustrous would reward us inside those 
 strange ramparts. It is thus that Jerusalem appears 
 to-day to hundreds of thousands of spiritual pil- 
 grims. The hymns we sing and the sermons we 
 listen to support this illusion. They confound the 
 New Jerusalem with the old, and they suggest the 
 serenity and beauty of broad white streets and 
 saintly calm. Nothing could be falser to fact. 
 The real Jerusalem is what Lord Chesterfield calls, 
 in another sense, "a heterogeneous jumble of 
 caducity." It is a city that has turned reddish 
 with the concentrated dust of centuries. Under 
 this coating of dust there lurk fragments of all the 
 civilisations which have swept over it, one after the 
 other, one in the steps of the other. 
 
 This is the solemnising (even the terrifying) 
 aspect of Jerusalem. Its composite monuments, 
 in their melancholy abandonment, speak of the 
 horrors of its historic past. Nowhere can this 
 past be heard to speak more plainly than in the 
 wonderful kiosk, covered with turquoise-coloured 
 faience, which stands close to the Mosque of Omar 
 in the Haram-esh-Cherif. M. Loti describes its 
 double row of marble columns as a museum of 
 all the debris of the ages. Here are Greek and
 
 PIERRE LOTI 213 
 
 Roman capitals, fragments of Byzantine and of 
 Hebrew architecture ; and among these compara- 
 tively historic specimens there are others of a 
 wild and unknown style, at the sight of which the 
 imagination goes back to some forgotten art of the 
 primitive Jebusites, the very nature of which is 
 lost in the obscurity of remote time. It is the 
 peculiarity of Jerusalem that, whilst nothing has 
 been completely preserved, nothing has been 
 wholly lost. Jealous religions have fought with 
 one another for the possession of this rocky 
 sanctuary which they all have claimed. None 
 has entirely succeeded, and gradually all have 
 settled down to an uneasy toleration, each scrap- 
 ing away the dust and fashioning an altar for itself 
 among cyclopean stones which were ancient in the 
 days of Solomon, inside fortifications which Herod 
 may have built over the place of martyrdom of 
 some primitive and fabulous saint. 
 
 At the very foot of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, 
 where the path has crossed the Kedron and is just 
 about to mount again towards Gethsemane, there 
 is an extraordinary example of this sordid and 
 multifarious sanctity. A melancholy mausoleum 
 is seen, in the midst of which an ancient iron door 
 admits to the Tomb of the Virgin, a church of the 
 fourth century, which, for more than a thousand 
 years, has been the theatre of incessant ecclesiastical 
 battle. At the present moment the Western 
 Churches are excluded from this singular con- 
 venticle ; but the Greeks, the Armenians, the 
 Syrians, the Abyssinians, the Copts, and even the 
 Mahometans, make themselves at home in it.
 
 2i 4 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 The visitor enters, and is met by darkness and a 
 smell of damp and mildew. A staircase, dimly 
 perceived before him, leads down into the bowels 
 of the earth, and presently introduces him to a 
 church, which is more like a grotto than a human 
 construction, and continues to sink lower as he 
 proceeds. This strange cavern is dimly lighted by 
 hundreds of gold and silver lamps, of extreme 
 antiquity, hung from the low roof in wreaths and 
 garlands. Within this agitating place, which is full 
 of dark corners and ends of breakneck stairs that 
 climb to nothing, five or six religions, each hating 
 the rest, carry on simultaneously their ancient 
 rituals, and everywhere there ascend discord of 
 incoherent prayer and distracted singing, with 
 candles waving and incense burning, processions 
 in mediaeval brocades that disturb kneeling pilgrims 
 in the green turban of Mecca ; a chaos of con- 
 flicting religions humming and hurrying in the 
 darkness of this damp and barbarous cavern. 
 Nothing could give a stronger impression of the 
 bewildered genius of Jerusalem. 
 
 It was the privilege of M. Loti to be admitted to 
 the arcane treasuries of the Armenian Church in 
 Jerusalem, a privilege which, we understand him 
 to say, no previous traveller has enjoyed. Under 
 the special patronage of His Beatitude the 
 Patriarch, and after a strange diplomatic enter- 
 tainment of coffee, cigarettes, and a conserve of 
 rose-leaves, the French writer was permitted to 
 visit one of the oldest and most curious churches 
 in Jerusalem. Its walls and all its massive pillars 
 are covered with the lovely azure porcelain which
 
 PIERRE LOTI 215 
 
 is the triumph of ancient Arabic art. The thrones 
 of the Patriarchs are wrought in mosaics of 
 mother-of-pearl of an almost prehistoric work- 
 manship. From the roof hang golden lamps and 
 ostrich-eggs mounted in silver, while the marble 
 floors are concealed from view under thick Turkey 
 carpets of extreme antiquity, faded into exquisite 
 harmonies of yellow, blue, and rose-colour. It 
 was in front of the high altar, in the midst of all 
 this profusion of superb, archaic decoration, that 
 pale priests, with clear-cut profiles and black silky 
 beards, brought out to M. Loti one by one the 
 pieces of their incomparable and unknown Treasure, 
 a missal presented nearly seven hundred years 
 ago by a Queen of Cilicia, mitres heavy with 
 emeralds and pearls, tiaras of gold and rubies, 
 fairy-like textures of pale crimson, embroidered 
 with lavish foliage of pearl-work, in which the 
 flowers are emeralds and each fruit is a topaz. 
 Then, by little doors of mother-of-pearl, under 
 ancient hangings of velvet, through sacristies lined 
 with delicate porcelain, the visitor was hurried from 
 chapel to chapel, each stranger and more archaic 
 than the last, while his conductor, as though 
 speaking of the latest historical event which had 
 come to his knowledge, loudly lamented the cruel- 
 ties of that sacrilegious king Khosroes II. and the 
 ravages he had committed in Jerusalem. 
 
 This is an excellent specimen of the surprises that 
 the sacred city reserves for pious visitors. It is a 
 mass of decrepit fragments, a dust-heap of the reli- 
 gions of centuries upon centuries, preserving here 
 and there, under the mask of its affliction and its
 
 2i6 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 humiliation, folded away in its mysterious sanctu- 
 aries, remnants of the beauty of the past so com- 
 plete, so isolated, and so poignant, that the imagin- 
 ation finds it almost painful to contemplate them. 
 "Jerusalem, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least 
 in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy 
 peace ! But now they are hid from thine eyes." 
 
 1895. 
 
 LA GALILEE 
 
 The trilogy of travel is now concluded with 
 La Galilee. The completed work certainly forms 
 the most picturesque description of the Holy Land 
 and its surroundings which has yet been given to 
 the world. We close this third volume with a 
 sense of having really seen the places which had 
 been a sort of sacred mystery to us from earliest 
 childhood. Loti is a master of enchantment, and 
 so cunningly combines the arts of harmony and 
 colour in writing that he carries us, like St. 
 Thomas, whither we would not. In other words, 
 by the strange and scarcely analyzable charm of 
 his style, he bewitches us beyond our better 
 judgment. But a reaction comes, and we are 
 obliged to admit that in the case of La Galilee 
 it has come somewhat soon. 
 
 It was only while reading this third volume 
 that we became conscious that Pierre Loti was 
 doing rather a mechanical thing. In Le Desert 
 we were ready to believe that nothing but the 
 fascination of wild places took him across the 
 wilderness and up into that grotesque shrine of
 
 PIERRE LOTI 217 
 
 Christianity that lurks among the fierce pin- 
 nacles of Mount Sinai. In Jerusalem, led away 
 by the pathos of the scene and the poignant 
 grace of the pilgrim's reflections, we still per- 
 suaded ourselves to see in him one who withdrew 
 from the turmoil of the West that he might wor- 
 ship among the dead upon Mount Moriah. But 
 in La Galilee the illusion disappears. Loti crosses 
 Palestine, embarks upon the Sea of Gennesaret, 
 ascends Mount Hermon, winds down into the 
 rose-oasis of Damascus, no longer as the insou- 
 ciant and aristocratic wanderer, " le Byron de ncs 
 jours," but as a tourist like ourselves, wrapped in 
 a burnous, it is true, and not personally con- 
 ducted by Messrs. Cook & Sons, yet not the 
 less surely an alien, manufacturing copy for the 
 press. He is revealed as the " special corres- 
 pondent," bound, every night, however weary he 
 may be, to " pan out " sufficient description to fill 
 a certain space on the third page of the " Figaro." 
 There is nothing dishonourable in being a 
 special correspondent, nor is there a journalist 
 living who might not envy Pierre Loti the sup- 
 pleness and fluid felicity of his paragraphs. But 
 this is not the light in which we have learned 
 to know him. He has very carefully taught us 
 to regard him as one to whom literature is 
 indifferent, who never looks at a newspaper, 
 whose impressions of men and manners are 
 formed in lands whither his duties as a sailor 
 have casually brought him, who writes of them 
 out of the fullness of his heart, in easy exquisite 
 numbers cast forth as the bird casts its song. We
 
 218 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 have had an idea that Loti never looks at a 
 proof, that some comrade picks up the loose 
 leaves as they flutter in the forecastle, and 
 sends them surreptitiously to kind M. Calmann 
 Levy. When he is elected to the French 
 Academy, he is the last to know it, and wonders, 
 as he is rowed back from some Algerian har- 
 bour, what his men are shouting about on 
 board his ship. All this is the legend of Loti, 
 and we have nourished and cherished it, but it 
 will not bear the fierce light that beats upon La 
 Galilee. We cannot pretend any longer; we 
 cannot force ourselves to think of a romantic 
 pilgrim of the sea, flung ashore at Aleppo and 
 wandering vaguely up into the spurs of Carmel. 
 Certainly not ! This is a Monsieur Loti who is 
 travelling in the pay of an enterprising Parisian 
 newspaper, does his work very conscientiously, but 
 is sometimes not a little bored with it. 
 
 The reader, who finds out that he has been 
 played with, grows captious and unjust. The 
 result of discovering that Pierre Loti, notwith- 
 standing the burnous and the Arab carpets, is 
 nothing better than a glorified commis vqyageur, 
 has made us crusty. We are displeased that he 
 should travel so fast, and be willing to scamper 
 through the whole of " ce pays sacre de Galil " in 
 six weeks. It is really no matter of ours whether 
 he lingers or not, and yet we resent that he should 
 push on as monotonously as any of the Cookites 
 do, about whom he is so sarcastic. Our disgust 
 invades us even when we read the famous descrip- 
 tions ; we feel, not that they impressed themselves
 
 PIERRE LOTI 219 
 
 irresistibly upon him, but that he went out for the 
 purpose of making them, and made them as fast 
 as he could. He becomes, to our affronted fancy, 
 a sort of huge and infinitely elaborate photographic 
 machine, making exquisite kodaks as his guides 
 hurry him along. All this, we admit, is very 
 unfair, but it exemplifies the danger of admitting 
 the public too much into the works of the musical 
 box. We find ourselves glancing back at our old 
 favourites with horrid new suspicions. Was he 
 paid so much a line to make love to his plaintive 
 bride in Tahiti ? Did some newspaper engage 
 him to pursue Aziyade so madly through the length 
 and breadth of Stamboul ? Was the Press kept 
 waiting while Tante Claire was dying ? These are 
 hideous questions, and we thrust them from us, 
 but Pierre Loti should really be made to realise 
 that the romantic attachment which his readers 
 bear him is a tender plant. He holds them 
 because he is so wayworn and desolate, but if he 
 read his Shelley he would learn that " desolation 
 is a delicate thing." 
 
 We would not be supposed to deny that La 
 Galilee is full of pages which Loti only could write, 
 pictures which he alone could paint. Here is a 
 marvellous vignette of that sombre and sepulchral 
 city of Nablous, so rarely visited by Christians, so 
 isolated in its notorious bigotry, which an outrage 
 on a small Protestant mission has just brought 
 prominently before us. Here is Nazareth in 
 twilight, with the moon flooding the boundless gulf 
 of grasses that stretch from its rocky feet. Very 
 impressive is the picture of the dead city of
 
 220 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Tiberias, along whose solemn and deserted quays, 
 once thronged with shipping, no vessel has been 
 moored for centuries, looking down at the reflection 
 of its crenelated walls in the tideless waters of 
 Gennesaret. Beautiful, too, and " du meilleur Loti " 
 is the description of the descent from the grey 
 terraces of Hermon, to that miraculous oasis in 
 the Idumean desert where Damascus lifts its rose- 
 coloured minarets and domes out of pale-green 
 orchards of poplars and pomegranates, beneath 
 whose boughs the rivulets run sparkling over a 
 carpet of iris and anemone. It is in forming 
 impressions such as these, where no detail escapes 
 the narrator's eye, and not a word is said too 
 little or too much, that Pierre Loti asserts that 
 supremacy as a master of description which no 
 carelessness and no inconsistency can deprive him 
 of. He has little pretension to being an intellectual 
 force in literature, but as a proficient in this 
 species of sensuous legerdemain he has had no 
 rival, and is not likely soon to be surpassed. 
 
 1896. 
 
 FIGURES ET CHOSES QUI PASSAIENT 
 
 It has long been the custom of Pierre Loti to 
 gather together at intervals those short pieces of 
 his prose which have not found their place in any 
 consecutive fiction or record of travel. In the 
 case of most authors, even of the better class, 
 such chips from the workshop would excite but a 
 very languid interest, or might be judged wholly
 
 PIERRE LOTI 221 
 
 impertinent. All that Loti does, however, on 
 whatever scale, is done with so much care and is 
 so characteristic of him, that his admirers find 
 some of their richest feasts in these his baskets of 
 broken meat. The genuine Lotist is a fanatic, 
 who can give no other reason for the faith that 
 is in him than this, that the mere voice of this 
 particular writer is an irresistible enchantment. 
 It is not the story, or the chain of valuable 
 thoughts, or the important information supplied 
 by Pierre Loti that enthrals his admirers. It is 
 the music of the voice, the incomparable magic of 
 the mode in which the mournful, sensuous, exquisite 
 observations are delivered. He is a Pied Piper, 
 and as for his admirers, poor rats, as he pipes, 
 they follow, follow. He who writes these lines is 
 always among the bewitched. 
 
 The convinced Lotist, then, will not be dis- 
 couraged to hear that Figures et Choses qui passaient, 
 which is the twentieth tune (or volume) which this 
 piper has played to us, is made up entirely of bits 
 and airs that seem to have lost their way from 
 other works. On the contrary, it will amuse and 
 stimulate him to notice that Passage d'Enfant 
 suggests a lost chapter of Le Livre de la Pitie et de 
 la Mott ; that Instant de Recueillement reads like a 
 rejected preface to the novel called Ramuntcho ; 
 that Passage de Sultan is a sort of appendix to 
 Fantome d' Or lent; and that Passage de Carmencita 
 forms a quite unexpected prelude to Le Manage de 
 Loti. But this at least may be said, that this beau 
 gabier of literature, the fantastic and wayward 
 sailor so signally unlike the kind of mariner
 
 222 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 (with a pigtail, and hitching up white ducks), 
 who still continues to be our haunting mari- 
 time convention this complicated and morbid 
 Alcade de la\ Mer who walks so uncompromis- 
 ingly the quarter-deck of the French Academy, 
 has never published a book which more tyranni- 
 cally presupposes an acquaintance with all his 
 previous works. But he knows our frailty ; and 
 I will make a confession which may go to the 
 heart of other Lotists. There is one piece in 
 Figures et Choses which certainly ought never to 
 have been written. I hope to screw up my 
 courage, presently, to reprove it by name ; it is 
 horrible, unseemly. But I have read every word 
 of it, slowly, with gusto, as we read our Loti, 
 balancing the sentences, drawing the phrases over 
 the palate. It is a vice, this Lotism ; and I am not 
 sure that there ought not to be a society to put 
 it down. Yet if I were persuaded to sign a pledge 
 never to read another page of Loti, I know that 
 I should immediately break it. 
 
 Yet Loti does everything which, according to 
 the rules, he should not do. Passage d'Enfant, 
 with which this volume opens, is a study such as 
 no Englishman can conceive himself proposing to 
 write. The author is in Paris, about some official 
 business. He receives a letter and a telegram to 
 say that a little boy of two years old, the child of 
 a pair of his domestic servants at Rochefort, has 
 suddenly died of croup. The resulting emotion 
 is so capricious, so intimate, so poignant, that one 
 would hardly be able to tell it, were it one's own 
 experience, to one's most familiar friend. Pierre
 
 PIERRE LOTI 223 
 
 Loti tells it to the world in full detail, without 
 concealment of names or places or conditions, and 
 with an absolute perfection of narrative. He 
 weaves it into a sort of diatribe against " the stupid 
 cruelty of death." He flies back to his home, he 
 visits the little newly-made grave, he mingles his 
 tears with those of the child's father, he recalls a 
 score of pretty tricks and babblings. There seems 
 to us English people a certain lack here of decent 
 proportion or self-command. Yet these are local 
 matters, and the standard of taste varies so much 
 at different times in different countries that one 
 hesitates to dogmatise. And besides, the whole 
 thing is steeped in that distinguished melancholy 
 beauty which redeems and explains everything. 
 
 A large section of this new volume deals with 
 the customs and landscape of that extreme corner 
 of south-western France which the author has 
 made his own during the years in which he has 
 been stationed at the mouth of the Bidassoa. All 
 these studies of the " Euskal-Erria," the primitive 
 Basque Country, are instinct with the most grace- 
 ful qualities of Pierre Loti's spirit. He has an 
 exquisite instinct for the preservation of whatever 
 is antique and beautiful, a superstitious conser- 
 vatism pushed almost to an affectation. As he 
 grows older, this characteristic increases with him. 
 He has become an impassioned admirer of cathe- 
 drals ; he is moved, almost to an act of worship, 
 by sumptuous and complicated churches ; he bows 
 a dubiously adoring knee at Loyola and at Burgos. 
 He is very eager to take part in processions, he is 
 active among crowds of penitents, he omits no
 
 224 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 item in the sensual parts of ritual, and is swayed 
 almost to intoxication on the ebb and flood of 
 mysterious and archaic incantations. The reader 
 of his Jerusalem will recall how earnestly and 
 how vainly Pierre Loti sought for a religious idea, 
 or a genuine inspiration of any spiritual kind, 
 among the shrines and waters of Palestine. Once 
 more this unction is denied him. Doomed for 
 ever to deal with the external side of things, the 
 exquisite envelope of life, Loti, as time goes by, 
 seems knocking with a more and more hope- 
 less agitation at the door of the mystical world. 
 But that which is revealed to children will never 
 be exposed to him. It ought to be enough for 
 Loti that he surpasses all the rest of his fellow- 
 men in the perfection of his tactile apparatus. 
 That which is neither to be seen, nor touched, 
 nor smelled, nor heard, lies outside his province. 
 
 But, within his province, what a magician he 
 is ! Vacances de Pdques, apparently a cancelled 
 chapter from Le Roman dun Enfant, tells us how 
 a certain Easter holiday was spent in Loti's child- 
 hood, and how the days flew one after another, 
 in the same cold rain, under the same black sky. 
 The subject, mainly dealing with a neglected 
 imposition and the dilatory labours of an idle 
 schoolboy, seems as unpromising as possible, but 
 the author's skill redeems it, and this little essay 
 contains one page on the excessive colour of 
 bright flowers under a grey or broken sky which 
 ranks among the best that he has written. Pierre 
 Loti is always excellent on this subject ; one re- 
 collects the tiny blossoms that enamelled the floor
 
 PIERRE LOTI 225 
 
 of his tent in Au Maroc. In the present volume, 
 while he is waiting on the hill-side to join the 
 procession winding far up the Pyrenees to Ron- 
 cevaux, he notes the long rosy spindles of the 
 foxgloves, lashed with rain, the laden campanulas, 
 the astonishing and almost grotesque saxifrages 
 torn and ravaged by the hail. And here and 
 there a monotonous flush of red flowers rosy 
 moss-campions, rosy geraniums, rosy mallows 
 and from the broken stalks the petals flung in pink 
 ribands across the delicate deep green mosses. 
 
 An example of the peculiar subtlety of Loti's 
 symbolism is afforded by the curious little study 
 here called Papillon de Mite. In that corner of 
 his house in Rochefort of which he has often told 
 us, where all the treasures are stored up that he 
 has brought home from his travels, the author 
 watches a clothes-moth disengage itself from a 
 splendid Chinese robe of red velvet, and dance in 
 a sunbeam. Rapidly, rapidly, in the delirium of 
 existence, this atom waves its wings of silken dust, 
 describing its little gay, fantastic curves of flight. 
 Loti strikes it carelessly to the ground, and then 
 begins to wonder what it is that it reminds him 
 of. Where had he once seen before in his life 
 something " papillonnement gris pareil " which 
 had caused him a like but a less transient melan- 
 choly ? And he recollects it was long ago, at 
 Constantinople, on the wooden bridge that con- 
 nects Stamboul and Pera. A woman who had 
 lost both her legs was begging, while a little, grey, 
 impassive child, with shrivelled hands, lay at her 
 side. Presently the mother called the child to 
 
 p
 
 226 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 come and have its small garment put on, when all 
 at once it leaped from her hands and escaped, 
 dancing about in the cold wind, and flapping the 
 sleeves of its burnous-like wings. And it was of 
 this poor child, soon exhausted, soon grey and 
 immobile again, but for an instant intoxicated with 
 the simple ecstasy of existence and motion, that 
 Loti was reminded by the curves and flutterings 
 of the clothes-moth. This is a wonderfully 
 characteristic example of the methods of the 
 author, of his refined sensibility, vivid memory 
 for details, and fondness for poignant and subtle 
 impressions of association. 
 
 In Profanation the study which I have dared 
 to speak of with reprobation I feel sure that 
 he carries too far his theory that we may say any- 
 thing if only we say it exquisitely enough and in 
 the interests of pity. Loti's ideas of " taste," of 
 reticence, are not ours ; he does not address an 
 Anglo-Saxon audience. But the cases in which 
 he offends against even our conventions are very 
 few in Figures et Chases. I have left myself no 
 space to speak of the vivid pictures of sports 
 among the primeval Basque population studies, 
 one might conjecture them to be, for the book 
 that afterwards became Ramuntcho. I can but 
 refer, with strong commendation, to the amazing 
 description of the sacred dance of the Souletins. 
 The last one hundred pages of this enchanting 
 volume are occupied by Trots Journe'es de Guerre, 
 an exceedingly minute and picturesque report of 
 the storming of the city of Hu6 in the Annam 
 War of 1883. Unless I am mistaken, these notes
 
 PIERRE LOTI 227 
 
 were originally sent home to some Parisian news- 
 paper, where their publication gave great offence 
 at the French Admiralty or War Office. Why it 
 should do so, it is not easy after fifteen years of 
 suppression to conceive. These Trots Journe'es de 
 Guerre en Annam form one of the most admirably 
 solid of all Pierre Loti's minor writings. They 
 ought to be read in conjunction with the book 
 called Propos d'ExiL 
 
 1897. 
 
 RAMUNTCHO 
 
 In Ramuntcho Pierre Loti returns to the class 
 of work which originally made him famous. It is 
 eleven years since he published Pecheur d'Islande, 
 the latest of his genuine novels, for we refuse to 
 include among these the distressing sketch called 
 Matelot. During this decade he has written much, 
 and some of it, such as Fantome d 'Orient, has taken 
 a form half-way between fact and fiction ; the rest 
 has been purely descriptive, culminating, or rather 
 going to seed, in the rather empty volume called 
 La Galilee. It is probable that Loti who for 
 a person who never reads anything (as he told the 
 French Academy) is remarkably shrewd in feeling 
 the pulse of literature has become conscious that 
 he must recover some lost steps of his position. 
 After a considerable pause, then, he comes forward 
 with a book which is not only one of the most 
 attractive that he has ever written, but belongs to 
 the class which the public particularly enjoys. In 
 Ramuntcho the tribe of the Lotists recover the Loti
 
 228 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 that they like best, the Loti of Pecheur d'Islande 
 and Le Roman d'un Spahi. Such a book as this, 
 very carefully written in his best style by the 
 most sensitive writer now living, is an event, and 
 one on which to congratulate ourselves. 
 
 The scene of Ramuntcho is the extreme south- 
 western corner of France, between the Bay of 
 Biscay and the Pyrenees, where the remnants 
 of an ancient race speak their mysterious and 
 unrelated Basque language, and live a life apart 
 from the interests and habits of their fellow- 
 countrymen. We are reminded of the Breton 
 scenes in Mon Frere Yves, with their flashes of 
 sunshine breaking through long spells of rain and 
 mist ; and Ramuntcho, the hero of the book, is, 
 indeed, a sort of Yves less intelligent, less 
 developed, carried less far into manhood, but with 
 the same dumb self-reliance, the same unadulter- 
 ated physical force, the same pathetic resignation 
 as the scion of a wasting, isolated race. The 
 landscape of the Basque country interpenetrates 
 the whole fabric of the story ; we never escape 
 from it for a moment. We move among grey 
 hamlets, infinitely old, which are perched among 
 great chestnuts, high up upon the terraces of 
 mountain sides. On one hand the Bay of Biscay, 
 with its troubled waters, never ceases to moan ; 
 on the other, the tumultuous labyrinth of the 
 Pyrenees, with its sinuous paths and winding 
 streams, stretches interminably, obscure and threat- 
 ening. In each of the sparse mountain villages 
 two monuments of great antiquity hold the local 
 life together ; one is the massive and archaic
 
 PIERRE LOTI 229 
 
 church, often as solid as a fortress ; the other is 
 the fives-court, in which for generations past all 
 the young men of the parish have tempered their 
 muscles of steel, and become adepts in this national 
 game of la pelote. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the way in which 
 the imagination of M. Loti works will have no 
 difficulty in guessing the line he takes with such a 
 landscape as this. Its inaccessibility to modern 
 innovations, its secular decay, the gravity and 
 dignity of its inhabitants, their poverty and in- 
 dependence, their respect for physical beauty, their 
 hardy activity all these are qualities naturally 
 fascinating to M. Loti, and he adds to a com- 
 bination of these the peculiar melancholy, the 
 sense of the inexorable " fallings from us, vanish- 
 ings," of which he is so singular a master. Never 
 has he been more pathetic, more deeply plunged 
 in the consciousness that, as the Persian poet 
 puts it, 
 
 " The Stars are setting, and the Caravan 
 Starts for the Dawn of Nothing." 
 
 Never has he expended a greater wealth of melody 
 and colour, never fused his effects into tones of 
 rarer delicacy, than in this tale of smuggling, 
 peloie-p\a.y'mg and courtship in a mountain village 
 of the Basques. 
 
 No injustice is done to the author of such a 
 novel as this by giving an outline of his plot, for 
 the mere story is primitive and simple ; it is in 
 the telling that the art consists. The hamlet of 
 Etchezar is the home of Franchita, a lonely
 
 230 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 woman, who, with one little son, Raymond or 
 (in Basque) Ramuntcho, stole back thither some 
 fifteen years before the tale opens, having been 
 deserted by the man, an unnamed person of 
 quality from Paris, whose mistress she had been 
 in Biarritz. Ramuntcho grows up with a mixed 
 temperament ; partly he is a Basque, stolid, im- 
 penetrable, intensely local, but partly also he is 
 conscious of cosmopolitan instincts, faint blasts of 
 longing, like those which come to Arne in Bjorn- 
 son's beautiful story, for the world outside, the 
 au-dela, or, as Ramuntcho vaguely puts it, " les 
 choses d'ailleurs." In the village of Etchezar, 
 which mainly supports itself by smuggling, the 
 widow Dolores is a prominent personage, with 
 her intensely respectable past, her store of money, 
 and the two beautiful children, her son Arrochkoa 
 and her daughter Gracieuse. But she hates and 
 despises the unfortunate Franchita, and scorns 
 Ramuntcho. The latter youth, arriving at the 
 maturity of seventeen years, and in close amity 
 with Arrochkoa, is admitted into the secret fellow- 
 ship of a most desperate and successful band of 
 smugglers, who, under the guidance of Itchoua, a 
 much older man, harry the frontier of Spain. 
 
 The excursions of the smugglers give M. Loti 
 opportunities for his matchless power in visual 
 writing. The great scene in which, under the 
 intoxication of the magical south wind, the band 
 of desperados cross the shining estuary of the 
 Bidassoa at sunrise, is superb. But still more 
 striking are the pictures of home life in the village, 
 the ceremonies and entertainments on All Saints
 
 PIERRE LOTI 231 
 
 Day, scenes the theatres of which are the church 
 and the pelote-couri. In the national game the 
 Basque fives in excelsis Ramuntcho becomes, as 
 he approaches the age of eighteen, extremely 
 skilful ; he and Arrochkoa, indeed, are the two 
 champion players of the whole district, and are 
 thus drawn into closer mutual friendship. And 
 under the smile with which Gracieuse rewards his 
 prowess at the game, an old affection for the sister 
 of his friend is blown into a passion, which is 
 returned, and would be avowed, but for the 
 jealousy of old Dolores. The lovers are driven to 
 innocent clandestine meetings on the stone bench 
 under Dolores' house, or, upon moonlight nights, 
 within the dense shadow of the chestnut trees. If 
 there is any theme in which M. Loti delights, and 
 to the delineation of which he brings his most 
 delicate and sympathetic gifts, it is the progress of 
 the passion of love in adolescence. Ramuntcho 
 comes to Gracieuse from his perilous skirmishings 
 with the Spanish Custom-house officers, and from 
 long vigils which have brought him close to the 
 very pulse of nature. I cannot refrain from 
 quoting, in this connexion, one passage intimately 
 characteristic of its author : 
 
 "Voici venir les longs crepuscules pales de 
 juin. . . . Pour Ramuntcho, c'est 1'epoque ou la 
 contrebande devient un metier presque sans peine, 
 avec des heures charmantes : marcher vers les 
 sommets, a travers les nuages printaniers ; franchir 
 les ravins, errer dans des regions de sources et de 
 figuiers sauvages ; dormir, pour attendre 1'heure 
 convenue avec les carabiniers complices, sur des
 
 232 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 tapis de menthes et d'ceillets. La bonne senteur 
 des plantes impregnait ses habits, sa veste jamais 
 mise qui ne lui servait que d'oreiller ou de 
 couverture ; et Gracieuse quelquefois lui disait le 
 soir : ' Je sais la contrebande que vous avez faite 
 la nuit dernierej car tu sens les 'menthes de la 
 montagne au-dessus de Mendiazpi,' ou bien : 'Tu 
 sens les absinthes du marais de Subernoa.' " 
 
 This happy condition of things is brought to an 
 end by the necessity in which Ramuntcho finds 
 himself of opting for Spanish or French citizen- 
 ship. If he chooses the latter, he must prepare 
 for three years' absence on military duty before he 
 can marry Gracieuse. He determines, however, 
 that to accept his fate is the manly thing to do ; 
 but hardly has he so decided, when an unexpected 
 letter comes from an uncle Ignacio, in Uruguay, 
 offering to adopt him if he will go out to America. 
 The proposal comes too late, and he starts for his 
 military service. Then the tragedy begins. He 
 returns after his three years' absence to find his 
 mother dying, and his Gracieuse vanished. The 
 bitter old Dolores, after vainly thrusting a rich 
 suitor upon her daughter, has driven her to take 
 the veil, and she is now a nun in a little remote 
 mountain-convent close to the Spanish frontier. 
 Ramuntcho takes up the old wild life as a smuggler, 
 but he cannot get the idea of Gracieuse out of 
 his mind ; and at last, encouraged by Arrochkoa, 
 he determines to make a raid on the convent, 
 snatch Gracieuse from her devotions, and fly with 
 her to Argentina. The two young men make 
 an elaborate plan for a nocturnal rape of their
 
 PIERRE LOTI 233 
 
 Iberian Sabine. But when they arrive at the 
 peaceful, noiseless nunnery, and are hospitably 
 received by the holy women, their ardour dies 
 away. Gracieuse gives no sign of any wish to fly ; 
 she merely says, when she hears that Ramuntcho 
 is leaving the country, that they will all pray the 
 Virgin that he may have a happy voyage. Intimi- 
 dated by the sanctity of the life which it seemed 
 so easy to break into as they talked about it late 
 at nights over their chacoti, but which now seems 
 impregnable, the lads go peaceably away, Arroch- 
 koa sullenly to his nocturnal foray on the frontier, 
 Ramuntcho with a broken heart to Bordeaux and 
 Buenos Ayres. And so, with that tribute to the 
 mutability of fortune which Loti loves, and 
 with a touch of positive pietism which we meet 
 with in his work almost for the first time there 
 was a hint of it in Jerusalem this beautiful and 
 melancholy book closes. We feel as we put down 
 the volume more convinced than ever of the 
 unique character of its author's talent, so evasive 
 and limited, and yet within its own boundaries of 
 so exquisite a perfection. It is a talent in which 
 intellect - : has no part, but in which melody and 
 perfume and colour combine with extraordinary 
 vivacity to produce an impression of extreme and 
 perhaps not quite healthy sensibility. 
 
 1897.
 
 234 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 LES DERNIERS JOURS DE PEKIN. 
 
 It was a fortunate chance which sent to China, 
 in the late autumn of 1900, the man in whom, 
 perhaps more delicately than in any other living 
 person, are combined the gifts of the seeing eye 
 and the expressive pen. The result is a book 
 which, so far as mere visual presentment goes, 
 may safely be said to outweigh the whole bulk of 
 what else was sent home from the extreme East, 
 in letters and articles to every part of the world, 
 during that terrible period of storm and stress. 
 Pierre Loti arrived when the fighting was over, 
 when the Imperial family had fled, and when the 
 mysteries of the hitherto inviolable capital of China 
 had just first been opened to the Powers. He 
 reaped the earliest harvest of strange and magni- 
 ficent impressions, and he saw, with that incom- 
 parably clear vision of his, what no European had 
 seen till then, and much that no human being will 
 ever see again. Moreover, after a long rest, the 
 great artist, who had seemed in Jerusalem, and still 
 more in La Galilee, to have tired his pen a little, 
 and to have lost something of his firm clairvoyance, 
 has enjoyed a rest of several years. His style 
 proclaims the advantage of this reserve. Loti is 
 entirely himself again ; never before, not even in 
 the matchless Fleurs dExil, has he presented his 
 talent in a form more evenly brilliant, more splen- 
 didly characteristic in its rich simplicity, than in 
 Les Derniers Jours de Pe'kin. 
 
 Pierre Loti arrived at Ning-Hal, on the Yellow 
 Sea, in a French man-of-war, on October 3, and a
 
 PIERRE LOTI 235 
 
 week later he started on a mission to Peking. His 
 journey thither was marked by no very striking 
 events, except his passage through the vast and 
 deserted city of Tong-Tcheou, full of silence and 
 corpses, and paved with broken porcelain. The 
 horrors of this place might fill a niche in some 
 eastern Inferno ; and they offer Loti his first oppor- 
 tunity to exercise in China his marvellous gift for 
 the reproduction of phenomena. We pass with 
 him under the black and gigantic ramparts of 
 Tong-Tcheou, and thread its dreadful streets under 
 the harsh and penetrating light of Chinese autumn. 
 The coldness, the dark colour, the awful silence, 
 the importunate and crushing odour of death, these 
 he renders as only a master can. The little party 
 pursues its course, and on October 18, quite sud- 
 denly, in a grim solitude, where nothing had been 
 visible a few seconds before, a huge crenelated 
 rampart hangs high above their heads, the discon- 
 certing and grimacing outer wall of the Tartar city 
 of Peking. 
 
 We cannot follow the author through his intel- 
 lectual adventures, on a scene the most mysterious 
 and the most tragic in the modern world, where, 
 it is true, the agony of movement had ceased, but 
 where, in the suspense and hush, the mental ex- 
 citement was perhaps even greater than it had been 
 during the siege. Everywhere was brooding the 
 evidence of massacre, everywhere the horror of 
 catastrophe, in what had so lately been the most 
 magnificent city in the world, and what was now 
 merely the most decrepit. The author, by virtue 
 of his errand and his fame, had the extreme good
 
 236 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 fortune to be passed from the ruined French Em- 
 bassy, in and in, through the Yellow City and the 
 Pink City, to the very Holy of Holies, the ultimate 
 and mysterious shrine, never before exhibited or 
 even described to a Western eye, where, above the 
 fabulous Lake of Lotus, the Empress and the Em- 
 peror had their group of secluded palaces. He 
 was lodged in a gallery, walled entirely with glass 
 and rice-paper, where marvellous ebony sculptures 
 dropped in lacework from the ceiling, and where 
 Imperial golden-yellow carpets, incredibly soft and 
 sumptuous, rolled their dragons along the floor. 
 Here the Empress, until a month or two before, 
 had played the goddess among her great ladies in 
 an indolent magnificence of flowers and satins and 
 music. 
 
 But, perhaps, more incalculable still was the 
 little dark chamber, furnished with a deep austerity 
 of taste, and faintly pervaded with an odour of tea, 
 of withered roses and of old silks, where, on a low 
 bed, the dark blue coverlid thrown hastily aside, 
 no change had been made since the pale and timid 
 Emperor, whose innermost lair this was, had risen, 
 in a paroxysm of terror, to fly for his life into the 
 darkness, into the unknown spaces, guided only 
 by that fierce and wonderful woman, of whose per- 
 sonal greatness everything that reaches us through 
 the dimness of report merely seems to intensify 
 our perception. 
 
 It is impossible here to do more than indicate 
 the fullness of the descriptive passages which 
 throng this volume. All the scenes, by day and 
 night, in the Pink City, with its ramparts the
 
 PIERRE LOTI 237 
 
 colour of dried blood ; all the pictures of temples 
 and pagodas, half-lost in groves of immemorial 
 cedars, and stained, in their exquisite and precious 
 beauty, by dust, and corruption, and neglect ; all 
 the visits to sinister mandarins ; all the chiaroscuro 
 of night, scented and twinkling, falling upon this 
 foul and fairylike nightmare all must be read in 
 the author's own language. How concise that is, 
 how unaffected, how competent to transfer to us 
 the image strongly imprinted upon Loti's own 
 delicately ductile vision, one extract must suffice 
 to exemplify. It is the conclusion of the account 
 he gives of his visit to the triple Temple of the 
 Lamas, where all had been in contrast, in its colour 
 of ochre and rust, with the rose-colour and golden 
 yellow of purely Chinese state ornament : 
 
 " Ce dernier temple le plus caduc peut-etre, le 
 plus dejete, et le plus vermoulu ne presente que 
 la repetition obsedante des deux autres sauf 
 pourtant 1'idole du centre qui, au lieu d'etre assise 
 et de taille humaine, surgit debout, gante, im- 
 preVue et presque effroyable. Les plafonds d'or, 
 coup6s pour la laisser passer, lui arrivent a mi- 
 jambe, et elle monte toute droite sous une espece 
 de clocher dor, qui la tient par trop etroitement 
 emboitee. Pour voir sa visage, il faut s'approcher 
 tout contre les autels, et lever la tete au milieu des 
 brule-parfums et des rigides fleurs ; on dirait alors 
 une momie de Titan erige dans sa gaine, et son 
 regard baisse^ au premier abord, cause quelque 
 crainte. Mais, en la fixant, on subit d'elle un 
 malefice plutot charmeur ; on se sent hypnotist 
 et retenu la par son sourire, qui tombe d'en haut
 
 238 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 si dtach6 et si tranquille, sur tout son entourage 
 de splendeur expirante, d'or, et de poussiere, de 
 froid, de cr6puscule, de ruines, et de silence." 
 
 Pierre Loti's brief visit was paid just when the 
 tide was turning. Even while he stayed in his 
 fairy palace he noted the rapid recovery of Peking. 
 The corpses were being buried out of sight, the 
 ruins repaired, the raw edges of useless and 
 barbarous destruction healed over. And now, 
 after so short an absence, the mysterious Empress 
 and her flock of mandarins are back once more, 
 to restore as best they may their sparkling ter- 
 races of alabaster and their walls of sanguine lac. 
 Once more the secrets of the Pink City will fold 
 their soft curtains around them, and that inscrut- 
 able existence of ceremonious luxury resume its 
 ancient course. Will any living Western man see 
 again what Loti and his comrades saw in the 
 winter of 1900? In one sense it is impossible 
 that he should, since the adorable palace of the 
 Empress, occupied by Field-Marshal von Walder- 
 see, was burned down by accident in April 1901. 
 But even what survives is only too likely to be 
 hidden again for ever from European eyes, unless, 
 indeed, another massacre of Christians throws it 
 open to our righteous Vandalism. 
 
 1902.
 
 SOME RECENT BOOKS OF 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 
 
 VOYAGEUSES 
 
 THE talent of M. Paul Bourget has but rarely 
 consented to submit itself to that precision of 
 form and rapidity of narrative which are necessary 
 for the conduct of a short story. His novels, 
 indeed, have been becoming longer and longer, 
 and the latest, Un Crime d' Amour, had, we are 
 bound to confess, such an abundance of reflec- 
 tions and so little plot that it seemed to take us 
 back to the days of Marivaux and Richardson. 
 It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise to open 
 M. Bourget's new volume, and discover that it is 
 a collection of six independent stories, not one of 
 them lengthy. The title, Voyageuses, is explained 
 by a brief preface. These are tales of female 
 travellers, whom the author has met (or feigns to 
 have met) in the course of those restless perambu- 
 lations of the world which he describes to us, 
 every now and then, in his graceful " sensations." 
 M. Bourget appears to us in Voyageuses in his very 
 happiest vein, with least of his mannerism and 
 most of his lucid gift of penetrating through action 
 to motive. 
 
 The first of these stories is also the most subtle 
 
 and pleasing. " Antigone " is the name the 
 
 239
 
 2 4 o FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 author gives to a Frenchwoman whom he meets 
 in Corfu. She is the sister of a deputy who has 
 been attainted in the Panama scandal, and who 
 still tries to be dignified in exile. This ignoble 
 person affects complete innocence, and has de- 
 ceived a noble Ionian burgher, Napoleon Zaffoni, 
 into a belief in him, so that Zaffoni entrusts to 
 him the MS. of a book, the work of his lifetime, 
 on the history and constitution of the Ionian 
 Islands. From this the deputy grossly plagiarises, 
 and would be cast forth even from Corfu were he 
 not protected by the fervent good faith of his 
 sister, who, in spite of all his rogueries, persists 
 in believing in him. His character is presently 
 whitewashed in Paris, and he returns to the 
 Chamber of Deputies triumphant, owing all to 
 the long-suffering old maid whom he probably 
 robs and upon whom he certainly tramples. 
 
 We pass over to America in the somewhat fan- 
 tastic tale called " Deux Manages." The author has 
 been told in Paris that he must make the acquain- 
 tance of Mrs. Tennyson R. Harris, who is " such " 
 a bright, cultured woman with a " lovely " home 
 at Newport. Unfortunately there is a husband, 
 a common millionaire, without any conversation ; 
 but one need take no notice of him. M. Bourget 
 visits Mrs. Tennyson R. Harris, but finds her 
 pretentious, scandalous and empty, and her lovely 
 home a crazy shop of knick-knacks. But, on the 
 other hand, he becomes deeply interested in the 
 husband, a silent, down-trodden man, horribly 
 overworked and beginning to suffer from " nerve- 
 trouble." He is ordered south for rest, and in-
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 241 
 
 vites the author to come with him. At Thomas- 
 ville, a fashionable watering-place in Georgia, they 
 have a curious experience, which M. Bourget must 
 be permitted to tell in his own words. 
 
 We are next in Ireland, in the exquisite story 
 called " Neptunevale." Two young Parisians of 
 fashion, the one as empty-headed as the other, 
 but, beneath their frivolity, deeply and mutually 
 enamoured, receive soon after their marriage a 
 singular legacy. It is nothing less than a small 
 property on the west coast of Ireland, where an 
 uncle of the hero's, having persisted against the 
 wish of his family in marrying a governess, retired 
 half a century ago in dogged determination of 
 exile. The young people do not know what to do 
 with this little white Irish elephant, except to sell 
 it for as much cash as it would fetch. But they 
 have a curiosity to see it first, and, utterly ignorant, 
 they persuade M. Bourget, who " knows the 
 language," to come over with them. Neptunevale 
 for that is the name of their uncle's home 
 lies on the coast of county Galway ; they have to 
 get out at Oranmore station and drive to it. The 
 arrival at the strange house, the reception of the 
 French visitors by the old Irish servants, the way 
 that the Celtic sentiment invades and engulfs the 
 newcomers, so that at last they are afraid to sell 
 the place at all, but find it exercising a curious 
 fascination over them, an attraction half of terror 
 and half of love all this is described with extreme 
 skill and delicacy. Nor can we fail to remark, 
 with some degree of surprise as well as of admira- 
 tion, how exactly M. Bourget, who can have but 
 
 Q
 
 242 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 a slight and superficial knowledge of Ireland, has 
 caught the note of Irish mysticism. There is a 
 scene in which an old mad woman and a little 
 boy sacrifice a cock, with horrid rites, to some 
 dim Celtic deity, which is calculated to give Mr. 
 Yeats himself a shiver. 
 
 Much more conventional is "Charit6 de Femme," 
 a story which I should be inclined to describe as 
 insignificant, were it not that it contains an in- 
 cident, very naturally and unexpectedly introduced, 
 which illuminates it, as with a flash of lightning. 
 The scene of this tale, moreover, is laid in the 
 islands off the coast of Provence, a territory 
 which seemed to belong till lately to Guy de 
 Maupassant, and has since been annexed by M. 
 Melchior de Vogii. There is a vague sense in 
 which we conceive that certain districts are the 
 property of particular novelists, and resent the 
 intrusion of others, unless the newcomers bring 
 with them some very marked freshness of the 
 point of view. This is wanting in " Charit6 de 
 Femme." More striking is " Odile," which is com- 
 posed, in point of fact, of two distinct episodes. 
 In a Parisian drawing-room the author meets a 
 strange Marquise d'Estinac, very distinguished, 
 shy and mysterious, who invites him to take a 
 drive with her in her carriage, for the purpose, 
 as he afterwards divines, of enabling her to con- 
 quer an otherwise irresistible tendency to suicide. 
 He learns that she is extremely fond of her 
 husband, who neglects her for a belle mondaine, 
 Madame Justel. While the author is still bewil- 
 dered at a circumstance which is unparalleled in his
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 243 
 
 career for the companion of his drive refused to 
 speak to him or look at him he abruptly hears 
 of the sudden and mysterious death of Madame 
 d'Estinac. A couple of years afterwards, being 
 at Maloja, he meets in the hotel there the Marquis, 
 who has in the meantime married Madame Justel. 
 A third person is of the party, Mademoiselle Odile 
 d'Estinac, a girl of fourteen, the exact counterpart 
 of her unfortunate mother. M. Bourget soon 
 perceives that between this proud, reserved child 
 and her new stepmother the relations are more 
 than strained. He is witness to the insulting 
 tyranny of the one, the isolation and despair of 
 the other ; and the body of Odile is presently 
 discovered in the tarn below the hotel. 
 
 The longest and the most elaborated of these 
 stories is the last, and it does not properly belong 
 to them, for " La Pia " is no voyageuse, but a dweller, 
 against her will, in the tents of Shem. This 
 beautiful and extraordinary tale of a masterpiece 
 stolen from the remote basilica of San Spirito in 
 Val d'Elsa is one of the most effective examples 
 we have met with of M. Bourget's method. It 
 would be unfair to describe it fully, for while the 
 five previous stories, of which we have given the 
 brief outlines, depend exclusively for their effect 
 on their execution, here the surprises of the plot 
 have their adventitious value. The English 
 readers of this volume will be inclined to see in 
 it a curious tribute to an artist of our own race. 
 It is hardly possible to believe that M. Bourget, 
 who has always shown himself sensitive, as 
 perhaps no other French writer of equal value,
 
 244 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 to exotic influences, has been an inattentive reader 
 of Mr. Henry James's latest volumes, and, in par- 
 ticular, of Embarrassments and Terminations. He 
 remains, of course, essentially himself; but, as 
 Guy de Maupassant in Notre Cceur was evidently 
 trying his hand at an essay in the Bourget manner, 
 so in "Antigone" and "La Pia" M. Bourget is dis- 
 covered, so it seems at least to us, no less in- 
 dubitably trying what he can produce with the 
 pencils and two-inch square of ivory that are the 
 property of Mr. Henry James. 
 1897. 
 
 LA DUCHESSE BLEUE 
 
 The violence of public movements in France in 
 1897 was so great as to produce an unusual 
 scarcity in literary productions. In such a barren 
 season, therefore, the fecundity of M. Paul Bour- 
 get is remarkable. La Duchesse Bleue is the third 
 volume which he has published this year, and it 
 is one of the most solid and elaborate of his 
 novels. But it is not quite new, although it is 
 now given to the public for the first time in book 
 form. Five years ago, if I remember right, the 
 " Journal " applied to M. Bourget in great haste 
 for a new novel, and he wrote, somewhat in a 
 hurry and for that special purpose, a story called 
 Trots Ames d Artistes. He was dissatisfied with it, 
 and left it there in the lost columns of a daily 
 newspaper, from which he has now redeemed it, 
 taking the opportunity to revise, adapt and indeed 
 rewrite it as La Duchesse Bleue. We are not sure 
 that this is ever a very fortunate method of pro-
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 245 
 
 ducing a book, and, although the novel before us 
 bears trace of extraordinary care and fastidious 
 correction, it lacks that spontaneity which comes 
 with work which has been run on right lines from 
 its very inception. La Duchesse Bleue, let me 
 admit at once, is not M. Bourget's masterpiece. 
 But it possesses a dedication, which is some- 
 thing of a literary event. The dedications of M. 
 Bourget have always been a curious feature of his 
 work. They are often, as in the present case, 
 essays of some length and seriousness ; they 
 frequently develop a theory or a philosophy of 
 the ingenious writer's. On principle, we are 
 adverse to such prefatory disquisitions. If an 
 author, long after the date of original publication, 
 likes to gossip to us about the mode in which the 
 plot and place commended themselves to him, we 
 are well pleased to listen. But to open a new 
 novel, and to find that a critical or metaphysical 
 essay divides us from the tale, is not, to our mind, 
 a happy discovery. It tends to destroy the 
 illusion ; it is, in its distinguished way, of the same 
 order of obstacle as " this is a fact " of the very 
 clumsy narrator. We begin by passing under a 
 cold shower of scepticism ; the effort to believe 
 in the story is vastly increased. The dedicatory 
 prefaces of M. Bourget are peculiarly disillusion- 
 ing. He talks in them so much about the crafts- 
 man and the artist, so much about methods and 
 forms ; in short, he takes the music-box to pieces 
 before us so resolutely, that we start with a sense 
 of artificiality. Even in these complex days, we 
 like to pretend that we are sitting in a ring around
 
 246 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 the story-teller, under the hawthorn-tree, a&d that 
 when he says, "There was, once upon a time," 
 once upon a time there was. 
 
 In the case before us we are, as usual, of 
 opinion that the " dedication " is no help to the 
 reader in giving him faith in the incidents about 
 to be related to him, but it forms in itself an 
 agreeable and suggestive piece of literature. It is 
 addressed to Madame Matilde Serao, the Neapolitan 
 novelist, whose astonishing II paese di Cuccagna, by 
 the way, has been excellently translated out of the 
 Italian by Madame Paul Bourget. M. Bourget 
 has been reading this brilliant book, and he has 
 felt, once more, what a chasm divides the crowded 
 and animated scenes of Madame Serao from his 
 own limited studies of psychological problems. 
 Accordingly he writes a long letter to explain this 
 to Madame Serao, and to remind her that in the 
 house of the novel there are many chambers. 
 The great central hall, no doubt, is that occupied 
 by herself and Balzac, Zola and Tolstoi and, we 
 may add, by Fielding and Dickens where an 
 eager creative energy sets on their feet, and spurs 
 to concerted action personages of every kind, in 
 hundreds at a time. This prodigious power to 
 crowd the canvas with figures belongs to Madame 
 Serao alone among the living novelists of Italy. 
 One has only to recollect how entirely it is want- 
 ing to Gabriele d'Annunzio. It is a gift not to be 
 despised ; it suggests a virility of intellect and a 
 breadth of sympathy which are rewarded by a 
 direct influence over a wide circle of readers. 
 The success of such novels, in the hands of a great
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 247 
 
 artist, is not problematical, because they possess, 
 obviously and beyond contradiction, what M. 
 Bourget calls " le coloris de la vie en mouvement." 
 If, however, this kind of scene-painting were 
 the only species of fiction permitted, there are 
 many novelists who could never earn their daily 
 bread, and M. Bourget is one of them. Accord- 
 ingly his flattering address to Madame Serao is 
 merely the prelude to an ingenious apology for 
 the painting of sentiments and emotions in the 
 novel which analyses minute and fugitive im- 
 pressions. This demands a closeness of texture 
 and a strenuous uniformity of technical effort 
 which are in themselves advantages, but which 
 are with difficulty exercised in the huge world- 
 romance. In the course of his essay M. Bourget 
 pauses to express his warm admiration of Mr. 
 Henry James, whom he takes as the first living 
 exponent of this peculiarly intense and vivid 
 manner of contemplating, as through a micro- 
 scope, the movement of intellectual life. We 
 cannot but record this fact with complaisance, 
 since, in reviewing Voyageuses last year, we re- 
 marked that, if it were possible to imagine that 
 a prominent French writer could undergo the 
 influence of an Anglo-Saxon contemporary, the 
 transition which the style and attitude of M. 
 Bourget are now undergoing would point to a 
 deliberate study of Mr. James's manner. M. 
 Bourget, in the dedication to La Dttchesse Bleue, 
 practically confesses that we were correct in 
 what seemed our almost daring conjecture. He 
 names Mr. James's volume called Terminations as
 
 248 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 the model which he has placed before himself in his 
 recent treatment of problems of artistic psychology. 
 
 The original name of the story before us was 
 Trots Ames d' Artistes, as we have already said. M. 
 Bourget explains that, on reflection, he thought 
 this too ambitious a title. It was at least descrip- 
 tive, whereas La Duchesse Bleue suggests nothing ; 
 it proves upon examination to be the nickname of 
 a part in a play in which the heroine made a 
 success. M. Bourget has portrayed in this 
 book three artistic temperaments set side by side. 
 These are respectively those of a novelist and 
 dramatist, an actress and a painter, and he has 
 shown these three persons to us in a mutual crisis 
 of tragical passion. Jacques Moran, the dramatist, 
 has a play being acted, for the principal role in 
 which a charming little actress, with a Botticelli 
 face, Camille Favier, makes a great success ; the 
 painter is Vincent la Croix, who tells the story. 
 Moran is adored by Camille, but deserts her for a 
 woman of fashion, Madame de Bonnivet, while 
 Vincent, worked upon by his generous indignation 
 at this treatment, fails to perceive through three 
 hundred pages that he himself loves Camille, and 
 might be loved in return. The plot is no more 
 complicated than this, and we confess that it 
 requires some respect for M. Bourget and some 
 enthusiasm for the processes of the psychological 
 novel to carry us through so long a book attached 
 to so slender a thread of plot. 
 
 Moran and Camille are entirely successful in 
 life, Vincent la Croix is a failure in everything he 
 touches, and the object of La Duchesse Bleue seems
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 249 
 
 to be to distinguish between the one race of artists 
 which translates marvellously without itself experi- 
 encing, and the other race which experiences with- 
 out being able to translate. For a phrase to say on 
 the boards, for a sentence to write in a book, the 
 former class would sell their father or their mother. 
 The moral of La Duchesse Bleue, in a nutshell, 
 is that if we wish to keep our hearts tender and 
 fresh, we must be content to be ourselves mediocre 
 and obscure. The thesis is a not unfamiliar one. 
 It occurred to the fiery spirit of Elizabeth Browning 
 while she watched the great god Pan, down by 
 the reeds in the river, " draw out the pith like the 
 heart of a man." In the hypothesis of the French 
 novelist, a love, a hatred, a joy, a sorrow, is to 
 the really successful artist nothing more than so 
 much manured earth out of which he can force 
 the flower of his talent, that blossom of delicacy 
 and passion, to perfect which he will not hesitate 
 for a moment to kill in himself every true delicacy 
 and every living emotion. It is not a pleasant 
 theory, and the ugliness of it may help us who form 
 the vast majority of men and women to bear with 
 fortitude the mortifying fact that we were not born to 
 be geniuses. But we think that M. Bourget makes 
 a mistake in attributing this peculiarly inhuman 
 hardness of heart exclusively to the artist of the 
 highest class. We are afraid that our experience 
 has led us to observe the vanity which is really 
 at the root of this moral deformity in those who 
 have nothing of genius in their nature except its 
 fretfulness and its ferocity.
 
 250 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 COMPLICATIONS SENTIMENTALES 
 
 In reading M. Bourget's collection of short 
 stories called Vqyageuses, we observed that he had 
 quitted for a moment that perfumed atmosphere 
 of the salon and the boudoir which he loves, and 
 that he had consented to take us with him out 
 into the fresh air. It was but an episode ; in Com- 
 plications Sentimentales we find ourselves once more 
 in the scented world of Parisian elegance, among 
 those well-bred people of wealth, without occupa- 
 tion, whose intrigues and passions M. Bourget has 
 taught himself to analyse with such extraordinary 
 precision. His new book consists of three tales, 
 or short novels, one of which at least, " L'Ecran," 
 might easily be expanded into the form of a com- 
 plete work. These three stories deal with three 
 critical conditions of the mind and temper of a 
 woman. The first and second end in a moral 
 tragedy : the third ends well, after excursions and 
 alarms, and may be called a tragi-comedy of the 
 soul. All three analyse symptoms of that disease 
 which M. Bourget believes to be so widely dis- 
 seminated in the feminine society of the day, " la 
 trahison de la femme," deception under the guise 
 of a bland and maiden candour. The heroines of 
 the three stories are all liars : but while two of 
 them are minxes, the third is a dupe. Admirers 
 of that clever novel, Mensonges, will find themselves 
 quite in their element when they read Complications 
 Sentimentales. 
 
 One of these three stories, " L'Ecran," is in its 
 way a masterpiece. M. Bourget has never written
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 251 
 
 anything which better exemplifies his peculiar 
 qualities, the insinuating and persistent force of his 
 style, his preoccupation with delicate subtleties and 
 undulations of feeling, the skill with which he 
 renders the most fleeting shades of mental sensation. 
 In " L'Ecran," moreover, he avoids to a remarkable 
 degree that defect of movement which has seriously 
 damaged several of his most elaborate books : 
 which, for instance, makes Une Idylle Tragique 
 scarcely readable. His danger, like that of Mr. 
 Henry James, whom he resembles on more sides 
 than one, is to delay in interminable psychological 
 reflections until our attention has betrayed us, and 
 we have lost the thread of the story. This error, 
 or defect, would seem to have presented itself as a 
 peril to the mind of M. Bourget : for in his latest 
 stories he is manifestly on his guard against it, and 
 " L'Ecran," in particular, is a really excellent 
 example of a tale told to excite and amuse even 
 those who are quite indifferent to the lesson it 
 conveys, and to the exquisite art of its delivery. 
 
 In the month of June the Lautrecs and the Sar- 
 lieves, two aristocratic me'nages of Paris, come over 
 to England to enjoy the London season, into the 
 whirlpool of which they descend. But at almost 
 the same moment arrives the Vicomte Bertrand 
 d'Aydie, who is understood to nurse an absolutely 
 hopeless and respectful passion for the sainted 
 Marquise Alyette de Lautrec. This devotion is 
 much " chaffed " in clubs and smilingly alluded 
 to in drawing-rooms as pure waste of time, since 
 the purity and dignity of Madame de Lautrec are 
 above the possibility of suspicion. But Madame
 
 252 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 de Lautrec's dearest friend happens to be the 
 Vicomtesse Emmeline de Sarlieve a gay and 
 amiable butterfly, of whom no one thinks seriously 
 at all. Bertrand and Emmeline have, however, for 
 some time past, carried on with complete immunity 
 a liaison, under the shadow of their friendship for 
 Alyette, Pecran, the screen. Bertrand encourages 
 the idea that he is throwing away a desperate 
 passion on the icy heart of Alyette, when he is 
 really planning with Emmeline rendezvous, which 
 owe their facility to the presence of Alyette. The 
 reader does not know M. Bourget if he is not by 
 this time conscious that here are united all the 
 elements for one of his most ingenious ethical 
 problems. The visit of the quintette to London 
 precipitates the inevitable catastrophe. M. Bour- 
 get's sketch of our society is wonderfully skilful 
 and entertaining, and Londoners will recognise 
 some familiar faces, scarcely disguised under the 
 travesty of false names. 
 1899. 
 
 OUTRE-MER 
 
 The author of Outre-Mer takes himself, as the 
 phrase goes, rather seriously. He passes in New 
 York and in Paris as a kind of new De Tocque- 
 ville. We mean no detraction of his gifts, nor of 
 the charm of his amusing volumes, when we say 
 that they are not quite so important to an English 
 as to a French or to an American audience. They 
 are important in France, because M. Bourget 
 is a highly accomplished public favourite, whose 
 methods attract attention whatever subject he may
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 253 
 
 deal with, and whose mind has here been given to 
 the study of a kind of life not familiar to Frenchmen. 
 They are important in America, because America 
 is greatly moved by European opinion, and must 
 be flattered at so close an examination of her in- 
 stitutions by an eminent French writer. But in 
 England our contact with the United States is 
 closer and more habitual than that between those 
 States and France, while our vanity is not more 
 stimulated by M. Bourget's study of America than 
 by M. Loti's pictures of Jerusalem. To put it 
 boldly, we know more and care less than the 
 two main classes who will form the audience of 
 Outre-Mer. 
 
 Taking, then, this calmer standpoint, the feats 
 of M. Bourget's sympathetic appreciation, and the 
 deficiencies in his equipment, leave us, on the 
 whole, rather indifferent. No book of this author 
 has been so much talked of beforehand, or so 
 ardently expected, as Outre-Mer, and we do not 
 suppose that its two main bodies of readers will 
 be at all disappointed. But no philosophical Eng- 
 lishman will consider it the best of M. Bourget's 
 books. He will, for example, be infinitely less 
 pleased with it than he was with Sensations d'ltalie, 
 a much less popular work. The fact is that in 
 reading what the elegant psychologist has to say 
 about America, " on y regrette," as he himself 
 would say, "la douce et lente Europe." The 
 reason of this is, that in dealing with certain super- 
 ficial features of a vast and crude new civilisation, 
 M. Bourget is a razor cutting a hone. The razor 
 is amazingly sharp and bright, but it is not doing
 
 254 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 its proper business. M. Bourget is a subtle and 
 minute analyst, whose gift it is to distinguish be- 
 tween delicate orders of thought which are yet 
 closely allied, to determine between new elements 
 and old ones in survival, to provoke, with pro- 
 fundity and penetration, long developments of 
 reverie. He is at home in old societies and 
 waning cities ; he is a master in the evocation 
 of new lights on outworn themes. He is full of 
 the nostalgia of the past, and he dreams about 
 the dead while he moves among the living. It is 
 obvious that such a writer is out of place in the 
 study of a country that has no past, no history, 
 no basis of death, a country where a man looks 
 upon his grandfather as a historical character, and 
 upon a house a hundred years old as a historical 
 monument. What M. Bourget has done is extra- 
 ordinarily clever and brilliant, but he was not the 
 man to be set to do it. 
 
 The conditions under which the work progressed 
 were, though specious, not less unfavourable to 
 its perfection. These notes, by a famous French- 
 man, on the social life of America to-day, were 
 prepared to appear first of all in an enterprising 
 New York journal. That M. Bourget should ac- 
 cept such a test proclaims his courage, and that 
 he should, in the main, have endured the ordeal, 
 his accuracy and care. It is none the less a shock 
 to find the book dedicated, in a very clever pre- 
 fatory epistle, to Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and 
 to realise that before its impressions could be given 
 to the world they had to pass through the mill of 
 the New York Herald. The result is a book which
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 255 
 
 is beautifully written, and which, above all, gives 
 the impression of being sincerely written a book 
 which contains many brilliant flashes of intuition, 
 many just and liberal opinions, and some pictures 
 of high merit, but which, somehow, fails to be 
 philosophical, and is apt to slip between the stools 
 of vain conjecture and mere reporter's work. A 
 great deal which will be read with most entertain- 
 ment in Outre-Mer the description of Chicago, 
 for instance, and the visit to the night-side of New 
 York is really fitted to appear in a daily news- 
 paper, and then to be forgotten. It is very full 
 and conscientious, but it is the production of a 
 sublimated reporter, and there is precious little De 
 Tocqueville about it. 
 
 This, however, may be considered hypercritical. 
 M. Bourget spent eight or nine months in the 
 United States, with no other occupation than the 
 collection of the notes from which these volumes 
 are selected. He had all possible facilities given 
 to him, and he worked in a fair and generous 
 spirit. He was genuinely interested in America, 
 interested more intelligently, no doubt, than any 
 other recent Frenchman has been. It would have 
 been strange if he had not written a book which 
 repaid perusal. The faults of M. Bourget's style 
 have always been over-elaboration and excess of 
 detail. Here he has been tempted to indulge 
 these frailties, and we cannot say that he is not 
 occasionally tedious when he lingers upon facts 
 and conditions obvious to all Englishmen who 
 visit America. Hence, we like his book best where 
 it gives us the results of the application of his
 
 256 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 subtle intellect to less familiar matters. All he has 
 to say about the vitality of the Catholic Church 
 in the United States is worthy of close attention. 
 His interviews with Cardinal Gibbon and Arch- 
 bishop Ireland are of material interest, and his 
 notes on the socialistic tendencies of American 
 Catholicism singularly valuable. No pages here 
 are more graphic than those which record a visit 
 to a Roman church in New York, and the sermon 
 which the author listened to there. He was struck, 
 as all visitors to America must be, with the absence 
 of reverie, of the spiritual and experimental spirit, 
 in the teaching and tendency of the Church of 
 Rome in America, and with its practical energy, 
 its businesslike activity and vehemence. In a few 
 words M. Bourget renders with admirable skill 
 that air of antiquity and Catholic piety which 
 make Baltimore more like a city of Southern 
 Europe than any other in the United States. In 
 observation of this kind M. Bourget can always 
 be trusted. 
 
 As befits the inquiry of a Latin psychologist, 
 the question of woman takes a very prominent 
 part in the investigation of M. Bourget. On this 
 subject what he has to say and what he has to 
 admit ignorance of are equally interesting. He 
 has to confess himself baffled by that extraordinary 
 outcome of Western civilisation, the American 
 girl, but he revenges himself by the notation of 
 innumerable instances of her peculiarities and 
 idiosyncrasies. On the whole, though she puzzles 
 him, he is greatly delighted with her. We re- 
 member hearing of the visit paid to Newport by
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 257 
 
 a young French poet of the Symbolists, who was 
 well acquainted with the American language, but 
 whose manners were all adjusted to the model 
 of the Boulevard St. Michel. He made a dozen 
 serious blunders, all of which were benignly for- 
 given, before he settled down to some due recog- 
 nition of the cold, free, stimulating and sphinx-like 
 creature that woman is on the shores of America. 
 M. Bourget is too much a man of the world, and 
 has been too carefully trained, to err in this way, 
 but his wonder is no less pronounced. He comes 
 to the curious " resultat que le dsir de la femme 
 est demeure au second rang dans les proccupa- 
 tions de ces hommes." He considers, as other 
 observers have done, that this condition of things 
 can be but transitory, and that the strange apo- 
 theosis of the American girl, with all that it pre- 
 supposes in the way of reticence of manners, is 
 but a transitory phase. He falls into an eloquent 
 description of the American idol, the sexless 
 woman of the United States, and closes it with a 
 passage which is one of the most remarkable in 
 his volumes : 
 
 " Cette femme peut ne pas e*tre aimee. Elle 
 n'a pas besoin d'etre aimee. Ce n'est ni la volupt 
 ni la tendresse qu'elle symbolise. Elle est comme 
 un objet d'art vivant, une savante et derniere com- 
 position humaine qui atteste que le Yankee, ce 
 dsespr d'hier, ce vaincu du vieux monde, a su 
 tirer de ce sauvage univers ou il fut jete par le 
 sort toute une civilisation nouvelle, incarnee dans 
 cette femme-la, son luxe et son orgueil. Tout 
 s'claire de cette civilisation au regard de ces yeux 
 
 R
 
 258 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 profonds, . . . tout ce qui est l'Idalisme de ce 
 pays sans Ideal, ce qui sera sa perte peut-etre, 
 mais qui jusqu'ici demeure sa grandeur : la foi 
 absolue, unique, syst6matique et indomptable dans 
 la Volonte." 
 
 With the West the author does not seem to 
 have any personal acquaintance. In his chapter 
 on " Cowboys " he tells some marvellous stories. 
 We know not what to think of the vivacious anec- 
 dote of the men who, weary to see some eminent 
 emanation of the East, planned the kidnapping 
 of Madame Sarah Bernhardt as she passed Green 
 River on her way to the Pacific. The great actress 
 had taken an earlier express, and was saved from 
 her embarrassing captors. M. Bourget occupies 
 nearly fifty pages with a "Confession of a Cow- 
 boy," the source of which is very vaguely stated. 
 All this, we must acknowledge, seems rather poor 
 to us, and must have been collected at worse than 
 second-hand. Those chapters, on the contrary, 
 which deal with the South, are particularly fresh 
 and charming. There is no sort of connection be- 
 tween the close of the second volume, which deals 
 with an excursion through Georgia and Florida, 
 and the rest of the book, yet no one will wish this 
 species of appendix omitted. The author gives an 
 exceedingly picturesque and humorous picture of 
 life in a Georgian watering-place, which he calls 
 Phillipeville, where somebody or other is lynched 
 every year. M. Bourget, as in duty bound, tells a 
 spirited story of a " lynchage." He describes, too, 
 in his very best style, the execution of a rebellious 
 but repentant mulatto.
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 259 
 
 When our author proceeded still further South, 
 he had not the good fortune to see such strik- 
 ing sights, or to meet with so singular a popula- 
 tion. But at Jacksonville, Florida, he was able, as 
 nowhere else, to study the negro at home, and at 
 St. Augustine he discovered to his delight a sort 
 of Cannes or Monte Carlo of America, with its 
 gardens of oranges and jasmine, its green oaks and 
 its oleanders. He rejoiced, after his long inland 
 wanderings, to see the ocean breaking on the reefs 
 of Anastasia. Upon the whole, whether in the 
 North or the South, M. Bourget has been pleased 
 with the United States. He has recognised the 
 two great defects of that country : its incoherence, 
 and its brutality. He has recognised a factitious 
 element in its cultivation, corruption in its politics, 
 and a general excess in its activity. He delights 
 in three typical American words, and discovers 
 "puff," "boom," and "bluff" at every turn. He 
 comes back to Europe at last with that emotion 
 of gratitude which every European feels, however 
 warmly he has been welcomed in America, and 
 in however favourable a light American life has 
 been shown to him. Yet he is conscious of its 
 high virtues, its noble possibilities, and on the 
 whole his picture of the great Republic, so care- 
 fully and modestly prepared, so conscientiously 
 composed, is in a high degree a flattering and 
 attractive one. 
 
 1895.
 
 260 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 L'ETAPE 
 
 We are so little accustomed in England to the 
 polemical novel, or, indeed, to the novel of ideas 
 in any form, that it is difficult for us to realise the 
 condition of mind which has led M. Bourget to 
 fling himself into the arena of French politics with 
 a romance which must give extreme offence to the 
 majority of its possible readers, and which runs 
 violently counter to the traditional complacency of 
 French democratic life. It is probable that M. 
 Bourget no longer cares very much whether he 
 offends or pleases, and, doubtless, the more he 
 scourges the many, the more he endears himself to 
 the comparatively few. Here, in England, we are 
 called upon if only English people would com- 
 prehend the fact to contemplate and not to criti- 
 cise the intellectual and moral idiosyncrasies of our 
 neighbours. If we could but learn the lesson that 
 a curious attention, an inquisitive observation into 
 foreign modes of thought becomes us very well, 
 but that we are not asked for our opinion, it would 
 vastly facilitate our relations. In calling attention 
 to M. Bourget's extremely interesting and powerful 
 novel, I expressly deprecate the impertinence of 
 our " taking a side " in the matter of its aim. We 
 have our own national failings to attend to ; let 
 us, for goodness' sake, avoid the folly of hauling 
 our neighbours up to a tribunal of Anglo-Saxon 
 political virtue. It should be enough for us that 
 the phenomena which in France produce a Mon- 
 neron on the one side and a Ferrand on the other
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 261 
 
 are very interesting. Let us observe them as closely 
 as we can, but not hazard a decision. 
 
 The title of M. Bourget's book would offer me 
 a great difficulty if I were called upon to translate 
 it, and I am not sure that a Frenchman will im- 
 mediately understand what is symbolised by it. 
 An e'tape is a stage, a station ; on brule I'e'tape by 
 rushing through, without, as it were, stopping to 
 change horses. Is, then, the theme of this book 
 the stage, the day's march, as it were, which its 
 over-educated peasant takes in passing over to 
 Conservatism ? Does the Monnerons' fault consist 
 in their having " burned " their e'tape in their too 
 great hurry to cut a figure in society ? It is not 
 until the final page 516 that we meet with the 
 word and the image, even as we have to reach the 
 last paragraph of Stendhal's masterpiece before we 
 hear of the Chartreuse de Parme. Enough, then, 
 that the subject of this tape is the story of a family 
 of peasants from the Ardeche, one of whom has 
 received an education in excess of his fitness for 
 it ; has become, in other words, a functionary and 
 a bourgeois without the necessary preparation. It 
 might be rash to suppose that so practised an 
 author as M. Bourget would condescend to be 
 influenced by a much younger writer, or else I 
 should say that throughout this book I am con- 
 strained to perceive the spirit of M. Maurice 
 Barres. The attitude of the writer of L'tape has, 
 at all events, become astonishingly identical with 
 that of the author of Les De'racines, and to have 
 read that extraordinary work will prepare a reader 
 in many ways for the study of the novel before us.
 
 262 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 In both the one and the other it would, perhaps, 
 be more critical to say that we see fructifying and 
 spreading the pessimist influence of Taine. 
 
 The uncomfortable and paradoxical condition of 
 modern society in France is attributed by these 
 writers of the school of Taine to the obstinate 
 cultivation of political chimeras which have out- 
 lived the excitement of the Revolution. The key- 
 note to the attitude of modern democracy is 
 conceived by M. Bourget to be hostility to the 
 origins and history of the country. The good 
 hero of the story, M. Ferrand (who is inclined, 
 like all good heroes, to be a little oracular), re- 
 minds the young socialist of a passage in Plato's 
 Timceus where we are told that a most ancient 
 priest of the temple of Sais warned Solon that the 
 weakness of the Greeks was their possessing no 
 ancient doctrine transmitted by their ancestors, 
 no education passed down from age to age by 
 venerable teachers. It is this lack of authoritative 
 continuity which M. Bourget deplores; his view 
 of 1789 is that it snapped the thread that bound 
 society to the past, that it vulgarised, uprooted, 
 shattered, and destroyed things which were essen- 
 tial to national prosperity and to individual happi- 
 ness. He thinks that one of these links still exists 
 and can be strengthened indefinitely namely, the 
 Catholic religion. Therefore, according to M. 
 Bourget, the first thing a Frenchman has to do 
 is to abandon his ideology and his collectivism, 
 which lead only to anarchical and incoherent 
 forms of misery, and to humble himself before 
 the Church, by the aid of which alone a whole-
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 263 
 
 some society can be rebuilt on the ruins of a 
 hundred years of revolutionary madness. 
 
 One is bound, however, to point out that if 
 Taine's teaching can be interpreted in a re- 
 actionary sense, there is nothing in his writings 
 which seems to justify its being distorted for 
 political and clerical purposes. I have endeavoured 
 to summarise as fairly as possible what seem to 
 be M. Bourget's views about "the lack of authori- 
 tative continuity." But Taine is careful, in LAncien 
 Regime, precisely to insist that all the Revolution 
 did was to transfer the exercise of absolute power 
 from the King to a central body of men in Paris. 
 Here was no breach of continuity ; it was merely 
 a new form of precisely the same thing. M. 
 Bourget, and those who act with him, seem to 
 overlook completely the kernel of Taine's argu- 
 ment, namely, that the Revolution was not a 
 spontaneous growth, but the outcome of three 
 centuries of antecedent events. The latest re- 
 actionaries, I must confess, appear to me to intro- 
 duce an element of wilful obscurity into a position 
 which Taine left admirably clear and plain. 
 
 Considered purely as a story, L'Etape is told 
 with all M. Bourget's accustomed solidity and 
 refinement. It has, moreover, a vigorous evolu- 
 tion which captivates the attention, and prevents 
 the elaboration of the author's analysis from ever 
 becoming dull. The action passes in university 
 society, and practically within the families of two 
 classical professors at the Sorbonne. M. Ferrand, 
 the Catholic, who is all serenity and joy, has a 
 gentle, lovely daughter, Brigitte. She is courted
 
 264 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 by Jean, the eldest son of M. Monneron, who has 
 the misfortune to be a Republican and a Drey- 
 fusard, and everything, in fact, which is sinister 
 and fatal in the eyes of M. Bourget. Brigitte will 
 not marry Jean Monneron unless he consents to 
 become a Catholic, and the intrigue of the novel 
 proceeds, with alarming abruptness, during the 
 days in which Jean is making up his mind to take 
 the leap. Terrible things happen to the agitated 
 members of the Monneron family things which 
 lead them to forgery and attempted murder and 
 all on account of their deplorable political opinions, 
 while the happy and virtuous Ferrands sit up aloft, 
 in the purity of their reaction, and, ultimately, as 
 it happens, take care of the life of poor Jean. Told 
 baldly thus, or rather not told at all, but sum- 
 marised, the plot seems preposterous ; and it 
 cannot, I think, be denied that it is in some 
 degree mechanical. Is not this a fault to which 
 those novelists in France who throw in their lot 
 with the disciples of Balzac are peculiarly liable ? 
 
 Plot, however, in our trivial sense, is the least 
 matter about which M. Bourget troubles himself. 
 He is occupied with two things : the presentation 
 of his thesis we may almost say his propaganda 
 and the conduct of his personages when face to 
 face in moments of exalted spiritual excitement. 
 In the past, he has sometimes shirked the clash 
 of these crises, as if shrinking a little from the 
 mere physical disturbance of them. But he does 
 not do so in L'j(ape, which will be found " awfully 
 thrilling," even by the Hildas of the circulating 
 libraries. In the study of the " Union Tolstoi,"
 
 M. PAUL BOURGET 265 
 
 which is a sort of Toynbee Hall, founded in the 
 heart of Paris by Cremieu-Dax (a curious re- 
 miniscence, whether conscious or not, of our own 
 Leonard Montefiore), M. Bourget is led away by 
 the blindness of his exclusive fanaticism. A lighter 
 touch, a little of the playfulness of humour, would 
 have rendered more probable and human this 
 humanitarian club of Jews and Protestants and 
 Anarchists and faddists, united in nothing but in 
 their enmity to the ancient government and faith 
 of France. And the ruin of the " Union Tolstoi " 
 is shown to be so inevitable, that we are left to 
 wonder how it could ever have seemed to flourish. 
 The portraits in the book, however, are neither 
 mechanical nor hard. The old Monneron, gentle, 
 learned, and humane, but bound hand and foot by 
 his network of political prejudices ; the impudent 
 Antoine ; Julie, the type of the girl emancipated 
 on Anglo-American lines, and doomed to violent 
 catastrophe ; the enthusiastic and yet patient, fana- 
 tical and yet tender millionaire socialist, Solomon 
 Cremieu-Dax ; in a lesser degree the unfortunate 
 Abbe Chanut, who believes that the democracy 
 can be reconciled to the Church all these are 
 admirable specimens of M. Bourget's art of por- 
 traiture. The novel is profoundly interesting, 
 although hardly addressed to those who run 
 while they read ; but it must not be taken as 
 a text-book of the state of France without a 
 good deal of counteracting Republican literature. 
 Yet it is a document of remarkable value and a 
 charming work of art. 
 1902.
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 
 
 WHEN I was young I had the pleasure of knowing 
 a prominent Plymouth Brother, an' intelligent and 
 fanatical old gentleman, into whose [house there 
 strayed an attractive volume, which he forbade his 
 grown-up son and daughter to peruse. A day or 
 two later, his children, suddenly entering his library, 
 found him deep in the study of the said dangerous 
 book, and gently upbraided him with doing what 
 he had expressly told them not to do. He replied, 
 with calm good-humour, " Ah ! but you see I have 
 a much stronger spiritual digestion than you have!" 
 This question of the " spiritual digestion " is one 
 which must always trouble those who are asked to 
 recommend one or another species of reading to 
 an order of undefined readers. Who shall decide 
 what books are and what books are not proper to 
 be read ? There are some people who can pasture 
 unpoisoned upon the memoirs of Casanova, and 
 others who are disturbed by The Idyls of the King. 
 They tell me that in Minneapolis Othello is con- 
 sidered objectionable ; our own great-aunts thought 
 Jane Eyre no book for girls. In the vast compli- 
 cated garden of literature it is always difficult to 
 say where the toxicologist comes in, and what dis- 
 tinguishes him from the purveyor of a salutary 
 moral tonic. In recent French romance, every- 
 
 266
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 267 
 
 body must acknowledge, it is practically impossible 
 to lay down a hard and fast rule. 
 
 The object of this chapter, however, is not to 
 decide how far the daring apologist can go in the 
 recommendation of new French novel-writers, but 
 to offer to the notice of shy English readers a par- 
 ticularly " nice " one. But, before attempting to 
 introduce M. Rene Bazin, I would reflect a moment 
 on the very curious condition of the French novel 
 in general at the present time. No one who ob- 
 serves the entire field of current French literature 
 without prejudice will deny that the novel is pass- 
 ing through a period which must prove highly 
 perilous to its future, a period at once of transition 
 and of experiment. The school of realism or 
 naturalism, which was founded upon the prac- 
 tice of Balzac in direct opposition to the prac- 
 tices of George Sand and of Dumas pere, achieved, 
 about twenty years ago, one of those violent vic- 
 tories which are more dangerous to a cause than 
 defeat itself. It was in 1880 that M. Zola pub- 
 lished that volume of polemical criticism which 
 had so far-reaching an effect in France and else- 
 where, and which was strangely ignored in England 
 Le Roman Experimental. This was just the point 
 of time at which the Rougon-Macquart series of 
 socio-pathological romances was receiving its maxi- 
 mum of hostile attention. M. Zola's book of criti- 
 cism was a plausible, audacious, magnificently 
 casuistical plea, not merely for the acceptance of 
 the realistic method, but for the exclusion of every 
 other method from the processes of fiction. It 
 had its tremendous effect ; during the space of
 
 268 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 some five years the " romanciers naturalistes," with 
 M. Zola at their head, had it all their own way. 
 Then came, in 1885, La Terre, an object-lesson in 
 the abuse of the naturalistic formula, and people 
 began to open their eyes to its drawbacks. And 
 then we all dissolved in laughter over the protest 
 of the " cinq purs," and the defection of a whole 
 group of disciples. M. Zola, like the weary Titan 
 that he was, went on, but the prestige of naturalism 
 was undermined. 
 
 But, meanwhile, the old forms of procedure in 
 romance had been dishonoured. It was not enough 
 that the weak places in the realistic armour should 
 be pierced by the arrows of a humaner criticism ; 
 the older warriors whom Goliath had overthrown 
 had to be set on their legs again. And it is not 
 to be denied that some of them were found to be 
 dreadfully the worse for wear. No one who had 
 read Flaubert and the Goncourts, no one who had 
 been introduced to Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky, could 
 any longer endure the trick of Cherbuliez. It was 
 like going back to William Black after Stevenson 
 and Mr. Barrie. Even Ferdinand Fabre, the 
 Thomas Hardy of the Cevennes, seemed to have 
 lost his savour. The novels of Octave Feuillet 
 were classics, but no one yearned for fresh imita- 
 tions of Monsieur de Cantors. Pierre Loti turned 
 more and more exclusively to adventures of the 
 ego in tropical scenery. Alphonse Daudet, after 
 a melancholy eclipse of his fresh early genius, 
 passed away. Even before the death of Edmond, 
 the influence of the Goncourts, although still 
 potent, spread into other fields of intellectual effort,
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 269 
 
 and became negligible so far as the novel, pure 
 and simple, was concerned. What was most note- 
 worthy in the French belles-lettres of ten years ago 
 was the brilliant galaxy of critics that swam into 
 our ken. In men like MM. Lemaitre, Anatole 
 France, Brunetiere and Gaston Paris, the intel- 
 ligent reader found purveyors of entertainment 
 which was as charming as fiction, and much more 
 solid and stimulating. Why read dull novels when 
 one could be so much better amused by a new 
 volume of La Vie Litteraire ? 
 
 In pure criticism there is now again a certain 
 depression in French literature. The most brilliant 
 of the group I have just mentioned has turned 
 from the adventures of books to the analysis of 
 life. But the author of L'Anneau cFAme'thyste is 
 hardly to be counted among the novelists. His 
 philosophical satires, sparkling with wit and malice, 
 incomparable in their beauty of expression, are 
 doubtless the most exquisite productions proceed- 
 ing to-day from the pen of a Frenchman, but 
 L'Orme du Mail is no more a novel than Friend- 
 ship's Garland is. Among the talents which were 
 directly challenged by the theories of the natural- 
 istic school, the one which seems to have escaped 
 least battered from the fray is that of M. Paul 
 Bourget. He stands apart, like Mr. Henry James 
 the European writer with whom he is in closest 
 relation. But even over this delicious writer a 
 certain change is passing. He becomes less and 
 less a novelist, and more and more a writer of 
 nouvelles or short stories. La Duchesse Bleue was 
 not a roman, it was a nouvelle writ large, and in the
 
 270 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 volume of consummate studies of applied psy- 
 chology (Un Homme cC Affaires), which reaches me 
 as I write these lines, I find a M. Paul Bourget 
 more than ever removed from the battle-field of 
 common fiction, more than ever isolated in his 
 exquisite attenuation of the enigmas of the human 
 heart. On the broader field, M. Marcel Provost 
 and M. Paul Hervieu support the Balzac tradition 
 after their strenuous and intelligent fashion. It is 
 these two writers who continue for us the manu- 
 facture of the " French novel " pure and simple. 
 Do they console us for Flaubert and Maupassant 
 and Goncourt ? Me, I am afraid, they do as yet 
 but faintly console. 
 
 Elsewhere, in the French fiction with which the 
 century is closing, we see little but experiment, 
 and that experiment largely takes the form of 
 pastiche. One thing has certainly been learned by 
 the brief tyranny of realism, namely, that the mere 
 exterior phenomena of experience, briefly observed, 
 do not exhaust the significance of life. It is not 
 to be denied that a worthy intellectual effort, a 
 desire to make thought take its place again in 
 aesthetic literature, marks the tentatives, often very 
 unsatisfactory in themselves and unrelated to one 
 another, which are produced by the younger nove- 
 lists in France. These books address, it must never 
 be forgotten, an audience far more cultivated, far 
 less hide-bound in its prejudices, than does the 
 output of the popular English novelist. It is diffi- 
 cult to conceive of a British Huysmans translating, 
 with the utmost disregard for plot, the voluptuous 
 languors of religion ; it is even more difficult to
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 271 
 
 conceive of a British Maurice Barres engaged, in 
 the form of fiction, in the glorification of a theory 
 of individualism. It is proper that we should do 
 honour to the man who writes and to the public 
 that reads, with zeal and curiosity, these attempts 
 to deal with spiritual problems in the form of 
 fiction. But it is surely not unfair to ask whether 
 the experiment so courageously attempted is per- 
 fectly successful ? It is not improper to suggest 
 that neither La Cathedrale nor Les Deracines is exactly 
 to be styled an ideal novel. 
 
 More completely fulfilling the classic purpose of 
 the romance, the narrative, are some of the experi- 
 mental works in fiction which I have indicated as 
 belonging to the section of pastiche. In this class 
 I will name but three, the Aphrodite of M. Pierre 
 Louys, La Nichina of M. Hugues Rebell, and La 
 Route d"meraude of M. Eugene Dem older. These, 
 no doubt, have been the most successful, and the 
 most deservedly successful, of a sort of novel in 
 these last years in France, books in which the life 
 of past ages has been resuscitated with a full sense 
 of the danger which lurks in pedantry and in a 
 didactic dryness. With these may be included the 
 extraordinary pre-historic novels of the brothers 
 Rosny. This kind of story suffers from two dan- 
 gers. Firstly, nothing so soon loses its pleasur- 
 able surprise, and becomes a tiresome trick, as 
 pastiche. Already, in the case of more than one 
 of the young writers just mentioned, fatigue of 
 fancy has obviously set in. The other peril is a 
 heritage from the Naturalists, and makes the dis- 
 cussion of recent French fiction extremely difficult
 
 272 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 in England, namely, the determination to gain a 
 sharp, vivid effect by treating, with surgical cool- 
 ness, the maladies of society. Hence to skate as 
 lightly as possible over this thin ice the difficulty 
 of daring to recommend to English readers a single 
 book in recent French fiction. We have spoken 
 of a strong spiritual digestion ; but most of the 
 romances of the latest school require the digestion 
 of a Commissioner in Lunacy or of the matron in a 
 Lock hospital. 
 
 Therefore and not to be always pointing to the 
 Quaker-coloured stories of M. Edouard Rod the 
 joy and surprise of being able to recommend, 
 without the possibility of a blush, the latest of all 
 the novelists of France. It has been necessary, in 
 the briefest language, to sketch the existing situa- 
 tion in French fiction, in order to make appreciable 
 the purity, the freshness, the simplicity of M. Ren 
 Bazin. It is only within the last season or two 
 that he has come prominently to the front, although 
 he has been writing quietly for about fifteen years. 
 It would be absurd to exaggerate. M. Bazin is 
 not, and will not be here presented as being, a 
 great force in literature. If it were the part of 
 criticism to deal in negatives, it would be easy to 
 mention a great many things which M. Bazin is 
 not. Among others, he is not a profound psy- 
 chologist ; people who like the novels of M. 
 E16mir Bourges, and are able to understand them, 
 will, unquestionably, pronounce Les Noellet and La 
 Sarcelle Bleue very insipid. But it is possible that 
 the French novelists of these last five years have 
 been trying to be a great deal too clever, that they
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 273 
 
 have starved the large reading public with the 
 extravagant intellectuality of their stories. Whether 
 that be so or not, it is at least pleasant to have 
 one man writing, in excellent French, refined, 
 cheerful, and sentimental novels of the most ultra- 
 modest kind, books that every girl may read, that 
 every guardian of youth may safely leave about in 
 any room of the house. I do not say I am a 
 thousand miles from thinking that this is every- 
 thing ; but I protest even in face of the indignant 
 Bar of Bruges that this is much. 
 
 Little seems to have been told about the very 
 quiet career of M. Ren Bazin, who is evidently 
 an enemy to self-advertisement. He was born at 
 Angers in 1853, and was educated at the little 
 seminary of Montgazon. Of his purely literary 
 career all that is known appears to be that in 1886 
 he published a romance, Ma Tante Gtron, to which 
 I shall presently return, which fell almost un- 
 noticed from the press. It found its way, how- 
 ever, to one highly appropriate reader, M. Ludovic 
 Halevy, to whom its author was entirely unknown. 
 M. Halevy was so much struck with the cleanliness 
 and the freshness of this new writer that he recom- 
 mended the editor of the lt Journal des Dbats " to 
 secure him as a contributor. To the amazement 
 of M. Bazin, he was invited, by a total stranger, to 
 join the staff of the " Debats." He did so, and for 
 that newspaper he has written almost exclusively 
 ever since, and there his successive novels and 
 books of travel have first appeared. It is said that 
 M. Halevy tried, without success, to induce the 
 French Academy to give one of its prizes to Ma 
 
 S
 
 274 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Tante Giron. That attempt failed, but no doubt it 
 was to the same admirer that was due the crowning 
 of M. Ren Bazin's second story, Une Tache d'Encre. 
 One can hardly doubt that the time is not far 
 distant when M. Bazin will himself be in a posi- 
 tion to secure the prizes of the Academy for still 
 younger aspirants. This account of M. Bazin is 
 meagre ; but although it is all that I know of his 
 blameless career, I feel sure that it is, as Froude 
 once said on a parallel occasion, " nothing to what 
 the angels know." 
 
 When we turn to M. Bazin's earliest novel, Ma 
 Tante Giron, it is not difficult to divine what it was 
 that attracted to this stranger the amiable author of 
 L'Abbe Constantin and Monsieur et Madame Cardinal. 
 It is a sprightly story of provincial life, a dish, as 
 was wickedly said of one of M. Halevy's own 
 books, consisting of nothing but angels served up 
 with a white sauce of virtue. The action is laid 
 in a remote corner of Western France, the Craonais, 
 half in Vendee, half in Brittany. There are fine 
 old sporting characters, who bring down hares at 
 fabulous distances to the reproach of younger 
 shots ; there are excellent cures, the souls of 
 generosity and unworldliness, with a touch of 
 eccentricity to keep them human. There is an 
 admirable young man, the Baron Jacques, who 
 falls desperately in love with the beautiful and 
 modest Mademoiselle de Seigny, and has just 
 worked himself up to the point of proposing, 
 when he unfortunately hears that she has become 
 the greatest heiress in the country-side. Then, 
 of course, his honourable scruples overweigh his
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 275 
 
 passion, and he takes to a capricious flight. Made- 
 moiselle de Seigny, who loves him, will marry no 
 one else, and both are horribly unhappy, until 
 Aunt Giron, who is the comic providence of the 
 tale, rides over to the Baron's retreat, and brings 
 him back, a blushing captive, to the feet of the 
 young lady. All comes well, of course, and the 
 curtain falls to the sound of wedding bells, while 
 Aunt Giron, brushing away a tear, exclaims, " La 
 joie des autres, comme cela fait du bien !" 
 
 But Ma Tanle Giron is really the least bit too 
 ingenuous for the best of good little girls. Hence 
 we are not surprised to find M. Bazin's next novel 
 at the same time less provincial and less artless. 
 It is very rare for a second book to show so 
 remarkable an advance upon a first as Une Tache 
 d'Encre does upon its predecessor. This is a story 
 which may be recommended to any reader, of 
 whatever age or sex, who wishes for a gay, good- 
 humoured and well-constructed tale, in which the 
 whole tone and temper shall be blameless, and in 
 which no great strain shall be put upon the intel- 
 lectual attention. It is excellently carpentered ; it 
 is as neatly turned-out a piece of fiction-furniture 
 as any one could wish to see. It has, moreover, 
 beyond its sentimental plot, a definite subject. In 
 Une Tache cfEncre the perennial hostility between 
 Paris and the country-town, particularly between 
 Paris and the professional countryman, is used, 
 with excellent effect, to hang an innocent and 
 recurrent humour upon. Fabian Mouillard, an 
 orphan, has been educated by an uncle, who is a 
 family lawyer at Bourges. He has been brought
 
 276 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 up in the veneration of the office, with the fixed 
 idea that he must eventually carry on the profes- 
 sion, in the same place, among the same clients ; 
 he is a sort of Dauphin of the basoche, and it has 
 never been suggested to him that he can escape 
 from being his uncle's successor. But Fabian 
 comes up to Paris, that dangerous city, hatred and 
 fear of which have been most carefully instilled 
 into him. He still continues, however, to be as 
 good as gold, when a blot of ink changes the 
 whole current of his life. He is engaged in com- 
 posing a thesis on the Junian Latins, a kind of 
 slaves whose status in ancient Rome offers curious 
 difficulties to the student of jurisprudence. To 
 inform himself of history in this matter he attends 
 the National Library, and there, one afternoon, he 
 is so unlucky (or so lucky) as to flip a drop of ink 
 by accident on to a folio which is in act of being 
 consulted by M. Flamaran, of the Academy of 
 Moral and Political Sciences. M. Flamaran is a 
 very peppery old pedant, and he is so angry that 
 Fabian feels obliged to call upon him, at his 
 private house, with a further apology. The fond 
 reader will be prepared to learn that M. Flamaran, 
 who is a widower, lives with a very charming 
 daughter, and that she keeps house for him. 
 
 The course of true love then runs tolerably 
 smoothly. The virtuous youth without a profes- 
 sion timidly woos the modest maiden without a 
 mamma, and all would go well were it not for the 
 fierce old solicitor at Bourges. M. Flamaran will 
 give his daughter if Fabian will live in Paris ; but 
 the uncle will accept no niece unless the young
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 277 
 
 couple will settle in the country. The eccentric 
 violence of M. Mouillard gives the author occasion 
 for a plentiful exercise of that conventional wit 
 about lawyers which never fails to amuse French 
 people, which animates the farces of the Renaissance, 
 and which finds its locus classicus in the one great 
 comedy of Racine. There follows a visit to Italy, 
 very gracefully described ; then a visit to Bourges, 
 very pathetical and proper ; and, of course, the 
 end of it all is that the uncle capitulates in snuff 
 and tears, and comes up to Paris to end his days 
 with Fabian and his admirable wife. A final con- 
 versation lifts the veil of the future, and we learn 
 that the tact and household virtues of the bride 
 are to make the whole of Fabian's career a honey- 
 moon. 
 
 The same smoothness of execution, the same 
 grace and adroitness of narrative, which render 
 Une Tache d'Encre as pleasant reading as any one 
 of Mr. W. E. Norris's best society stories, are dis- 
 covered in La Sarcellc Bleue, in which, moreover, 
 the element of humour is not absent. As a typical 
 interpreter of decent French sentiment, at points 
 where it is markedly in contrast with English 
 habits of thought, this is an interesting and even 
 an instructive novel. We are introduced, in a 
 country-house of Anjou, to an old officer, M. 
 Guillaume Maldonne, and his wife, and their young 
 daughter, Therese. With these excellent people 
 lives Robert de Keredol, an old bachelor, also a 
 retired officer, the lifelong friend of Maldonne. 
 The latter is an enthusiastic ornithologist, and 
 keeper of the museum of natural history in the
 
 278 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 adjoining country-town. His ambition is to pos- 
 sess a complete collection of the birds of the 
 district, and the arrival of Robert de Kerdol is 
 due to a letter inviting him to come to Anjou and 
 bring his gun. He has just been wounded in 
 Africa, and the invitation is opportune. He arrives, 
 and so prolongs his visit that he becomes a member 
 of the household : 
 
 " Robert recovered, and was soon in a fit state 
 to go out with his friend. And then there began 
 for both of them the most astonishing and the 
 most fascinating of Odysseys. Each felt some- 
 thing of the old life return to him ; adventure, the 
 emotion of the chase, the need to be on the alert, 
 shots that hit or missed, distant excursions, nights 
 beneath the stars. All private estates, princely 
 domains, closed parks, opened their gates to these 
 hunters of a new type. What mattered it to the 
 proprietor most jealous of his rights if a rare 
 woodpecker or butcher-bird was slaughtered ? 
 Welcomed everywhere, feted everywhere, they 
 ran from one end of the department to the other, 
 through the copses, the meadows, the vineyards, 
 the marshlands. Robert did not shoot, but he 
 had an extraordinary gift for divining that a bird 
 had passed, for discovering its traces or its nest, 
 for saying casually, 'Guillaume, I feel that there 
 are woodcock in the thickets under that clump of 
 birches ; the mist is violet, there is an odour of 
 dead leaves about it.' Or, when the silver Spring, 
 along the edges of the Loire, wakens all the little 
 world of clustered buds, he was wonderful in per- 
 ceiving, motionless on a point of the shore, a ruff
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 279 
 
 with bristling plumage, or even, posed between 
 two alder catkins, the almost imperceptible blue 
 linnet." 
 
 It follows that this novel is the romance of 
 ornithology, and in its pleasantest pages we follow 
 the fugitive "humeur d'oiseau." To the local 
 collection at last but one treasure is lacking. The 
 Blue Teal (perhaps a relative of the Blue Linnet) 
 is known to be claimed among the avifauna of 
 Anjou, but Maldonne and Kredol can never come 
 within earshot of a specimen. Such is the state of 
 affairs when the book opens. Without perceiving 
 the fact, the exquisite child Therese Maldonne has 
 become a woman, and Robert de KeVedol, who 
 thinks that his affection for her is still that of an 
 adopted uncle, wakens to the perception that he 
 desires her for his wife. Docile in her inexperi- 
 ence and in her maidenly reserve, Therese 
 accustoms her mind to this idea, but at the death- 
 bed of a village child, her protege, she meets an 
 ardent and virtuous young gentleman of her own 
 age, Claude Revel, and there is love almost at first 
 sight between them. 
 
 In France, however, and especially in the pro- 
 vinces, the advances of Cupid must be made with 
 extreme decorum. Revel is not acquainted with 
 M. Maldonne, and how is he to be introduced ? 
 He is no zoologist, but he hears of the old col- 
 lector's passion for rare birds, and shooting a 
 squirrel, he presents himself with its corpse at the 
 Museum. He is admitted, indeed, but with some 
 scorn ; and is instructed, in a high tone, that a 
 squirrel is not a bird, nor even a rarity. He
 
 280 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 receives this information with a touching lowliness 
 of heart, and expresses a thirst to know more. 
 The zoologist pronounces him marvellously igno- 
 rant, indeed, but ripe for knowledge, and deigns 
 to take an interest in him. By degrees, as a rising 
 young ornithologist, he is introduced into the 
 family circle, where Keredol instantly conceives a 
 blind and rude jealousy of him. Threse, on the 
 contrary, is charmed, but he gets no closer to her 
 parents. It is explained to him at last by Therese 
 that his only chance is to present himself as a 
 suitor, with a specimen of the Blue Teal in his 
 hands. Then we follow him on cold mornings, 
 before daybreak, in a punt on the reedy reaches of 
 the Loire ; and the gods are good to him, he pots 
 a teal of the most cerulean blueness. Even as he 
 brings it in, Keredol, an incautious lago, snatches 
 it from him, and spoils it. But now the scales fall 
 from everybody's eyes ; Keredol writes a long 
 letter of farewell, and disappears, while Threse, 
 after some coy raptures, is ceremoniously betrothed 
 to the enchanted Claude Revel. It is not suggested 
 that he goes out any longer, searching for blue 
 teal, of a cold and misty morning. La Sarcelle 
 Bleue is a very charming story, only spoiled a little, 
 as it seems to me, by the unsportsmanlike violence 
 of Robert de Ker6dol's jealousy, which is hardly 
 in keeping with his reputation as a soldier and a 
 gentleman. 
 
 As he has advanced in experience, M. Rene 
 Bazin has shown an increasing ambition to deal 
 with larger problems than are involved in such 
 innocent love intrigues as those which we have
 
 
 M. RENfi BAZIN 281 
 
 just briefly analysed. But in doing so he has, 
 with remarkable persistency, refrained from any 
 realisation of what are called the seamy sides of 
 life. In De Toule son Ame he attempted to deal 
 with the aspects of class-feeling in a large pro- 
 vincial town, and in doing so was as cautious as 
 Mrs. Gaskell or as Anthony Trollope. This story, 
 indeed, has a very curious resemblance in its plan 
 to a class of novel familiar to English readers 
 of half a century ago, and hardly known outside 
 England. One has a difficulty in persuading 
 oneself that it has not been written in direct 
 rivalry with such books as Mary Barton and John 
 Halifax, Gentleman. It is a deliberate effort to pre- 
 sent the struggle of industrial life, and the contrasts 
 of capital and labour, in a light purely pathetic and 
 sentimental. To readers who remember how this 
 class of theme is usually treated in France with 
 so much more force and colour, perhaps, but with 
 a complete disregard of the illusions of the heart 
 the mere effort is interesting. In the case of De 
 Toute son Ame the motive is superior to the execu- 
 tion. M. Bazin, greatly daring, does not wholly 
 succeed. The Latin temper is too strong for him, 
 the absence of tradition betrays him ; in this 
 novel, ably constructed as it is, there is a certain 
 insipid tone of sentimentality such as is common 
 enough in English novels of the same class, but 
 such as the best masters amongst us have avoided. 
 True to his strenuous provinciality, M. Bazin 
 does not take Paris as his scene, but Nantes. 
 That city and the lucid stretches of the vast Loire, 
 now approaching the sea, offer subjects for a series
 
 282 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 of accurate and picturesque drop-scenes. The 
 plot of the book itself centres in a great factory, 
 in the ateliers and the usines of the rich firm of 
 Lemarie, one of the most wealthy and prosperous 
 industrials of Nantes. Here one of the artisans is 
 Uncle Eloi, a simple and honest labourer of the 
 better class, who has made himself the guardian 
 of his orphan nephew and niece, Antoine and 
 Henriette Madiot. These two young people are 
 two types the former of the idle, sly, and vicious 
 ne'er-do-well, the latter of all that is most indus- 
 trious, high-minded and decently ambitious. But 
 Henriette is really the illegitimate daughter of the 
 proprietor of the works, M. Lemarie, and his son 
 Victor is attracted, he knows not why, by a 
 fraternal instinct, to the admirable Henriette. 
 She is loved by a countryman, the tall and hand- 
 some Etienne, reserved and silent. The works in 
 Nantes are burned down, by the spite of Antoine, 
 who has turned anarchist. Lemarie, the selfish 
 capitalist, is killed by a stroke of apoplexy on 
 hearing the news. His widow, a woman of deep 
 religion, gives the rest of her life to good works, 
 and is aided in her distributions by Henriette, who 
 finds so much to do for others, in the accumula- 
 tion of her labours for their welfare, that her own 
 happiness can find no place, and the silent Etienne 
 goes back to his country home in his barge. De 
 Toute son Ante is a well-constructed book, full of 
 noble thoughts ; and the sale of some twenty large 
 editions proves that it has appealed with success 
 to a wide public in France. But we are accus- 
 tomed in England, the home of sensibility, to
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 283 
 
 guard, with humour and with a fear of the absurd, 
 against being swept away on the full tide of senti- 
 ment, and perhaps this sort of subject is better 
 treated by a Teutonic than by a Latin mind. At 
 all events, De Toute son Ame t the most English of 
 M. Bazin's novels, is likely to be the one least 
 appreciated in England. 
 
 A very characteristic specimen of M. Bazin's 
 deliberate rejection of all the conventional spices 
 with which the French love to heighten the flavour 
 of their fiction, is found in the novel called Madame 
 Corentine, a sort of hymn to the glory of devoted 
 and unruffled matrimony. This tale opens in the 
 island of Jersey, where Madame Corentine L'Hereec 
 is discovered keeping a bric-a-brac shop in St. 
 Heliers, in company with her thirteen-year-old 
 daughter, Simone. Madame L'Hereec is living 
 separated from her husband, but M. Bazin would 
 not be true to his parti pris if he even suggested 
 that there had been any impropriety of moral con- 
 duct on either side. On the contrary, husband 
 and wife are excellent alike, only, unhappily, there 
 has been a fatal incompatibility of temper, exacer- 
 bated by the husband's vixen mother. Corentine 
 was a charming girl of Perros in Brittany ; M. 
 L'Hereec, a citizen of the neighbouring town of 
 Lannion. Now he remains in Lannion, and she 
 has taken refuge in Jersey ; no communication 
 passes between them. But the child Simone longs 
 to see her father, and she sends him a written 
 word by a Breton sailor. Old Capt. Guen, 
 Corentine's widowed father, writes to beg her to 
 come to Perros, where her younger sister, Marie
 
 284 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Anne, has married the skipper of a fishing-vessel. 
 Pressed by Simone, the mother consents to go, 
 although dreading the approach to her husband. 
 She arrives to find her sister's husband, Sullian, 
 drowned at sea, and the father mourns over two 
 daughters, one of whom is a widow and the other 
 separated from her man. But Sullian comes back 
 to life, and through the instrumentality of little 
 Simone, the L'Hereecs are brought together, even 
 the wicked old mother-in-law getting her fangs 
 successively drawn. The curtain falls on a scene 
 of perfect happiness, a general " Bless ye, my 
 children " of melodrama. 
 
 There is a great deal of charming description in 
 this book, both the Jersey and the Lannion and 
 Perros scenes being painted in delightful colours. 
 A great part of the novel is occupied with the 
 pathos of the harvest of the sea, the agony of 
 Breton women who lose their husbands, brothers 
 and sons in the fisheries. Here M. Bazin comes 
 into direct competition with a greater magician, 
 with Pierre Loti in his exquisite and famous 
 Pecheur d'Islande. This is a comparison which is 
 inevitably made, and it is one which the younger 
 novelist, with all his merits, is not strong enough 
 to sustain. On the other hand, the central subject 
 of the novel, the development of character in the 
 frivolous and tactless but essentially good-hearted 
 Corentine, is very good, and Simone is one of the 
 best of M. Bazin's favourite "girlish shapes that 
 slip the bud in lines of unspoiled symmetry." It 
 is not possible for me to dwell here on Les Noellel, 
 a long novel about provincial society in the
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 285 
 
 Angevin district of the Vendee, nor on Humble 
 Amour, a series of six short stories, all (except 
 Les Trots Peines d'un Rossignol, a fantastic dream 
 of Naples) dealing with Breton life, because I 
 must push on to a consideration of a much more 
 important work. 
 
 The most successful, and I think the best, of M. 
 Ren Bazin's books, is the latest. When La Terre 
 qui Meurt was published in 1899, there were not a 
 few critics who said that here at last was a really 
 great novel. There is no doubt, at all events, that 
 the novelist has found a subject worthy of the 
 highest talent. That subject briefly is the draining 
 of the village by the city. He takes, in La Terre 
 qui Meurt, the agricultural class, and shows how 
 the towns, with their offices, cafes, railway stations 
 and shops, are tempting it away from the farms, 
 and how, under the pressure of imported produce, 
 the land itself, the ancient, free prerogative of 
 France, the inalienable and faithful soil, is dying 
 of a slow disease. To illustrate this heroic and 
 melancholy theme, M. Bazin takes the history of a 
 farm in that flat district occupying the north-west 
 of the department of the Vendee, between the 
 sandy shore of the Atlantic and the low hills of the 
 Bocage, which is called Le Marais. This is a 
 curious fragment of France, traversed by canals, a 
 little Holland in its endless horizons, broken up by 
 marshes and pools, burned hard in summer, floated 
 over by icy fogs in winter, a country which, from 
 time immemorial, has been proud of its great 
 farms, and where the traditions of the soil have 
 been more conservative than anywhere else. Of
 
 286 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 this tract of land, the famous Marais Venden, 
 with its occasional hill-town looking out from a 
 chalky island over a wild sea of corn and vines and 
 dwarf orchards to the veritable ocean far away in 
 the west, M. Bazin gives an enchanting picture. It 
 may be amusing to note that his landscape is as 
 exact as a guide-book, and that Sallertaine, Challans, 
 St. Gilles, and the rest are all real places. If the 
 reader should ever take the sea-baths at Sables 
 d'Olonne, he may drive northward and visit for him- 
 self "la terre qui meurt" in all its melancholy beauty. 
 The scene of the novel is an ancient farm, 
 called La Fromentiere (even this, by the way, is 
 almost a real name, since it is the channel of 
 Fromentine which divides all this rich marsh-land 
 from the populous island of Noirmoutiers). This 
 farmstead and the fields around it have belonged 
 from time immemorial to the family of Lumineau. 
 Close by there is a chateau, which has always been 
 in the possession of one noble family, that of the 
 Marquis de la Fromentiere. The aristocrats at the 
 castle have preserved a sort of feudal relation to 
 the farmers, as they to the labourers, the demo- 
 cratisation of society in France having but faintly 
 extended to these outlying provinces. But hard 
 times have come. All these people live on the 
 land, and the land can no longer support them. 
 The land cannot adapt itself to new methods, new 
 traditions ; it is the most mattering thing in the 
 world, and when pressure comes from without and 
 from within, demanding new ideas, exciting new 
 ambitions, the land can neither resist nor change, 
 it can only die.
 
 M. RENE BAZIN 287 
 
 Consequently, when La Terre qui Meurt opens, 
 the Marquis and his family have long ceased to 
 inhabit their chateau. They have passed away to 
 Paris, out of sight of the peasants who respected 
 and loved them, leaving the park untended and the 
 house empty. Toussaint Lumineau, the farmer, 
 who owns La Fromentiere, is a splendid specimen 
 of the old, heroic type of French farmer, a man 
 patriarchal in appearance, having in his blood, 
 scarcely altered by the passage of time, the pre- 
 judices, the faiths, and the persistencies of his 
 ancient race. No one of his progenitors has ever 
 dreamed of leaving the land. The sons have 
 cultivated it by the side of the fathers ; the 
 daughters have married into the families of neigh- 
 bouring farms, and have borne sons and daughters 
 for the eternal service of the soil. The land was 
 strong enough and rich enough ; it could support 
 them all. But now the virtue has passed out of 
 the land. It is being killed by trains from Russia 
 and by ships from America ; the phylloxera has 
 smitten its vineyards, the shifting of markets has 
 disturbed the easy distribution of its products. 
 And the land never adapts itself to circumstances, 
 never takes a new lease of life, never " turns over 
 a new life." If you trifle with its ancient, immut- 
 able conditions, there is but one thing that the land 
 can do it can die. 
 
 The whole of La Terre qui Meurt shows how, 
 without violence or agony, this sad condition pro- 
 ceeds at La Fromentiere. Within the memory of 
 Toussaint Lumineau the farm has been prosperous 
 and wealthy. With a wife of the old, capable
 
 288 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 class, with three strong sons and two wholesome 
 daughters, all went well in the household. But, 
 gradually, one by one, the props are removed, and 
 the roof of his house rests more and more heavily 
 on the old man's own obstinate persistence. What 
 will happen when that, too, is removed ? For the 
 eldest son, a Hercules, has been lamed for life by 
 a waggon which passed over his legs ; the second 
 son and the elder daughter, bored to extinction by 
 the farm life, steal away, the one to a wretched 
 post at a railway station, the other to be servant 
 in a small restaurant, both infinitely preferring the 
 mean life in a country town to the splendid solitude 
 of the ancestral homestead. Toussaint is left with 
 his third son, Andr6, a first-rate farmer, and with 
 his younger daughter, Rousille. In each of these 
 the genuine love of the soil survives. 
 
 But Andr6 has been a soldier in Africa, and has 
 tasted of the sweetness of the world. He pines for 
 society and a richer earth, more sunlight and a 
 wider chance ; and, at length, with a breaking 
 heart, not daring to confide in his proud old 
 father, he, too, steals away, not to abandon the 
 tillage of the earth, but to practise it on a far 
 broader scale in the fertile plains of the Argentine. 
 The eldest son, the cripple, dies, and the old 
 Toussaint is left, abandoned by all save his younger 
 daughter, in whom the heroic virtue of the soil 
 revives, and who becomes mistress of the farm and 
 the hope of the future. And happiness comes to 
 her, for Jean Nesmy, the labourer from the Bocage, 
 whom her father has despised, but whom she has 
 always loved, contrives to marry Rousille at the
 
 M. RENfi BAZIN 289 
 
 end of the story. But the Marquis is by this time 
 completely ruined, and the estates are presently to 
 be sold. The farms, which have been in his family 
 for centuries, will pass into other hands. What 
 will be the result of this upon the life at La 
 Fromentiere ? That remains to be seen ; that 
 will be experienced, with all else that an economic 
 revolution brings in its wake, by the children of 
 Rousille. 
 
 A field in which M. Ren6 Bazin has been fer- 
 tile almost from the first has been the publication 
 in the " Debats," and afterwards in book-form, of 
 short, picturesque studies of foreign landscape, 
 manners and accomplishment. He began with A 
 f Aventure, a volume of sketches of modern Italian 
 life, which he expanded a few years later in Les 
 Italiens d'Aujourd'hui. Perhaps the best of all these 
 volumes is that called Sidle, a record of a tour 
 along the shores of the Mediterranean, to Malta, 
 through the length and breadth of Sicily, north- 
 ward along Calabria and so to Naples. In no book 
 of M. Bazin's are his lucid, cheerful philosophy and 
 his power of eager observation more eminently 
 illustrated than in Sidle. A tour which he made 
 in Spain during the months of September and 
 October, 1894, was recorded in a volume entitled 
 Terre d'Espagne. Of late he has expended the same 
 qualities of sight and style on the country parts of 
 France, the western portion of which he knows 
 with the closest intimacy. He has collected these 
 impressions sketches, short tales, imaginary con- 
 versations in two volumes, En Province, 1896, 
 and Croquis de France, 1899. In 1898 he accom- 
 
 T
 
 290 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 panied, or rather pursued, the Emperor of Germany 
 on his famous journey to Jerusalem, and we have 
 the result in Croquis d' Orient. In short, M. Bazin, 
 who has undertaken all these excursions in the 
 interests of the great newspaper with which he is 
 identified, is at the present moment one of the 
 most active literary travellers in France, and his 
 records have exactly the same discreet, safe and 
 conciliatory qualities which mark his novels. 
 Wherever M. Bazin is, and whatever he writes, 
 he is always eminently sage. 
 
 We return to the point from which we started. 
 Whatever honours the future may have in store 
 for the author of La Terre qui Mcurt, it is not to be 
 believed that he will ever develop into an author 
 dangerous to morals. His stories and sketches 
 might have been read, had chronology permitted, 
 by Mrs. Barbauld to Miss Hannah More. Mrs. 
 Chapone, so difficult to satisfy, would have rejoiced 
 to see them in the hands of those cloistered virgins, 
 her long-suffering daughters. And there is not, to 
 my knowledge, one other contemporary French 
 author of the imagination who could endure that 
 stringent test. M. Bazin's novels appeal to persons 
 of a distinctly valetudinarian moral digestion. 
 With all this, they are not dull, or tiresome, or 
 priggish. They preach no sermon, except a broad 
 and wholesome amiability ; they are possessed by 
 no provoking propaganda of virtue. Simply, M. 
 Bazin sees the beauty of domestic life in France, 
 is fascinated by the charm of the national gaiety 
 and courtesy, and does not attempt to look below 
 the surface.
 
 M. RENfi BAZIN 291 
 
 We may find something to praise, as well as 
 perhaps something to smile at, in this chaste and sur- 
 prising optimism. In a very old-fashioned book, 
 that nobody reads now, Alfred de Musset's Confes- 
 sion (fun Enfant du Siecle, there is a phrase which 
 curiously prefigures the ordinary French novelist 
 of to-day. " Voyez," says the hero of that work, 
 " voyez comme ils parlent de tout : toujours les 
 termes les plus crus, les plus grossiers, les plus 
 abjects ; ceux-la seulement leur paraissent vrais ; 
 tout le reste n'est que parade, convention et pr- 
 juges. Qu'ils racontent une anecdote, qu'ils ren- 
 dent compte de ce qu'ils ont eprouv, toujours 
 le mot sale et physique, toujours la lettre, tou- 
 jours la mort." What an exact prediction ; and 
 it is to the honour of M. Bazin that all the faults 
 of judgment and proportion which are here so 
 vigorously stigmatised are avoided by his pure and 
 comfortable talent. 
 
 1901.
 
 M. HENRI DE REGNIER 
 
 LES JEUX RUSTIQUES ET DIVINS 
 
 THE determination of the younger French writers 
 to enlarge and develop the resources of their 
 national poetry is a feature of to-day, far too 
 persistent and general to be ignored. Until a 
 dozen years ago, the severely artificial prosody 
 accepted in France seemed to be one of the 
 literary phenomena of Europe the most securely 
 protected from possible change. The earliest 
 proposals and experiments in fresh directions 
 were laughed at, and often not undeservedly. 
 No one outside the fray can seriously admit that 
 any one of the early francs-tireurs of symbolism 
 made a perfectly successful fight. But the num- 
 ber of these volunteers, and their eagerness, and 
 their intense determination to try all possible 
 doors of egress from their too severe palace of 
 traditional verse, do at last impress the observer 
 with a sense of the importance of the instinct 
 which drives them to these eccentric manifesta- 
 tions. Renan said of the early Decadents that 
 they were a set of babies, sucking their thumbs. 
 But these people are getting bald, and have grey 
 beards, and still they suck their thumbs. There 
 must be something more in the whole thing 
 than met the eye of the philosopher. When the
 
 M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 293 
 
 entire poetic youth of a country such as France 
 is observed raking the dust-heaps, it is ' probable 
 that pearls are to be discovered. 
 
 It cannot but be admitted that M. Henri de 
 Rgnier has discovered a large one, if it seems 
 to be a little clouded, and perhaps a little flawed. 
 Indeed, of the multitude of experiment-makers and 
 theorists, he comes nearest (it seems to me) to 
 presenting a definitely evolved talent, lifted out 
 of the merely tentative order. He stands, at this 
 juncture, half-way between the Parnassians and 
 those of the symbolists who are least violent in 
 their excesses. If we approach M. de Regnier 
 from the old-fashioned camp, his work may seem 
 bewildering enough, but if we reach it from the 
 other side say, from M. Rene Ghii or from 
 M. Yvanho6 Rambosson it appears to be quite 
 organic and intelligible. Here at least is a writer 
 with something audible to communicate, with a 
 coherent manner of saying it, and with a definite 
 style. A year or two ago, the publication of his 
 Poemes Anciens el Romanesques raised M. de Rg- 
 nier, to my. mind, a head and shoulders above 
 his fellows. That impression is certainly streng- 
 thened by Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins, a volume full 
 of graceful and beautiful verses. Alone, among 
 the multitude of young experimenters, M. de 
 Regnier seems to possess the classical spirit ; he 
 is a genuine artist, of pure and strenuous vision. 
 For years and years, my eloquent and mysterious 
 friend, M. Stephane Mallarm, has been talking 
 about verse to the youth of Paris. The main 
 result of all those abstruse discourses has been
 
 294 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 (so it seems to me) the production of M. Henri 
 de R6gnier. He is the solitary swallow that 
 makes the summer for which M. Mallarm has 
 been so passionately imploring the gods. 
 
 M. Henri de R6gnier was born at Honfleur in 
 1864, and about 1885 became dimly perceptible 
 to the enthusiastic by his contributions to those 
 little revues, self-sacrificing tributes to the Muses, 
 which have formed such a pathetic and yet such 
 an encouraging feature of recent French literature. 
 He collected these scattered verses in tiny and 
 semi-private pamphlets of poetry, but it was not 
 until 1894 that he began to attract general atten- 
 tion and that opposition which is the compliment 
 time pays to strength. It was in that year that 
 M. de R6gnier published Artthuse, in which were 
 discovered such poems as Pe'roraison : 
 
 " O lac pur, j'ai jete mes flutes dans tes eaux, 
 
 Que quelque autre, a son tour, les retrouve, roseaux, 
 Sur le bord pastoral ou leurs tiges sont ne"es 
 Et vertes dans 1'Avril d'une plus belle Annee ! 
 Que toute la foret referme son automne 
 Mysterieux sur le lac pale ou j'abandonne 
 Mes flutes de jadis mortes au fond des eaux. 
 Le vent passe avec des feuilles et des oiseaux 
 Au-dessus du bois jaune et s'en va vers la Mer ; 
 Et je veux que ton acre ecume, 6 flot amer, 
 Argente ines cheveux et fleurisse ma joue ; 
 Et je veux, debout dans 1'aurore, sur la proue, 
 Saisir le vent qui vibre aux cordes de la lyre, 
 Et voir, aupres des Sirenes qui les attirent 
 A l'e*cueil ou sans lui nous naufragerions, 
 Le Dauphin serviable aux calmes Arions." 
 
 But the vogue of his melancholy and metaphysical 
 poetry, with its alabastrine purity, its sumptuous
 
 M. HENRI DE RftGNIER 295 
 
 richness, began when the poet finally addressed the 
 world at large in two collections of lyrical verse, 
 entitled Poemes Anciens et Romanesques (1896) and 
 Les Jeux Rusliques et Divins (1897), when it was 
 admitted, even by those who are the most jealous 
 guardians of the tradition in France, that M. Henr i 
 de Regnier represented a power which must be 
 taken for the future into serious consideration. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves, in 
 reading Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins, of the Mallar- 
 mean principle that poetry should suggest and not 
 express, that a series of harmonious hints should 
 produce the effect of direct clear statement. In 
 the opposite class, no better example can be 
 suggested than the sonnets of M. de Heredia, 
 which are as transparent as sapphires or topazes, 
 and as hard. But if M. de Regnier treats the 
 same class of subject as M. de Heredia (and he 
 often does) the result is totally different. He pro- 
 duces an opal, something clouded, soft in tone, and 
 complex, made of conflicting shades and fugitive 
 lights. In the volume before us we have a long 
 poem on the subject of Arethusa, the nymph who 
 haunted that Ortygian well where, when the flutes 
 of the shepherds were silent, the sirens came to 
 quench their thirst. We have been so long 
 habituated, in England by the manner of Keats 
 and Tennyson, in France by the tradition of the 
 Parnassians, to more or less definite and ex- 
 haustive portraiture, that at first we read this 
 poetry of M. de Regnier without receiving any 
 impression. All the rhythms are melodious, all 
 the diction dignified and pure, all the images
 
 296 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 appropriate, but, until it has been carefully re-read, 
 the poem seems to say nothing. It leaves at first 
 no imprint on the mind ; it merely bewilders and 
 taunts the attention. 
 
 It is difficult to find a complete piece short 
 enough for quotation which shall yet do no in- 
 justice to the methods of M. de Regnier ; but In- 
 vocation Memoriale may serve our purpose : 
 
 " La main en vous touchant se crispe et se contracte 
 Aux veines de 1'onyx et aux nceuds de 1'agate, 
 Vases nus que 1'amour en cendre a faits des urnes ! 
 O coupes tristes que je soupese, une a une, 
 Sans sourire aux beautes des socles et des anses ! 
 O passe longuement ou je goute en silence 
 Des poisons, des mdmoires acres ou le philtre 
 Qu'avec le souvenir encor 1'espoir infiltre 
 Goutte a goutte puise a d'ameres fontaines ; 
 Et, ne voyant que lui et elles dans moi-meme, 
 Je regarde, lk-bas, par les fenetres hautes, 
 L'ombre d'un cypres noir s'allonger sur les roses." 
 
 The studied eccentricity of the rhymes may be 
 passed over ; if fontaines and meme, hautes and 
 roses, satisfy a French ear, it is no business of an 
 English critic to comment on it. But the dimness 
 of the sense of this poem is a feature which we 
 may discuss. At first reading, perhaps, we shall 
 find that the words have left no mark behind 
 them whatever. Read them again and yet again, 
 and a certain harmonious impression of liquid 
 poetic beauty will disengage itself, something 
 more in keeping with the effect on the mind of 
 the Ode to a Grecian Urn, or the close of the 
 Scholar Gypsy, than of the purely Franco-Hel- 
 lenic poetry of Andr6 Chenier or of Leconet
 
 M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 297 
 
 de Lisle. Throughout this volume what is pre- 
 sented is a faint tapestry rather than a picture 
 dim choirs of brown fauns or cream-white 
 nymphs dancing in faint, mysterious forests, 
 autumnal foliage sighing over intangible stretches 
 of winding, flashing river ; Pan listening, the pale 
 Sirens singing, Autumn stumbling on under the 
 burden of the Hours, thyrsus and caduceus flung 
 by unseen deities on the velvet of the shaven 
 lawn everywhere the shadow of poetry, not its 
 substance, the suggestion of the imaginative act in 
 a state of suspended intelligence. Nor can beauty 
 be denied to the strange product, nor to the poet 
 his proud boast of the sanction of Pegasus : 
 
 " J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or 
 Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor, 
 Verdoyant a jamais hier comme aujourd'hui, 
 Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit." 
 1896, 
 
 LA CITE DES EAUX 
 
 It may be conceded that the publication of a 
 new volume by M. Henri de Regnier is, for the 
 moment, the event most looked forward to in the 
 poetical world of France. The great poets of an 
 elder generation, though three or four of them 
 survive, very rarely present anything novel to 
 their admirers, and of the active and numerous 
 body of younger writers there is no one, certainly 
 among those who are purely French by birth, 
 whose work offers so little to the doubter and the 
 detractor as that of M. de Regnier. He has been 
 before the public for sixteen or seventeen years ;
 
 298 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 his verse is learned, copious, varied and always 
 distinguished. Like all the younger poets of 
 France, he has posed as a revolutionary, and 
 has adopted a new system of aesthetics, and in 
 particular an emancipated prosody. But he has 
 carried his reforms tojno absurd excess ; he has 
 kept'in touch with the tradition, and he has never 
 demanded more liberty than he required to give 
 ease to the movements of his genius. By the 
 side of the fanatics of the new schools he has often 
 seemed conservative and sometimes almost re- 
 actionary. He has always had too much to say 
 and too great a joy in saying it to be forever 
 fidgeting about his apparatus. 
 
 M. Henri de Regnier is much nearer in genius 
 to the Parnassians than any other of his immediate 
 contemporaries. If he had been born a quarter 
 of a century earlier, doubtless he would be a 
 Parnassian. In his earliest verses he showed him- 
 self a disciple of M. Sully-Prudhomme. But that 
 was a purely imitative strain, it would seem, since 
 in the developed writing of M. de Regnier there is 
 none of the intimate analysis of feeling and the 
 close philosophic observation which characterise 
 the exquisite author of Les Vaines Tendresses. On 
 the other hand, in M. de Heredia we have a Par- 
 nassian whose objective genius is closely allied, on 
 several sides, to that of the younger poet. The 
 difference is largely one of texture ; the effects of 
 M. de Heredia are metallic, those of M. de Regnier 
 supple and silken. A certain hardness of outline, 
 which impairs for some readers the brilliant 
 enamel or bronze of Les Trophe'cs is exchanged 
 in Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins and Les Medailles
 
 M. HENRI DE R^GNIER 299 
 
 d'Argile for a softer line, drowned in a more 
 delicate atmosphere. This does not prevent M. 
 de Heredia and M. de Rgnier from being the 
 poets in whom the old and the new school take 
 hands, and in whom the historical transition may 
 be most advantageously studied. 
 
 La Cite des Eatix emphasises the conservative 
 rather than the revolutionary tendencies of the 
 writer. In two closely related directions, indeed, 
 it shows a reaction against previous movements 
 made by M. de Regnier somewhat to the discom- 
 fort of his readers. In the poetry he was writing 
 five or six years ago, he seemed to be com- 
 pletely subdued by two enchanting but extremely 
 dangerous sirens of style, allegory and symbol. 
 Some of the numbers in Les Jeux Rustiques el Divins 
 were highly melodious, indeed, and full of colour, 
 but so allusive and remote, so determined always 
 to indicate and never to express, so unintelligible, 
 in short, and so vaporous, that the pleasure of the 
 reader was very seriously interfered with. The 
 fascinating and perilous precepts of Mallarme 
 were here seen extravagantly at work. If M. de 
 Regnier had persisted in pushing further and 
 further along this nebulous path, we will not 
 venture to say that he would soon have lost him- 
 self, but he would most assuredly have begun to 
 lose his admirers. We are heartily glad that in 
 La Cite des Eaux he has seen fit to return to a 
 country where the air is more lucid, and where 
 men are no longer seen through the vitreous 
 gloom as trees walking. 
 
 M. de Regnier builds his rhyme with deep and 
 glowing colour. In this he is more like Keats
 
 300 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 than any other recent poet. Whether in the 
 mysterious eclogues of antiquity which it used to 
 please him to compose, or in the simpler and 
 clearer pieces of to-day, he is always a follower 
 of dreams. If the French poets were distinguished 
 by flowers, as their Greek predecessors were, the 
 brows of M. Henri de R6gnier might be bound 
 with newly-opened blossoms of the pomegranate, 
 like those of Menecrates in the garland of Meleager. 
 His classical pictures used to be extraordinarily 
 gorgeous, like those in Keats's Endymion, purpureal 
 and over-ripe, hanging in glutinous succession 
 from the sugared stalk of the rhyme. They are 
 now more strictly chastened, but they have not 
 lost their dreamy splendour. 
 
 The desolation of the most beautiful of Royal 
 gardens has attracted more and more frequently 
 of late the curiosity of men of imagination. It in- 
 spired this year the fantastic and elegant romance 
 of M. Marcel Batilliat, Versailles-aux-Fantomes. 
 But it has found no more exquisite rendering 
 than the cycle of sonnets which gives its name to 
 the volume before us. M. de Regnier wanders 
 through the pavilions and across the terraces of 
 Versailles, and everywhere he studies the effect 
 of its mossed and melancholy waters. He be- 
 comes hypnotised at last, and the very enclosures 
 of turf take the form of pools to his eyes : 
 
 " Le gazon toujours vert ressemble au bassin glauque. 
 C'est le mme carre* de verdure equivoque, 
 Dont le marbre ou le buis encadrent 1'herbe ou 1'eau : 
 Et dans 1'eau smaragdine et 1'herbe d'e'meraude, 
 Regarde, tour a tour, errer en ors rivaux 
 La jaune feuille morte et la cyprin qui r6de."
 
 M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 301 
 
 The vast and monumental garden stretches itself 
 before us in these sonnets, with its invariable 
 alleys of cypress and box, its porcelain dolphins, 
 its roses floating across the wasted marble of its 
 statues, the strange autumnal odour of its bos- 
 cages and its labyrinths, and, above all, still 
 regnant, the majestic and monotonous facade of 
 its incomparable palace. 
 
 For English readers the matchless choruses of 
 Empedocles said the final word in poetry about 
 Marsyas, exactly fifty years ago. M. de Regnier, 
 who has probably never read Matthew Arnold, 
 has taken a singularly parallel view of the story in 
 Le Sang de Marsyas, where the similarity is increased 
 by the fact that the French poet adopts a form of 
 free verse very closely analogous to that used by 
 Arnold in The Strayed Reveller and elsewhere. 
 The spirited odes, called La Course and Pan, have 
 the same form and something of the same Arnoldian 
 dignity. The section entitled Inscriptions lues au 
 Sotr Tontbant especially those lines which are 
 dedicated to " Le Centaure Blesse " might have 
 been signed, in his moments of most Hellenic 
 expansion, by Landor. It is not an accident that 
 we are so frequently reminded, in reading M. de 
 Regnier's poems, of the English masters, since he 
 is a prominent example of that slender strain 
 which runs through French verse from Ronsard 
 to Andre Chenier, and on through Alfred de 
 Vigny, where the Greek spirit takes forms of 
 expression which are really much more English 
 than Latin in their character. Of the purely 
 lyrical section of this charming volume it is
 
 302 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 difficult to give an impression without extensive 
 quotation. We must confine ourselves to a single 
 specimen, entitled La Lune Jaune : 
 
 " Ce long jour a fini par une lune jaune 
 
 Qui monte mollement entre les peupliers, 
 Tandis que se re'pand parmi 1'air qu'elle embaume 
 L'odeur de 1'eau qui dort entre les joncs mouille's. 
 
 Savions-nous, quand, tous deux, sous le soleil torride, 
 Foulions la terre rouge et le chaume blessant, 
 
 Savions-nous, quand nos pieds sur les sables arides 
 Laissaient leurs pas empreints comme des pas de sang, 
 
 Savions-nous, quand 1'amour brulait sa haute flamme 
 En nos coeurs dechirds d'un tourment sans espoir, 
 
 Savions-nous, quand mourait le feu dont nous brulames, 
 Que sa cendre serait si douce a notre soir, 
 
 Et que cet apre jour qui s'acheve et qu'embaume 
 Une odeur d'eau qui songe entre les joncs mouille's 
 
 Finirait mollement par cette lune jaune 
 
 Qui monte et s'arrondit entre les peupliers ? " 
 
 1903. 
 
 LES VACANCES D'UN JEUNE HOMME SAGE 
 
 M. Henri de Regnier is one of the most dis- 
 tinguished living poets of France. But in writing 
 Les Vacances dun Jeune Homme Sage he has attacked 
 a new province of literature, and has taken it by 
 storm. M. de Regnier has written several novels, 
 La Double Maitresse and Le Bon Plaisir in particular 
 which have aimed at reconstructing past eras of 
 society. These books have been remarkable for 
 their ethical insouciance, their rough and cynical 
 disregard of prejudice. One has formed the im- 
 pression that M. Henri de Rgnier's ambition was 
 to be a poet like Keats grafted upon a novelist
 
 M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 303 
 
 like Smollett. And the novels, with all their 
 vigour, were not quite what we sympathise with 
 in this country. Curiously enough, without giv- 
 ing us the least warning, M. de R6gnier has written, 
 in a mood of pure laughter, a refined little picture 
 of real life in a provincial town of to-day. He is 
 deliciously sympathetic at last. 
 
 A boy (I beg his pardon a young man) of 
 sixteen, Georges Dolonne, has the misfortune to 
 be plucked for his bachelor's degree at the Sor- 
 bonne. This is due partly to his shyness, and 
 partly to his pre-occupations, for he is very far 
 indeed from being stupid. It is rather a serious 
 check, however, but his mother in her clemency 
 carries him away to the country for the holidays, 
 to stay with his great-uncle and aunt at the little 
 town of Rivray-sur-Vince. The story is simply a 
 plain account of how Georges spent this vacation, 
 but in the course of it every delightful eccentricity 
 of the population of Rivray is laid bare. I can 
 imagine no pleasanter figures to spend a few hours 
 with than M. de la Boulerie, a decayed old noble- 
 man with a mania for heraldry ; or comfortable 
 obese Madame de la Boulerie, whose rich Avignon 
 accent comes out in moments of excitement ; or 
 Mademoiselle Duplan, the drawing-mistress, who 
 wears a huge hat with feathers in the depths of her 
 own home and dashes out every few moments to 
 drive the boys from her espaliers ; or M. de la 
 Vigneraie, coarse and subtle, with his loud voice and 
 his pinchbeck nobility and his domestic subterfuges. 
 Every one will laugh with these inhabitants of 
 Rivray-sur-Vince, but English readers must be a
 
 304 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 little philosophical in order to appreciate young 
 Master Georges. It is not a mere display of 
 Podsnappery to find him curiously exotic to our 
 ideas of decorous youth. But we ought to take 
 a pleasure in him as a psychological specimen, 
 although so very unlike those which flourish in 
 our own collections. There is no cricket, of 
 course, at Rivray-sur-Vince, and no base-ball ; 
 Georges neither rides, nor shoots, nor even fishes. 
 He smokes quantities of little cigarettes, and he 
 takes walks, not too far nor too fast, and always 
 on the shady side. In fact, the notion of physical 
 exercise does not enter into his head. Notwith- 
 standing this, Georges Dolonne is not a milksop 
 or a muff ; he is simply a young French gentle- 
 man in an immature condition. Mentally he is 
 much more alert, much more adroit and astute, 
 than an English boy in his seventeenth year would 
 be, and the extremely amusing part of the book 
 that part, indeed, where it rises to a remarkable 
 originality is where the contrast is silently drawn 
 between what his relations and friends believe 
 Georges to be and insist upon his being, and the 
 very wide-awake young person that he really is. 
 The prominent place which the appearance and 
 company of women take in the interests of a 
 young Frenchman at an age when the English 
 youth has scarcely awakened to the existence of 
 an ornamental side to sex is exemplified very 
 acutely, but with a charming reserve, in Les 
 Vacances d'un Jeune Homme sage. 
 
 1904.
 
 FOUR POETS 
 
 STEPHANE MALLARME 
 
 IN the midst of the violent incidents which 
 occupied public attention during the month of 
 September 1898 the passing of a curious figure 
 in the literary life of France was almost un- 
 observed. Stephane Mallarm6 died on the gth at 
 his cottage of Bichenic, near Valvius-sur-Seine, 
 after a short illness. He was still in the fulness 
 of life, having been born i8th March, 1842, but he 
 had long seemed fragile. Five or six years ago, 
 and at a quieter time, the death of Mallarm6 
 would have been a newspaper " event," for in the 
 early nineties his disciples managed to awaken 
 around his name and his very contemplative 
 person an astonishing amount of curiosity. This 
 culminated in and was partly assuaged by the 
 publication in 1893 of his Vers et Prose, with a 
 dreamy portrait, a lithograph of great beauty, by 
 Mr. Whistler. Then MallarmS had to take his 
 place among things seen and known ; his works 
 were no longer arcane ; people had read He'rodiade, 
 and their reason had survived the test. In France, 
 where sensations pass so quickly, Mallarm6 has 
 already long been taken for granted. 
 
 It was part of his resolute oddity to call himself 
 by the sonorous name of Stephane, but I have 
 
 35
 
 3 o6 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 been assured that his god-parents gave him the 
 humbler one of Etienne. He was descended 
 from a series, uninterrupted both on the father's 
 and on the mother's side, of officials connected 
 with the parochial and communal registers, and 
 Mallarme was the quite-unexpected flower of this 
 sober vegetation. He was to have been a clerk 
 himself, but he escaped to England about 1862, 
 and returned to Paris only to become what he 
 remained, professionally, for the remainder of his 
 life a teacher of the English language. While 
 he was with us he learned to cultivate a passion 
 for boating ; and in the very quiet, unambitious 
 life of his later years to steal away to his yole 
 d' acajou and lose himself, in dreaming, on one of 
 the tributaries of the Seine was his favourite, 
 almost his only, escapade. In 1874 or 1875 he 
 was in London, and then my acquaintance with 
 him began. I have a vision of him now, the little, 
 brown, gentle person, trotting about in Blooms- 
 bury with an elephant folio under his arm, trying 
 to find Mr. Swinburne by the unassisted light of 
 instinct. 
 
 This famous folio contained Edgar Poe's Raven, 
 translated by Mallarm and illustrated in the most 
 intimidating style by Manet, who was then still an 
 acquired taste. We should to-day admire these 
 illustrations, no doubt, very much ; I am afraid 
 that in 1875, in perfidious Albion, they awakened 
 among the few who saw them undying mirth. 
 Mallarm6's main design in those days was to 
 translate the poems of Poe, urged to it, I think, 
 by a dictum of Baudelaire's, that such a translation
 
 STfiPHANE MALLARME 307 
 
 " pent etre un reve caressant, mais ne peut etre 
 qu'un reve." Mallarm reduced it to reality, and no 
 one has ever denied that his version of Poe's poems 
 (1888) is as admirably successful as it must have 
 been difficult of performance. In 1875 the Par- 
 nasse Contetnporain rejected Mallarm's first impor- 
 tant poem, tlApres-Midi dun Faune, and his revolt 
 against the Parnassian theories began. In 1876 
 he suddenly braved opinion by two " couriers of 
 the Decadence," one the Faune, in quarto, the 
 other a reprint of Beckford's Vathek, with a pre- 
 face, an octavo in vellum. Fortunate the biblio- 
 phil of to-day who possesses these treasures, which 
 were received in Paris with nothing but ridicule 
 and are now sought after like rubies. 
 
 Extraordinary persistence in an idea, and extra- 
 ordinary patience under external discouragement, 
 these were eminent characteristics of Mallarmd. 
 He was not understood. Well, he would wait a 
 little longer. He waited, in fact, some seventeen 
 years before he admitted an ungrateful public again 
 to an examination of his specimens. Meanwhile, 
 in several highly eccentric forms, the initiated had 
 been allowed to buy Pages from his works in 
 prose and verse, at high prices, in most limited 
 issues. Then, in 1893, there was a burst of 
 celebrity and perhaps of disenchantment. When 
 the tom-toms and the conchs are silent, and the 
 Veiled Prophet is revealed at last, there is always 
 some frivolous person who is disappointed at the 
 revelation. Perhaps Mallarm6 was not quite so 
 thrilling when his poems could be read by every- 
 body as when they could only be gazed at through
 
 308 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 the glass bookcase doors of wealthy amateurs. 
 But still, if everybody could now read them, not 
 everybody could understand them. In 1894 the 
 amiable poet came over here, and delivered at 
 Oxford and at Cambridge, cites savantes, an ad- 
 dress of the densest Cimmerian darkness on Music 
 and Letters. In 1897 appeared a collection of 
 essays in prose, called Divagations. The diction- 
 aries will tell the rest of the story. 
 
 It seems quite impossible to conjecture what 
 posterity will think of the poetry of St6phane 
 Mallarm6. It is not of the class which rebuffs 
 contemporary sympathy by its sentiments or its 
 subjects ; the difficulty of Mallarm6 consists 
 entirely in his use of language. He was allied 
 with, or was taken as a master by, the young men 
 who have broken up and tried to remodel the 
 prosody of France. In popular estimation he 
 came to be identified with them, but in error ; 
 there are no vers fibres in Mallarm6. He was 
 resolutely misapprehended, and perhaps, in his 
 quiet way, he courted misapprehension. But if 
 we examine very carefully in what his eccentricity 
 (or his originality) consisted, we shall find it all 
 resolving itself into a question of language. He 
 thought that the vaunted precision and lucidity of 
 French style, whether in prose or verse, was 
 degrading the national literature ; that poetry mus- 
 preserve, or must conquer, an embroidered gart 
 ment to distinguish her from the daily newspaper. 
 He thought the best ways of doing this were, 
 firstly, to divert the mind of the reader from the 
 obvious and beaten paths of thought, and secondly
 
 ST^PHANE MALLARM 309 
 
 to arrange in a decorative or melodic scheme 
 words chosen or reverted to for their peculiar 
 dignity and beauty. 
 
 It was strange that Mallarme never saw, or 
 never chose to recognise, that he was attempting 
 the impossible. He went on giving us intima- 
 tions of what he meant, never the thing itself. 
 His published verses are mere fallings from him, 
 vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving 
 about in worlds not realised. They are fragments 
 of a very singular and complicated system which 
 the author never carried into existence. Mallarm6 
 has left no " works," and, although he was always 
 hinting of the Work, it was never written. Even 
 his Virgilian Faune, even his Ovidian He'rodiade, are 
 merely suggestions of the solid Latin splendour 
 with which he might have carried out a design 
 he did no more than indicate. He was a 
 wonderful dreamer, exquisite in his intuitions 
 and aspirations, but with as little creative power 
 as has ever been linked with such shining con- 
 victions. 
 
 What effect will the life and death of Mallarm 
 have upon poetry in France ? Must it not be 
 hoped that his influence may prove rather tem- 
 porary and transitional than lasting ? He did 
 excellent peripatetic service. His conversation and 
 example preserved alight, through a rather prosy 
 time, the lamp of poetic enthusiasm; he was a 
 glowing ember. But, on the other hand, who 
 can deny that his theories and practice, ill- 
 comprehended as they were, provoked a great 
 display of affectation and insincerity ? Prose pour
 
 310 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 les Esseintes is a very curious and interesting com- 
 position ; but it is not a good model for the young. 
 MallarmS himself, so lucid a spirit if so obscure a 
 writer, was well aware of this. People, he found, 
 were cocksure of what his poems meant when the 
 interpretation was only dawning upon himself after 
 a generation of study. A youthful admirer once 
 told him, it is said, that he entirely understood the 
 meaning of one of his most cryptic publications. 
 "What a genius you have!" replied Mallarme, 
 with his gentle smile ; " at the age of twenty {you 
 have discovered in a week what has baffled me for 
 thirty years." 
 
 Some of the eulogies on this poor, charming 
 Mallarm, with his intense and frustrated aspira- 
 tion after the perfect manner, have been a cruel 
 satire on his prestige. From one of these mystifi- 
 cations I learn that " with the accustomed Parian 
 (flesh of death), Mallarme associated grafts of life 
 unforeseen, eyes of emerald or of sapphire, hair 
 of gold or silver, smiles of ivory," and that these 
 statues "failed to fidget on their glued-down feet, 
 because to the brutal chisel had succeeded a proud 
 and delicate shiver glimmering through the infinite, 
 perceptible to the initiated alone, like the august 
 nibbling-away of Beauty by a white mouse ! " So 
 far as Mallarm6 and his theories are responsible 
 for writing such as this and for the last fifteen 
 years his name has been made the centre for a 
 prodigious amount of the like clotted nonsense 
 even those who loved and respected the man most 
 cannot sincerely wish that his influence should 
 continue.
 
 STPHANE MALLARM^ 311 
 
 Mallarme has been employed as a synonym for 
 darkness, but he did not choose this as a distinc- 
 tion. He was not like Donne, who, when Edward 
 Herbert had been extremely crabbed in an elegy 
 on Prince Henry, wrote one himself to " match," 
 as Ben Jonson tells us, Herbert " in obscureness." 
 In a letter to myself, some years ago, Mallarm 
 protested with evident sincerity against the charge 
 of being Lycophrontic : " excepte par maladresse 
 ou gaucherie je ne suis pas obscur." Yet where 
 is obscurity to be found if not in Don du Poeme? 
 What is dense if the light flows freely through 
 Prose pour des Esseintes ? Some of his alterations of 
 his own text betray the fact that he treated words 
 as musical notation, that he was far more inti- 
 mately affected by their euphonic interrelation 
 than by their meaning in logical sequence. In 
 my own copy of Les Fenfires, he has altered in 
 MS. the line 
 
 " Que dore la main chaste de 1'Infini " 
 to 
 
 "Que dore le matin chaste de 1'Infini." 
 
 Whether the Infinite had a Hand or a Morning 
 was purely a question of euphony. So, what had 
 long appeared as " mon exotique soin " became 
 " mon unique soin." In short, MallarmS used 
 words, not as descriptive, but as suggestive means 
 of communication between the writer and the 
 reader, and the object of a poem of his was 
 not to define what the poet was thinking about, 
 but to force the listener to think about it by
 
 312 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 blocking up all routes of impression save that 
 which led to the desired and indicated bourne. 
 
 He was a very delightful man, whom his .friends 
 deeply regret. He was a particularly lively talker, 
 and in his conversation, which was marked by good 
 sense no less than by a singular delicacy of percep- 
 tion, there was no trace of the wilful perversity of 
 his written style. He had a strong sense of hum- 
 our, and no one will ever know, perhaps, how far 
 a waggish love of mystification entered into his 
 theories and his experiments. He was very much 
 amused when Verlaine said of him that he "con- 
 sidera la clart6 comme une grace secondaire." It 
 certainly was not the grace he sought for first. 
 We may, perhaps, be permitted to think that he 
 had no such profoundly novel view of nature or 
 of man as justified procedures so violent as those 
 which he introduced. But, when we were able 
 to comprehend him, we perceived an exquisite 
 fancy, great refinement of feeling and an attitude 
 towards life which was uniformly and sensitively 
 poetical. Is it not to be supposed that when he 
 could no longer be understood, when we lost 
 him in the blaze of language, he was really more 
 delightful than ever, if only our gross senses could 
 have followed him ? 
 
 1898. 
 
 M. EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 Among those poets who have employed the 
 French tongue with most success in recent years, 
 it is curious that the two whose claims to distinc-
 
 M. fiMILE VERHAEREN 313 
 
 tion are least open to discussion should be, not 
 Frenchmen at all, but Flemings of pure race. The 
 work of M. Verhaeren has not the amusing quality 
 which has given a universal significance to the 
 dramas and treatises of M. Maeterlinck, and he 
 has remained obstinately faithful to the less popular 
 medium of verse. In our English sense of the 
 term, M. Maeterlinck is a poet only upon occasion, 
 while M. Verhaeren never appears without his 
 singing-robes about him. By dint of a remark- 
 able persistency in presenting his talent character- 
 istically to his readers, M. Verhaeren has risen 
 slowly but steadily to a very high eminence. He 
 has out-lived the impression, which prevailed at 
 first, of ugliness, of squalor, of a preoccupation 
 with themes and aspects radically antipoetical. 
 He has conquered us deliberately, book by book. 
 He has proved that genius is its own best judge 
 of what is a good "subject," and imperceptibly 
 we have learned to appreciate and respect him. 
 He is true to himself, quite indefatigable, and we 
 are beginning to realise at last that he is one of 
 the very small group of really great poets born 
 in Europe since 1850. 
 
 He has a local, besides his universal, claim on 
 our respect, since he is the pioneer and captain 
 of the brilliant neo-Belgian school which is now 
 so active and so prominent. His first book of 
 verses, Les Flamandes, of 1883, is curious to look 
 back upon. It was thrust upon a perfectly hostile 
 world of Brussels, a world with its eyes loyally 
 fixed on Paris. It had just the same harsh, 
 austere aspect which M. Verhaeren's poetry has
 
 3H FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 preserved ever since. It was utterly unlike what 
 came from Paris then, dear little amber-scented 
 books of polished sonnets, bound in vellum, with 
 Lemerre's familiar piocheur on the cover. It 
 was the first shoot of a new thing, of Franco- 
 Flemish imaginative literature. M. Verhaeren 
 cared nothing for the neglect of the critics ; he 
 went on putting forth successive little volumes, 
 no less thorny, no less smelling of the dykes and 
 dunes Les Moines in 1886, Les Soirs in 1887, 
 Les Debacles in 1888. It was not until 1889 that 
 M. Maeterlinck came to his support with a first 
 book, the Serres Chaudes. Meanwhile, the genius 
 of M. Verhaeren, the product of an individuality 
 of extraordinary strength, pressed steadily forward. 
 He has gained in suppleness and skill since then, 
 but all that distinguishes him from other writers, 
 all that is himself, is to be found in these earliest 
 pamphlets of gaunt, realistic poetry. 
 
 The following dismal impression of London is 
 highly characteristic of the early Verhaeren of 
 Les Soirs : 
 
 " Et ce Londres de fonte et de bronze, mon ame, 
 Oil des plaques de fer claquent sous les hangars, 
 
 Oil des voiles s'en vont, sans Notre Dame 
 Pour e*toile, s'en vont, Ik-bas, vers les hasards. 
 
 Gares de suies et de fume'e, ou du gaz pleure 
 
 Ses spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'eclair, 
 
 Oil des btes d'ennui baillent k 1'heure, 
 Dolente immense'ment, qui tinte k Westminster. 
 
 Et ces quais infinis de lanternes fatales, 
 
 Parques dont les fuseaux plongent aux profondeurs, 
 
 Et ces marins noyes, sous des pe"tales 
 De fleurs de boue oil la flamme met des lueurs.
 
 M. EMILE VERHAEREN 315 
 
 Et ces chales et ces gestes de femmes soules, 
 Et ces alcools en lettres d'or iusques au toit, 
 
 Et tout a coup la mort parmi ces foules 
 O mon ame du soir, ce Londres noir qui trone en toi ! " 
 
 A hundred years ago we possessed in English 
 literature a writer very curiously parallel to M. 
 Verhaeren, who probably never heard of him. I 
 do not know whether any one has pointed out the 
 similarity between Crabbe and the Belgian poet of 
 our day. It is, however, very striking when we 
 once come to think of it, and it embraces subject- 
 matter, attitude to life and art, and even such 
 closer matters as diction and versification. The 
 situation of Crabbe, in relation to the old school 
 of the eighteenth century on the one hand and to 
 the romantic school on the other, is closely repeated 
 by that of M. Verhaeren to his elders and his 
 juniors. If Byron were now alive, he might call 
 M. Verhaeren a Victor Hugo in worsted stockings. 
 There is the same sardonic delineation of a bleak 
 and sandy sea-coast country, Suffolk or Zeeland 
 as the case may be, the same determination to 
 find poetic material in the perfectly truthful study 
 of a raw peasantry, of narrow provincial towns, of 
 rough and cheerless seafaring existences. In each 
 of these poets and scarcely in any other Euro- 
 pean writers of verse we find the same saline 
 flavour, the same odour of iodine, the same 
 tenacious attachment to the strength and violence 
 and formidable simplicity of nature. 
 
 In Les Forces Tumultueuses we discover the same 
 qualities which we have found before in M. Ver-
 
 316 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 haeren's volumes. He employs mainly two forms 
 of verse, the one a free species of Alexandrines, 
 the other a wandering measure, loosely rhymed, 
 of the sort which used among ourselves to be 
 called " Pindarique." He gives us studies of modern 
 figures, the Captain, the Tribune, the Monk, the 
 Banker, the Tyrant. He gives us studies of towns, 
 curiously hard, although less violent than those in 
 his earlier, and perhaps most extraordinary, book, 
 Les Villes Tentaculaires. His interest in towns and 
 hamlets is inexhaustible and did not Crabbe 
 write " The Village " and The Borough " ? 
 Even railway junctions do not dismay the muse 
 of M. Verhaeren : 
 
 " Oh ! ces villes, par 1'or putride envenimees ! 
 Clameurs de pierre et vols et gestes de fumees, 
 D6mes et tours d'orgueil et colonnes debout 
 Dans 1'espace qui vibre et le travail qui bout, 
 En aimas-tu I'effroi et les affres profondes 
 O toi, le voyageur 
 Qui t'en allais triste et songeur, 
 Par les gares de feu qui ceinturent le monde ? 
 
 Cahots et bonds de trains par au-dessus des monts ! 
 
 L'intime et sourd tocsin qui enfieVrait ton ame 
 Battait aussi dans ces villes, le soir ; leur flamme 
 Rouge et myriadaire illuminait ton front, 
 Leur aboi noir, le cri, le ban de ton cceur mme ; 
 Ton tre entier e*tait tordu en leur blaspheme, 
 ; Ta volonte" jete"e en proie a leur torrent 
 Et vous vous maudissiez tout en vous adorant." 
 
 The superficially prosaic has no terrors for M. 
 Verhaeren. He gives us, too, of course, studies
 
 M. EMILE VERHAEREN 317 
 
 of the sea-coast, of that dreary district (it can 
 never have dreamed that it would nourish a poet) 
 which stretches from Antwerp westward along the 
 Scheldt to the North Sea, that infinite roll of 
 dunes, hung between the convulsive surf and the 
 heavy sky, over which a bitter wind goes whistling 
 through the wild thin grass towards a vague inland 
 flatness, vast, monotonous and dull beyond all 
 power of language to describe. This is a land 
 which arrives at relevancy only when darkness 
 falls on it, and its great revolving lights give 
 relation to its measureless masses. 
 
 The habitual gloom and mournfulness of M. 
 Verhaeren's pictures are only relieved once in this 
 powerful volume. The poem called Sur la Mer 
 strikes a different note, and resembles one of 
 those rare sunshiny days when the creeks of 
 Northern Flanders are in gala. We watch the 
 brilliantly-coloured ship stirring her cordage and 
 fluttering her pennons, like some gay little Dutch 
 garden putting merrily out to sea. All is a bustle 
 of scarlet and orange and blue ; but it would not 
 be a picture of M. Verhaeren's if it did not offer a 
 reverse side : 
 
 " Le vaisseau clair revint, un soir de bruit 
 Et de fete, vers le rivage, 
 D'oii son elan etait parti ; 
 Certes, les mats dardaient toujours leur ame, 
 Certes, le foe portait encore des oriflammes, 
 Mais les marins etaient decouronne"s 
 De confiance, et les haubans et les cordages 
 Ne vibraient plus comme des lyres sauvages.
 
 3i8 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Le navire rentra comme un jardin fane, 
 
 Drapeaux eteints, espoirs minds, 
 
 Avec Peffroi de n'oser dire a ceux du port 
 
 Qu'il avait entendu, la-bas, de plage en plage, 
 
 Les flots crier sur les rivages 
 
 Que Pan et que Jesus, tous deux, etaient des morts." 
 
 For those who seek from poetry its superficial 
 consolations, the canticles of M. Verhaeren offer 
 little attraction. But for readers who can endure 
 a sterner music, and a resolute avoidance of the 
 mere affectations of the intellect, he is now one 
 of the most interesting figures in contemporary 
 literature. And to deny that he is a poet would 
 be like denying that the great crimson willow- 
 herb is a flower because it grows in desolate 
 places. 
 
 1902. 
 
 ALBERT SAMAIN 
 
 The influence of Baudelaire, which so gravely 
 alarmed the critical sanhedrim of forty years ago, 
 has proved more durable than was expected, but 
 at the same time singularly inoffensive. There 
 seemed to be something in the imagination of 
 Baudelaire which fermented unpleasantly, and an 
 outbreak of pestilence in his neighbourhood was 
 seriously apprehended. He was treated as a sort 
 of plague-centre. It would be difficult to make 
 the young generation in London realise what 
 palpitations, what tremors, what alarms the terrible 
 Fleurs du Mai caused in poetic bosoms about 1860.
 
 ALBERT SAMAIN 319 
 
 But the Satanic dandyism, as it was called, of the 
 poet's most daring verses was not, in reality, a 
 very perdurable element. Most of it was absurd, 
 and some of it was vulgar ; all of it, with the 
 decease of poor Maurice Rollinat, seems now to 
 have evaporated. What was really powerful in 
 Baudelaire, and what his horrors at first con- 
 cealed, was the extreme intensity of his sense of 
 beauty, or, to be more precise, his noble gift of 
 subduing to the service of poetry the voluptuous 
 visions awakened by perfume and music and light. 
 
 It is this side of his genius which has attracted 
 so closely the leaders of the poetic revival in 
 France. A lofty, if somewhat vaporous dignity ; 
 a rich, if somewhat indefinable severity of taste ; 
 these are among the prominent qualities of the 
 new French poetry, which is as far removed in 
 spirit from the detestable " manie d'etonner " of 
 Les Fleurs du Mai as it is possible to be. Yet in 
 recounting the precursors to whom the homage 
 of the new school is due, every careful critic must 
 enumerate, not only Lamartine and Alfred de 
 Vigny, but unquestionably Baudelaire. 
 
 In the unfortunate Albert Samain, for instance, 
 whose death has deprived France prematurely of 
 a nature evidently predestined, as few can be said 
 to be, to the splendours of poetic fame, this 
 innocuous and wholesome influence of Baudelaire 
 may be very clearly traced. It does not interfere 
 with Samain's claim to be treated as an original 
 writer of high gifts, but it is impossible to over- 
 look its significance. The crawling corruption of 
 Baudelaire has, in fact, in the course of time, not
 
 320 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 merely become deodorised, but takes its place, as 
 a pinch of " scentless and delicate dust," in the 
 inevitable composition of any new French poet. 
 
 In the course of the winter of 1893, a good 
 many persons, of whom the present writer was 
 one, received a small quarto volume, bound in 
 deep sage-green, from an unknown source in 
 Paris. The book, which was privately printed 
 in a very small issue, was called Au Jardin de 
 I' Infante, and it transpired that this was the first 
 production of a clerk in the Prefecture de la 
 Seine, named Albert Samain. Born at Lille in 
 1859, Samain was no longer very young, but he 
 had no relations with the world of letters, and a 
 shy dissatisfaction with what he had written gave 
 him a dislike to publication. The sage-green 
 volume, already so rare, was, as it now appears, 
 printed and sent out by a friend, in spite of the 
 poet's deprecations. A copy of it came into the 
 hands of M. Francois Coppee, who, to his great 
 honour, instantly perceived its merits, and in the 
 second series of Mon Franc-Parler attracted atten- 
 tion to it. In 1897 an edition of Au Jardin de 
 tin/ante placed the poems of Samain within the 
 range of the ordinary reader, and in 1898 he 
 published another volume, Aux Flancs du Vase. 
 His health, however, had failed, and he had by 
 this time retired to the country village of Magny- 
 les-Hameaux, where he died on the i8th of August, 
 1900. Since his death there have appeared a 
 third volume of poems, Le Chariot d'Or (1901), 
 and a lyrical drama, Polypheme (1902). 
 
 The existence of Albert Samain left scarcely a
 
 ALBERT SAMAIN 321 
 
 ripple on the stream of French literary life. He 
 stood apart from all the coteries, and his shyness 
 and indigence prevented him from presenting him- 
 self where he might readily have been lionised. 
 Of the very few persons who ever saw Samain 
 I have interrogated one or two as to his appear- 
 ance and manners. They tell me that he was 
 pale and slight, with hollow cheeks and pre- 
 ponderating forehead, and of a great economy 
 of speech. Excessively near-sighted, he seemed 
 to have no cognisance of the world about him, 
 and the regularity of his life as a clerk emphasised 
 his dreamy habits. He is described to me as 
 grave, and, when he spoke, somewhat grandi- 
 loquent ; his half-shut eyes gave an impression 
 of languor, which was partly physical fatigue. I 
 think it possible that future times may feel a 
 curiosity about the person of Albert Samain, and 
 that there will be practically nothing to divulge, 
 since his dreams died with him. This small city 
 clerk, with his poor economies and stricken health, 
 habitually escaped from the oppression of a life 
 that was as dull and void as it could be, into 
 the buoyant liberty of gorgeous and persistent 
 vision. 
 
 He expresses this himself in every page of Au 
 Jardin de V Infante. He says : 
 
 " Les roses du couchant s'effeuillent sur la fleuve ; 
 Et dans 1'emotion pale du soir tombant, 
 S'eVoque un pare d'automne cm reve sur un bane 
 Ma jeunesse deja grave comme une veuve ;" 
 
 and in a braver tone :
 
 322 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 " Mon ame est une Infante en robe de parade, 
 Dont 1'exil se reflate, e"ternel et royal, 
 Aux grands miroirs deserts d'un vieil Escurial, 
 Ainsi qu'une galere oublie"e en la rade." 
 
 Everywhere the evidences of a sumptuous and 
 enchanted past, everywhere the purity of silence 
 and the radiance of royal waters at sunset, every- 
 where the incense of roses that were planted for 
 the pleasure of queens long dead and gone, and 
 Albert Samain pursuing his solitary way along 
 those deserted paths and up the marble of those 
 crumbling staircases. Such is the illusion which 
 animates the Garden of the Infanta. Some- 
 times the poet is not alone there ; other forms 
 approach him, and other faces smile ; but they 
 are the faces and the forms of phantoms : 
 
 " L'ame d'une flute soupire 
 
 Au fond du pare me"lodieux ; 
 Limpide est 1'ombre oil 1'on respire 
 Ton poeme silencieux, 
 
 Nuit de langueur, nuit de mensonge, 
 Qui poses d'un geste ondoyant 
 
 Dans ta chevelure de songe 
 La lune, bijou d'Orient. 
 
 Sylva, Sylvie et Sylvanire, 
 Belles au regard bleu changeant, 
 
 L'e'toile aux fontaines se mire, 
 Allez par les sentiers d'argent. 
 
 Allez vite 1'heure est si breve ! 
 
 Cueillir au jardin des aveux 
 Les coeurs qui se meurent du rve 
 
 De mourir parmi vos cheveux."
 
 ALBERT SAMAIN 323 
 
 His aim was to express a melancholy and chaste 
 sensuousness in terms of the most tender and im- 
 passioned symbolism. No one has succeeded more 
 frequently than Samain in giving artistic form to 
 those vague and faint emotions which pass over 
 the soul like a breeze. He desired to write verses 
 when, as he said, " I'ame sent, exquise, une caresse 
 a peine," or even 
 
 " De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame, 
 Ou la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame, 
 De vers d'une ancienne etoffe extenuee, 
 Impalpable comme le son et la nuee." 
 
 In this mood his poetry occasionally approaches 
 that of Mr. Robert Bridges on the one side and 
 of Mr. Yeats on the other. It has at other times 
 a certain marmoreal severity which reminds us of 
 neither. I desire the reader's close attention to 
 the following sonnet, called Cleopatre, in which the 
 genius of Albert Samain seems to be all revealed. 
 Here, it may at first be thought, he comes near to 
 the old Parnassians ; but his methods will be 
 found to be diametrically opposed to theirs, 
 although not even M. de Heredia would have 
 clothed the subject with a nobler beauty : 
 
 " Accoudee en silence aux creneaux de la tour, 
 
 La Reine aux cheveux bleus, serres de bandelettes, 
 Sous 1'incantation trouble des cassolettes, 
 Sent monter dans son cceur ta mer, immense Amour. 
 
 Immobile, sous ses paupieres violettes, 
 Elle reve, pamee aux fuites des coussins ; 
 Et les lourds colliers d'or souleves par ses seins 
 
 Racontent sa langueur et ses fievres muettes.
 
 324 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Un adieu rose flotte au front des monuments. 
 Le soir, veloute d'ombre, est plein d'enchantements ; 
 Et cependant qu' au loin pleurent les crocodiles, 
 
 La Reine aux doigts crispes, sanglotante d'aveux, 
 Frissonne de sentir, lascives et subtiles, 
 
 Des mains qui dans le vent e*puisent ses cheveux." 
 
 There is much in the history and in the art of 
 Albert Samain which reminds me of an English 
 poet whom I knew well when we both were 
 young, and who still awaits the fulness of re- 
 cognition Arthur O'Shaughnessy. Each of them 
 was fascinated by the stronger genius of two poets 
 of an older generation Baudelaire and Edgar 
 Allan Poe. But each had a quality that was 
 entirely his own, a quality which the passage of 
 time will certainly emphasise and isolate. 
 
 1904. 
 
 M. PAUL FORT 
 
 The instinct which impels every energetic talent 
 to emancipate itself as far as possible from the bond- 
 age of tradition is a natural one, and it is even not 
 so dangerous as we suppose. For, if there is a 
 centrifugal force ever driving the ambition of youth 
 away from the conventional idea of beauty, this is 
 easily reversed by the inherent attraction of purity 
 and nobility in form. The artist makes a bold 
 flight and wheels away into the distance, but he 
 returns ; he is true, like Wordsworth's skylark, to 
 the kindred points of heaven and home. In a 
 writer, therefore, who starts in open rebellion to
 
 M. PAUL FORT 325 
 
 the tradition of style, we have but to wait and see 
 whether the talent itself is durable. It is only 
 presumptuous Icarus, whose waxen wings melt in 
 the sun, and who topples into the sea. It is only 
 the writer who makes eccentricity the mantle to 
 hide his poverty of imagination and absence of 
 thought who disappears. To the young man of 
 violent idiosyncrasies and genuine talent two things 
 always happen he impresses his charm upon our 
 unwilling senses, and he is himself drawn back, 
 unconsciously and imperceptibly, into the main 
 current of the stream of style. 
 
 While M. Paul Fort was merely an eccentric 
 experimentalist, it did ' not seem worth while to 
 present him to an English audience. The earliest 
 of his published volumes, the Ballades Francises of 
 1897, was a pure mystification to most readers. 
 It was printed, and apparently written, as prose. 
 It asserted the superiority of rhythm over the arti- 
 fice of prosody, which is precisely what Walt Whit- 
 man did. The French conceive poetry, however, 
 very rigidly in its essential distinction from prose. 
 There are rules for writing French verse which are 
 categorical, and these must be taken en bloc. It is 
 far more difficult in French to imagine a thing 
 which could represent, at the same moment, poetry 
 and prose, than it would be in English. But M. 
 Paul Fort determined to create this entirely new 
 thing, and when one read his effusions first it is 
 only fair to admit that one was bewildered. Here, 
 for instance, is, in its entirety, one of the Ballades 
 Fran$aises : 
 
 " Etre ne page et brave vielleur d'amour, en la
 
 326 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 gentille cour d'un prince de jadis, chanter une 
 princesse follement aimee, au nom si doux que 
 bruit de roses essaimees, a qui offrir, un jour, en 
 lui offrant la main pour la marche a descendre 
 avant le lac d'hymen, 1'odorant coffret d'or sous 
 ses chaines de lys, plein de bleus hyalins es anneaux 
 de soleil et d'oiselets de Chypre ardents pour em- 
 baumer, a qui donner aux sons des fifres et des 
 vielles, pour notre traversee en la barque d'hymen, 
 le frele rosier d'or a tenir en sa main ! " 
 
 The only way to make anything of this is to 
 read it aloud, and it may be said in parenthesis 
 that M. Fort is a writer who appeals entirely to 
 the ear, not to the eye. Spoken, or murmured in 
 accordance with Mr. Yeats's new method, the piece 
 of overladen prose disengages itself, floats out into 
 filaments of silken verse, like a bunch of dry sea- 
 weed restored to its element. In this so-called 
 ballad the alexandrine dominates, but with elisions, 
 assonances, irregularities of every description. It 
 is therefore best to allow the author himself to 
 define his method. He says in the preface to a 
 later poem, Le Roman de Louis XI. : 
 
 " J'ai cherch un style pouvant passer, au gr de 
 l'6motion, de la prose au vers et du vers a la prose: 
 la prose rythm6e fournit la transition. Le vers 
 suit les elisions naturelles du langage. II se pr6- 
 sente comme prose, toute gene d'61ision disparais- 
 sant sous cette forme." 
 
 In short, we have heard much about " free 
 verse" in France, but here at last we have an 
 author who has had the daring to consider prose 
 and verse as parts of one graduated instrument,
 
 M. PAUL FORT 327 
 
 and to take the current pronunciation of the 
 French language as the only law of a general and 
 normal rhythm. It is a curious experiment, and 
 we shall have to see what he will ultimately make 
 of it. 
 
 But one is bound to admit that he has made a 
 good deal of it already. He has become an author 
 whom we cannot affect or afford to ignore. Born 
 so lately as 1872, M. Paul Fort is in some respects 
 the most notable, as he is certainly the most abun- 
 dant, imaginative author of his age in France. 
 The book which lies before us, a romance of 
 Parisian life of to-day in verse, is the sixth of the 
 volumes which M. Fort has brought out in less 
 than six years, all curiously consistent in manner, 
 all independent of external literary influences, and 
 all full of exuberant, fresh and vivid impressions 
 of nature. The eccentricities of his form lay him 
 open, of course, to theoretical objections which 
 I should never think unreasonable, and which I 
 am conservative enough to share. But these do 
 not affect his ardour in the contemplation of nature, 
 his high gust of being. I scarcely know where to 
 point in any recent literature to an author so full 
 of the joy of life. He does not philosophise or 
 analyse, he affects no airs of priest or prophet ; his 
 attitude is extraordinarily simple, but is charged 
 with the ecstasy of appreciation. In two of his 
 collections of lyrics in rhythm, in particular, we 
 find this ardour, this enchantment, predominating ; 
 these are Montagne, 1898, and L' Amour Marin, 1900, 
 in which he sings, or chants, the forest and the sea. 
 
 In Paris Sentimental M. Paul Fort has written a
 
 328 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 novel in his peculiar and favourite form. We 
 have had many examples of the dangers and diffi- 
 culties which attend the specious adventure of 
 writing modern fiction in metrical shape. Neither 
 Aurora Leigh nor Lucile nor The Inn Album 
 is entirely encouraging as more than the ex* 
 periment of a capricious though splendidly ac- 
 complished artist. Yet Paris Sentimental is more 
 nearly related to these than to any French poem 
 that I happen to recollect. There is, indeed, as it 
 seems to me, something English in M. Fort's habit 
 of mind. His novel, however, is much less elaborate 
 than either of the English poems I have mentioned, 
 and certainly much less strenuous than the first 
 and third. It is a chain of lyrical rhapsodies in 
 which a very plain tale of love and disappointment 
 in the Paris of to-day is made the excuse for a 
 poetical assimilation of all the charming things 
 which Paris contains, and which have hitherto 
 evaded the skill of the poets, such as the turf in 
 the Square Monge, and the colour of an autumn 
 shower on the Boulevard Sebastopol, and the 
 Tziganes singing by moonlight at the Exposition. 
 Here is an example of how it is done : 
 
 " Le couchant violet tremble au fond du jour 
 rouge. Le Luxembourg exhale une odeur d'oranger, 
 et Manon s'arrete a mon bras ; plus rien ne bouge, 
 les arbres, les passants, ce nuage loigne. . . . 
 
 " Et le jet d'eau s'est tu : c'est la ros6e qui 
 chante, la-bas, dans les gazons, oil revent les 
 statues, et pour rendre, 6 sens-tu ? la nuit pus 
 dfaillante, les Grangers en fleurs ont enivrl la 
 nue."
 
 M. PAUL FORT 329 
 
 It would be an easy exercise to search for the 
 metre here, as we used to hunt for blank verse in 
 the Leaves of Grass. But M. Paul Fort is less re- 
 volutionary than Whitman, and more of an artist. 
 Although he clings to his theories, in each of his 
 volumes he seems to be less negligent of form, less 
 provocative, than he was in the last. The force 
 of his talent is wheeling him back into the inevit- 
 able tradition ; he is being forced by the music in 
 his veins to content himself with cadences that 
 were good enough for Racine and Hugo and 
 Baudelaire. And, therefore, in the last quotation 
 which I offer from Paris Sentimental, I take the 
 liberty of disregarding the typographical whims of 
 the author, and print his lines as verse : 
 
 " Par les nuits d'ete bleues ou chantent les cigales, 
 Dieu verse sur la France une coupe d'etoiles. 
 Le vent porte a ma levre un gout du ciel d'ete ! 
 Je veux boire a 1'espace fraichement argente. 
 
 L'air du soir est pour moi le bord de la coupe froide 
 Ou, les yeux mi-fermes et la bouche goulue, 
 
 Je bois, comme le jus presse d'une grenade, 
 La fraicheur etoilee qui se repand des nues. 
 
 Couche sur un gazon dont 1'herbe est encore chaude 
 De s'tre prelassee sous 1'haleine du jour, 
 Oh ! que je viderais, ce soir, avec amour, 
 
 La coupe immense bleue ou le firmament rode ! " 
 
 1902.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF FRANCE UPON 
 ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Address delivered, February 9, 1904, before the Socie'te des 
 Conferences, in Paris. 
 
 BEFORE I begin to discuss with you the particular 
 subject of my discourse this afternoon, I cannot 
 refrain from expressing my emotion at finding 
 myself, in consequence of your gracious invitation, 
 occupying this platform. It has been said that, 
 for a man of letters, consideration in a country 
 not his own is a foretaste of the verdict of pos- 
 terity. If there be any truth in this, then surely, in 
 the particular case where that country happens to 
 be France, it should be more it should be some- 
 thing very like a dangerous mirage of immortality. 
 When the invitation of your committee first reached 
 me, it seemed for a moment impossible that I 
 could accept it. In no perfunctory or compli- 
 mentary sense, I shrank, with an apprehension of 
 my own twilight, from presenting myself in the 
 midst of your blaze of intelligence. How could I 
 be sure that any of my reflections, of my observa- 
 tions, could prove worthy of acceptance by an 
 
 audience accustomed to the teachings of the most 
 
 330
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 331 
 
 brilliant and the most learned critics of the world ? 
 If there be an obvious lack of sufficiency in my 
 words this afternoon, then, on yourselves must be 
 the blame, and on your own generosity, since in 
 venturing to stand before you, it is your com- 
 mands which I obey in all simplicity. I obey 
 them as some barbarous Northern minstrel might, 
 who, finding himself at the court of Philippe de 
 Valois, should be desired, in the presence of the 
 prince and of his ladies, to exhibit a specimen of 
 his rough native art. 
 
 The subject of our inquiry to-day is not the 
 nature of the change which occurs when a new 
 literature rises out of the imitation of an older 
 one, as occurred with such splendid results when 
 Latin poetry was deliberately based on Greek 
 poetry, in the second century before Christ, or 
 when, in the early Middle Ages, the vernacular 
 literatures of modern Europe sprang out of the 
 decay of Latin. In such cases as these the matter is 
 simple ; out of the old stock there springs a new 
 bud, affiliated to it, imitative and only gradually 
 independent. It is not difficult to see Ennius, 
 in the dawn of Rome, sitting with the Greek hexa- 
 meter before him, and deliberately fashioning a 
 similar thing out of the stubbornness of his own 
 rough tongue. It is not difficult to see some 
 student-minstrel of the eleventh century debating 
 within himself whether he shall put down his 
 thoughts in faded Latin or in the delicate lingua 
 Ttisca, communis et intelligibilis. Influences of this 
 kind are a part of the direct and natural evolution 
 of literature, and their phenomena are almost of a
 
 332 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 physical kind. When a new language breaks 
 away from an old language into the forms of a 
 creative literature, its earliest manifestations must 
 be imitative. It is original in the very fact that it 
 copies into a new medium instead of continuing 
 in an old one. 
 
 But the problem is much more subtle and the 
 phenomena more delicate and elusive when we 
 have to deal with the influences mutually exercised 
 on one another by contemporary literatures of 
 independent character and long-settled traditions. 
 In the case before us, we have one great people 
 building up for the expression of their joys and 
 passions a language out of Anglo-Saxon materials, 
 and another great people forging out of low Latin 
 a vehicle for their complicated thoughts. The 
 literatures so created have enjoyed a vivid and 
 variegated vitality for century after century, never 
 tending the one towards the other, neither at any 
 time seriously taking a place subordinate to the 
 other, nor even closely related. The image that 
 may help to suggest to us what it is that we 
 must look for in observing the mutual influences 
 of French and English literature upon one another 
 is that of two metallic objects, of different colour, 
 pursuing a long parallel flight through space. We 
 are not to count upon their touching one another, 
 or their affecting the direction or speed of either, 
 but we may expect, on occasion, to observe along 
 the burnished side of the one a dash of colour 
 reflected from the illuminated surface of the other. 
 
 It would take us too far from our proper theme 
 this afternoon a theme which at best we can but
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 333 
 
 very hurriedly investigate were I to dwell on the 
 essential differences which distinguish the poetry 
 of England from that of France. But it may be 
 pointed out that these differences make them- 
 selves most clearly felt exactly wherever the 
 national idiosyncrasy is most searchingly defined. 
 The extraordinary perfection of the verse of 
 Coleridge in its concentrated sweetness and har- 
 mony of vision, has never appealed to any French 
 student of our literature. Perhaps no French ear 
 could be trained to understand what the sover- 
 eign music of Coleridge means to us. In like 
 manner it is probable that, with all our efforts, 
 English criticism has never understood, and never 
 will understand, what the effect of the astonishing 
 genius of Racine is upon the nerves and intelligence 
 of a Frenchman. On the other hand, it is easy to 
 see that Mr. Swinburne approaches thought and 
 style from a point of view eminently appreciable 
 by the French, while France contains one great 
 poet, Charles Baudelaire, whose oddity of mental 
 attitude and whose peculiar treatment of verse- 
 music and of imagery are perhaps more easily 
 comprehended by an English reader than by an 
 academic Frenchman. 
 
 A matter which might be pursued, in connec- 
 tion with this, but which time forbids me to do 
 more than indicate, is that, while in France poetry 
 has been accustomed to reflect the general tongue 
 of the people, the great poets of England have 
 almost always had to struggle against a complete 
 dissonance between their own aims and interests 
 and those of the nation. The result has been that
 
 334 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 England, the most inartistic of modern races, has 
 produced the largest number of exquisite literary 
 artists. 
 
 The expression of personal sensation has always 
 been dear to the English poets, and we meet with it 
 in some of the earliest babblings of our tongue. 
 From Anglo-Saxon times onward, the British bard 
 never felt called upon to express the aesthetic 
 emotions of a society around him, as the Provencal 
 troubadour or Carlovingian jongleur did. He was 
 driven to find inspiration in nature and in himself. 
 The mediaeval conquest of England by the French 
 language did not modify this state of things in any 
 degree. When the French wave ebbed away from 
 us in the fourteenth century, it left our poets of pure 
 English as individual, as salient, as unrepresentative 
 as ever. What every poet of delicate genius, 
 whether he be Chaucer or Milton, Gray or Keats, 
 has felt in the existing world of England, has been 
 the pressure of a lack of the aesthetic sense. Our 
 people are not naturally sensitive to harmony, to 
 proportion, to the due relation of parts in a work 
 of imaginative artifice. But what is very curious 
 is that our poets have been peculiarly sensitive to 
 these very qualities, and that no finer or subtler 
 artists in language have risen in any country than 
 precisely the poetic representatives of the densely 
 unpoetic England. 
 
 The result of this fantastic and almost incessant 
 discord between our poets and our people a 
 discord dissolved into harmony only at one 
 moment around the genius of Shakespeare the 
 result of this has been to make our poets, at
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 335 
 
 critical epochs, sensitive to catch the colour of 
 literatures alien from their own. In the healthier 
 moments of our poetry we have gained brightness 
 by reflections from other literatures, from those of 
 Greece and Rome, from those of Italy and Spain 
 and France. In moments when our poetry was 
 unhealthy it has borrowed to its immediate and 
 certain disadvantage from these neighbours. But 
 it will, I think, be found that in the latter case the 
 borrowing has invariably been of a coarser and 
 more material kind, and has consisted in a more or 
 less vulgar imitation. The evil effect of this will, 
 I believe, be found to be as definite as the effect of 
 the higher and more illusive borrowing is bene- 
 ficial. For purposes of convenience I propose in 
 the following remarks to distinguish these forms 
 of influence as consisting in colour and in sub- 
 stance. 
 
 A few words may serve to define what I under- 
 stand here by " substance " and by " colour." 
 By the first of these I wish to indicate those cases 
 in which influence has taken a gross and slavish 
 form, in which there has been a more or less com- 
 plete resignation of the individuality of the literature 
 influenced. An instance of this is the absolute 
 bondage of Spanish drama to French in the 
 eighteenth century, when a play had no chance 
 on the stage of Madrid unless it were directly 
 modelled on Racine or Voltaire. We shall pre- 
 sently have to point to something similar in the 
 drama of our own Restoration. These are cases 
 where an exhausted literature, in extreme decay, 
 is kept alive by borrowing its very body and essence
 
 336 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 from a foreign source, the result being that such 
 life as it presents is not really its own, but provided 
 for it, ready-made, by the genius of another 
 country. This species of influence I hold to be 
 invariably the sign of a diseased and weakly con- 
 dition. 
 
 On the other hand, it is precisely when the 
 poets of a country desire to clothe in new forms 
 the personal sensations which are driving them to 
 creative expression, that they are very likely to 
 turn to a neighbouring literature, which happens 
 to be at a stage of aesthetic development different 
 from their own, for superficial suggestions. The 
 ornaments of form which they bring back with 
 them, when they are in this healthy and lively 
 condition, are what I describe as " colour." In 
 the early history of European poetry, none of the 
 great poetic powers disdained to import from 
 Italy the radiance and tincture of her executive 
 skill. The introduction of the sonnet to England 
 and to France, that of blank verse to England, 
 that of prose comedy to France, these were in- 
 stances of the absorption by living and vigorous 
 literatures of elements in the literary art of Italy 
 which were instinctively felt by them to be 
 strengthening and refining, but not subjugating. 
 In these cases influence does nothing to lessen the 
 importance of that delicate distinction of individual 
 style which is the very charm of poetry, but 
 rather gives that distinction a more powerful 
 apparatus for making its presence felt. 
 
 We have a very instructive example of this 
 wholesome reflex action of one literature upon 
 another, in the history of the fourteenth century.
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 337 
 
 No one will pretend that France possessed at that 
 epoch, or indeed had ever yet possessed, a poet of 
 very high rank, with the exception of the anony- 
 mous artist who bequeathed to us the Chanson 
 de Roland. But, in the thirteenth century, she had 
 produced that amazing work, Le Roman de la Rose, 
 half of it amatory, the other half of it satirical, 
 and the whole of it extraordinarily vivid and 
 civilising. It would be too much to call the 
 Roman de la Rose a great poem, or even two great 
 poems fused into one. But it certainly was one 
 of the most influential works which ever proceeded 
 from the pen of man. Its influence, if we look at 
 it broadly, was in the direction of warmth and 
 colour. It glowed like a fire, it flashed like a 
 sunrise. Guillaume de Lorris deserves our eternal 
 thanks for being the first in modern Europe to 
 write " pour esgaier les cceurs." He introduced 
 into poetry amenity, the pulse of life, the power of 
 Earthly Love. 
 
 It is useful for us to compare the Roman de la 
 Rose with what the best English poets were 
 writing at the same time. What do we find ? 
 We find a few dismal fragments of Scriptural 
 morality and one or two sermons in verse. We 
 may speculate in what a spirit a dulled English 
 minstrel of the end of the thirteenth century would 
 read the bold and brilliant couplets of Jean de 
 Meung. He would certainly be dazzled, and 
 perhaps be scandalised. He would creep back to 
 his own clammy Ayenbite of Inwyt and his stony 
 Cursor Mundi to escape from so much dangerous 
 warmth and colour. It seems as though for 
 
 Y
 
 338 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 nearly a hundred years England steadily refused 
 to enter that fair orchard where Beauty and Love 
 were dancing hand in hand around the thorny hedge 
 that guarded the Rosebud of the World. But the 
 revelation came at last, and it is not too much to 
 say that English poetry, as it has since become, 
 in the hands of Shakespeare and Keats and Tenny- 
 son, sprang into life when the English poets first 
 became acquainted with the gallant, courteous, 
 and amatory allegory of the Worship of the Rose. 
 
 It is very interesting to see that, apparently, it 
 was no less a person than Chaucer who led 
 English readers first to the grassy edge of the 
 fountain of love. The evidence is curiously 
 obscure, and has greatly exercised Chaucerian 
 scholars. But the truth seems to be that Chaucer 
 translated Le Roman de la Rose, as he tells us 
 himself in the The Legend of Good Women, but 
 that of this translation only a fragment now 
 survives. The other two fragments, always 
 printed together with Chaucer's, are now con- 
 sidered to be not his, and indeed to come from 
 two different hands. Into this vexed question we 
 must not go, but it is worth noticing that although 
 the three fragments which make up the fourteenth- 
 century Romaunt of the Rose only cover, together, 
 one-third of the French text, Chaucer constantly 
 quotes from and refers to passages from other 
 parts of the poem, showing that he was familiar 
 with it all. 
 
 English poetry, we may observe, had more to 
 learn from Guillaume de Lorris than from Jean de 
 Meung, great and more vigorous writer though
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 339 
 
 the latter might be. What modern English 
 poetry, in fact, in its restless adolescence, was 
 leaning to France for was not so much vigour as 
 grace. It had satiric vigour of its own in its 
 apocalyptical Langland. But what beamed and 
 glowed upon Chaucer from the Roman de la Rose 
 was its human sweetness, its perfume as of a bush 
 of eglantine in April sunshine. It was the first 
 delicate and civilised poem of modern Europe, 
 and its refinement and elegance, its decorated 
 beauty and its close observation of the human 
 heart were the qualities which attracted to it 
 Chaucer, as he came starved from the chill 
 allegories and moralities of his formless native 
 literature. 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1359 that Chaucer, as 
 a page in the retinue of Prince Lionel, paid what 
 is supposed to have been his earliest visit to 
 France. He took his part in the luckless in- 
 vasion of Champagne, and he was captured by 
 the French, perhaps at Rethel. Until March 1360, 
 when King Edward III. ransomed him for the 
 sum of 16, he was a prisoner in France. During 
 these five or six months we have to think of 
 Chaucer as a joyous youth of nineteen, little cast 
 down by the fortunes of war, but full of sentiment, 
 poetry, and passion. Up to that time, doubtless, 
 he had read few or none but French books. We 
 cannot question that he was familiar with the 
 Roman de la Rose, and it is just possible that it 
 was at this time that he came in contact with 
 the lyrical writers whose personal poetry affected 
 him so much later on. I am inclined, however,
 
 340 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 to think this unlikely, because Eustache Deschamps 
 was a youth of about Chaucer's own age, and 
 although Guillaume de Machault was consider- 
 ably older, there had been little public distribution 
 of his verses so early as 1360. 
 
 We must put the date of Chaucer's coming 
 under the influence of the French writers of chants 
 royaux and lais and ballades a little later. In the 
 summer of 1369 he was once more in France, 
 and this time, it would appear, on some pacific 
 embassage. Perhaps he escaped from the plague 
 which decimated England in that year, and carried 
 off even Queen Philippa herself. Perhaps he was 
 engaged on a diplomatic mission. We have to 
 walk carefully in the darkness of these mediaeval 
 dates, which offer difficulties even to the erudition 
 of M. Marcel Schwob. At all events, Chaucer was 
 certainly then " in partibus Franciae," and it can 
 hardly but have been now that he fell under the 
 influence of Machault, whom he admired so much, 
 and of Eustache Deschamps, in whom he awakened 
 so enthusiastic a friendship. 1 There was an entente 
 cordiale indeed when Deschamps and Froissart com- 
 plimented Chaucer, and Chaucer imitated Machault 
 and Oton de Granson. We find the English poet 
 passing through France again in 1373, and again 
 in 1377. We have vague and accidental record 
 of at least seven of these diplomatic journeys, 
 although after 1378 the French interest seems 
 
 1 Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly reminds me that, in his celebrated letter to 
 the Constable of Portugal, the Spanish poet Santillana goes into 
 raptures about four of the writers whom Chaucer admired Guillaume 
 de Lords, Jean de Meung, Machault, and Granson.
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 341 
 
 entirely swallowed up in the far more vivid fasci- 
 nation which Italy exercised over him. 
 
 To a poet who was privileged to come beneath 
 the intellectual sway of Petrarch and Boccaccio at 
 the glorious close of their careers, it might well be 
 that such suns would seem entirely to eclipse the 
 tapers of those who composed ballades and virelais 
 in the rich provinces north of the Loire. Himself 
 a man of far greater genius than any French 
 writer of the fourteenth century, we might be 
 prepared to find Chaucer disdaining the gentle 
 balladists of France. He had, to a far greater 
 degree than any of them, vigour, originality, fulness 
 of invention. Eustache Deschamps is sometimes 
 a very forcible poet, but he sinks into insignifi- 
 cance when we set him side by side with the giant 
 who wrote the Canterbury Tales. Yet if Chaucer 
 brought vigour to English poetry, he found in 
 France, and among these rhetorical lyrists, pre- 
 cisely the qualities which were lacking at home. 
 What it was essential for England to receive at 
 that most critical moment of her intellectual 
 history was an external, almost a superficial, 
 matter. She did not require the body and bones 
 of genius, but the garments with which talent 
 covers them. These robes are what we name 
 grace, elegance, melody and workmanship, and 
 these delicate textiles were issuing in profusion 
 from the looms of France. 
 
 This is the secret of the strong influence exer- 
 cised on a very great poet like Chaucer, and 
 through him upon the poetry of England, by a 
 writer so essentially mediocre as Guillaume de
 
 342 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 Machault. It was the accomplished tradition, the 
 picturesque and artistic skill of the lesser poet, 
 which so strongly attracted the greater. From 
 Machault English poetry took that heroic couplet 
 which had hitherto been unknown to it, and 
 which was to become one of its most abundant 
 and characteristic forms. In a variety of ways 
 the prosody of Great Britain was affected by that 
 of France between 1350 and 1370. The loose 
 and languid forms in which British poets had 
 hitherto composed were abandoned in delight at 
 the close metre of the French, and about 1350 
 John Gower produced his Cinquante Balades not 
 merely in the form but in the very language of 
 Eustache Deschamps. His Mirour de I'Omme, a 
 long and important poem first printed by Mr. 
 Macaulay in 1899, is an instance of pure Gallicisa- 
 tion. Chaucer did not imitate the French thus 
 grossly. Indeed, he went to France for nothing 
 interior or essential, but, sensitively conscious that 
 his own country lacked most of all the aesthetic 
 graces, he borrowed from writers like Machault 
 and Granson the external colour and the technical 
 forms. But the substantial forces which awakened 
 the splendid bourgeois genius of Chaucer were the 
 aristocratic influences of Dante, Petrarch, and 
 Boccaccio. 
 
 Two hundred years later, at the next great crisis 
 of English literature, a very similar condition is 
 apparent, though exposed with less intensity. 
 The mediaeval forms of poetry, allegorical, didactic, 
 diffuse, had now worn themselves out. There 
 was a total abandonment of "gardens" of rhe- 
 toric, of plaisances of morality. These efforts of
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 343 
 
 exhausted fancy continued to please English 
 readers longer than they did French ones, and it 
 is to be noted that their decay was sudden with us, 
 not gradual as with you. Not only, for instance, 
 did the transitional rhetoricians of the beginning 
 of the sixteenth century exercise no influence on 
 English thought, but there is no evidence that a 
 single person in England read a line of Jean 
 Le Maire des Beiges. But a little later all is 
 different. A recent critic has said that the 
 writings of Wyatt and Surrey, though not epoch- 
 making, were " epoch - marking." They were 
 not men of genius, but they were of eminently 
 modern taste. They perceived that everybody 
 was tired of long-winded allegory and rhetoric, 
 and they set themselves to write verse " in short 
 parcels," that is to say, in brief lyrics. So they 
 looked to France, where Wyatt passed, probably, 
 in 1532. What did he find? Doubtless he 
 found Clement Marot in the act of putting forth 
 L' Adolescence Clementine. It is probable that Marot, 
 with his " elegant badinage," was too gay for these 
 stiff English nobles, so solemn and rigid. His 
 want of intellectual ambition would strike them, 
 and they passed on to Italy. But something of 
 the perfume of France was left upon their fingers, 
 and they seem to have borrowed, perhaps from 
 Melin de Saint-Gelais, but more probably from 
 Marot, the sonnet - form, hitherto unknown in 
 England. It cannot be pretended that in the great 
 awakening of English lyrical poetry in the middle 
 of the sixteenth century France had any great share, 
 but what there was tended in the aesthetic direc-
 
 344 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 tion. The ugly hardness of the last mediaeval poets 
 was exchanged for a daintiness of expression, a 
 graceful lucidity, in the merit of which Clement 
 Marot's rondeaux and epigrams had a distinct 
 share. 
 
 We have now considered two instances the 
 one important, the other slight in which English 
 poetry received, at critical moments, a distinct 
 colour from the neighbouring art of France. In 
 each case the influence was exercised at a time 
 when the poetic ambition of our country greatly 
 exceeded the technical skill of its proficients, and 
 when the verse- writers were glad to go to school 
 to masters more habituated to art and grace than 
 themselves. But we have now another and a 
 very curious phenomenon to note. Fifty years 
 later than the revival of Wyatt and Surrey, when 
 Elizabethan literature was beginning to rise into pro- 
 minence, several very strenuous efforts were made 
 to take advantage of contemporary French ac- 
 complishment, and with one accord these attempts 
 conspicuously failed. We find in 1580 that the 
 French were " highly regarded " by the school of 
 versifiers at Cambridge, and before this Edmund 
 Spenser had translated the Visions of Joachim Du 
 Bellay. It might be supposed that this would be 
 the beginning of a consistent imitation of the 
 Pleiade by the English poets just, for instance, 
 as modern Swedish poetry was at this moment 
 started by Rosenhane's imitations of Ronsard. 
 But on the vast wave of Elizabethan literature, now 
 sweeping up with irresistible force and volume, 
 we find scarcely a trace of the Pleiade. The one
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 345 
 
 important writer who borrowed from the French 
 was Samuel Daniel, whose famous Delia of 1592 
 obviously owes both its title and its form to 
 Maurice Sceve's De'lie of 1544. Daniel also 
 imitates Ba'if and Pontus de Thyard, and had a 
 vast admiration for his more immediate contem- 
 porary, Philippe Desportes. 1 
 
 The experiments of Jodelle and Gamier in 
 Senecan drama were examined by the English 
 dramatists of the end of the sixteenth century 
 by Kyd and Daniel in particular and were 
 deliberately rejected. The pathway taken by 
 classical French tragedy was even touched for a 
 moment, in Titus Andronicus, by Shakespeare him- 
 self, but it was instantly quitted for the utterly 
 divergent road which led to Othello and King 
 Lear. The sententious and rhetorical character 
 of French drama was rejected by all the great 
 Elizabethans, and the only contemporary influence 
 accepted from France by our poetry at this time 
 was that of Du Bartas, whose violent and grotesque 
 style gratified a growing taste for exaggeration 
 among the courtiers. Du Bartas pointed the way 
 to that decadence which fell only too swiftly for 
 English poetry, like a plague of insects upon some 
 glorious summer garden. But it is interesting to 
 observe that from 1580 to 1620, that is to say 
 during the years in which the aesthetic sense was 
 most widely and most brilliantly developed in 
 English poetry, French influences of the best kind 
 
 1 Since this was written, however, Mr. Sidney Lee, in a valuable 
 essay on "The Elizabethan Sonnet-Literature" (printed in June 1904,) 
 has drawn attention to Lodge's indebtedness to Ronsard.
 
 346 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 knocked at its door in vain. In its superfluous 
 richness, it needed no further gifts. It had colour 
 enough and substance enough to spare for all the 
 world. 
 
 Very different was the condition of things fifty 
 years later. English poetry in the Jacobean age 
 was like a plant in a hothouse, that runs violently 
 to redundant blossom, and bears the germs of 
 swift decay in the very splendour of its buds. 
 Already, before the death of James I., the fresh- 
 ness was all gone, and the tendency to decline 
 was obvious. Under Charles I. the development 
 of literature was considerably warped, and at 
 length completely arrested, by the pressure of 
 political events. Then the Civil War broke out, 
 and the English Court, with its artistic hangers-on, 
 was dispersed in foreign countries. 
 
 As early as 1624, on the occasion of the 
 Marriage Treaty, the attention of the English 
 poets may probably have been directed to 
 Paris, but there had followed grave estrange- 
 ments between the Courts of France and Eng- 
 land, and in 1627 a disastrous rupture. The 
 earliest verses of Edmund Waller celebrate in- 
 cidents in Buckingham's expedition, and seem to 
 prove that Waller had even then been made aware 
 of the reforms in French prosody instituted by 
 Malherbe. The Civil War broke out in 1642, 
 and the raising of the king's standard at Notting- 
 ham was the signal to the Muses to snatch up 
 their lyres and quit this inhospitable island. The 
 vast majority of our living poets were Royalists, 
 and when Charles I. was defeated they either
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 347 
 
 withdrew into obscurity or left the country. 
 Suckling was already in Paris ; he was followed 
 there by Cowley, Waller, Davenant, Denham and 
 Roscommon, that is to say, by the men who were 
 to form poetic taste in England in the succeeding 
 generation. From 1645 to 1660 the English 
 Court was in Continental exile, and it carried 
 about it a troop of poets, who were sent, like so 
 many carrier - pigeons, upon wild diplomatic 
 errands. 
 
 It was a great misfortune for English poetry that 
 it was flung into the arms of France at this precise 
 moment. What the poets found in Paris was 
 not the best that could be given to them, and what 
 there was of the best they did not appreciate. 
 Their own taste in its rapid decadence had 
 become fantastical and disordered. We have but 
 to look at the early Odes of Abraham Cowley to 
 see into what peril English style had sunken. It 
 had grown diffuse and yet rugged ; it had surren- 
 dered itself to a wild abuse of metaphor, and, con- 
 scious of its failing charm, it was trying to produce 
 an impression by violent extravagance of imagery. 
 Its syntax had all gone wrong ; it had become the 
 prey of tortured grammatical inversions. 
 
 It is strange that in coming to France the English 
 poets of 1645 did n t see the misfortune of all this. 
 They should have found, if they had but had eyes 
 to perceive it, that French poetry was on the high 
 road to escape the very faults we have just men- 
 tioned. The fault of poetry such as that of Waller 
 and Davenant is that it is complicated and yet 
 not dignified. Well, the English Royalists who 
 waited upon Queen Henrietta in Paris might have
 
 348 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 observed in the verses of Malherbe and Racan 
 poetry which was majestic and yet simple, an 
 expression of true and beautiful sentiments in 
 language of pure sobriety. But these were the 
 new classics of France, and the English exiles had 
 been educated in a taste which was utterly anti- 
 classic. They could not comprehend Malherbe, 
 who was too stately for them, but unfortunately 
 there were other influences which exactly suited 
 their habits of mind. There can be no doubt 
 that they were pleased with the posthumous writ- 
 ings of Thophile de Viau, whose nature-painting 
 has left its mark on Cowley, and unquestionably, 
 like the rest of the world, they were enchanted 
 with the fantastic, almost burlesque talent of Saint- 
 Amant, who ruled the salons of Paris during the 
 whole of the English Exile, and who seemed to his 
 admirers of 1650 a very great poet whom it was a 
 distinction to imitate. 
 
 The English ear for rhythm is not constituted 
 like the French ear. We have a prosodical instinct 
 which is entirely unlike yours. This was ill com- 
 prehended, or rather not comprehended at all, by 
 the English Exiles. They were confronted by 
 the severity of Malherbe and the uniformity of 
 Maynard, and they were unable to appreciate 
 either the one or the other. The English sub- 
 limity, as exemplified at that very hour by the 
 majesty of Milton, is obtained by quite other 
 means. The sympathy of the English poets was 
 with what is irregular, and they never were genuine 
 classics, like the French, but merely, in ceasing to 
 be romantic, became pseudo-classical. The very
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 349 
 
 type of a pseudo-classic in revolt against romance 
 is Denham, in his extravagantly-praised Coopers 
 Hill. To compare this with the exquisite Retraile 
 of Racan, with which it is almost exactly con- 
 temporaneous, is to realise what the difference 
 is between a falsely and a genuinely classical 
 poem. Racan's lines seem to be breathed out 
 without effort from a pure Latin mind ; the 
 couplets of Denham are like the shout of a 
 barbarian, who has possessed himself of a toga, 
 indeed, but has no idea of how it ought to be 
 worn. 
 
 It is noticeable that foreigners are seldom 
 influenced in their style by their immediate con- 
 temporaries in another country. The prestige of 
 public acceptance is required before an alien 
 dares to imitate. Hence we search almost in 
 vain for traces of direct relation between the 
 Parisian Precteux and their British brethren. 
 There is little evidence that Voiture or Bense- 
 rade had admirers among the Exiles, although 
 they returned to England with ideas about pas- 
 toral, which I think they must have owed to 
 the glogues of Segrais. But it is certain that 
 they were infatuated by the burlesque writers of 
 France, and that Scarron, in particular, was 
 instantly imitated. The Virgile Travesti was ex- 
 travagantly admired and promptly paraphrased 
 in England, and in Cotton we had a poet who 
 deliberately and with great popular success set 
 out to be the English Scarron. Trivial in French, 
 these burlesque exercises became in English 
 intolerably heavy and vulgarly obscene. The
 
 350 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 taste for rhymed burlesque was a poor gift for 
 the Exiles to bring back with them from the 
 country which already possessed the Adonis of 
 La Fontaine. 
 
 In offering to their countrymen the forms of 
 French poetry, without giving them any of its 
 enchanting dignity and harmony, the English 
 poets of the Restoration were doing the exact 
 opposite of what Chaucer had done in the four- 
 teenth century. They imported the substance 
 without the colour ; they neglected precisely the 
 gift which our neighbour has always had to 
 bestow, namely, the charm of aesthetic propor- 
 tion. They were partly unfortunate, no doubt, in 
 the moment of their return to London. It was in 
 the very year 1660 that the great revival of poetic 
 taste began in Paris, and, by coming back to their 
 exciting duties and pleasures at that moment, the 
 English exiles excluded themselves from participa- 
 tion in Boileau, Moliere, and Racine. But would 
 they have learned to appreciate these great masters 
 if the restoration of the House of Stuart had been 
 delayed for twenty years ? It is permissible to 
 believe that they would not. 
 
 The invasion of the British stage by French 
 drama between 1665 and 1690, is the most 
 striking example of the influence of French taste 
 which the history of English poetry has to offer. 
 The theatres had been closed by an ordinance of 
 the Puritan government, and all performance of 
 plays forbidden throughout England in 1642. So 
 savage was the enactment that the theatres were 
 dismantled, in order to make acting impossible,
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 351 
 
 while all actors in plays, even in private, were 
 liable to be publicly whipped, and the audiences 
 individually fined. The result of this savage law 
 was that the very tradition of histrionics died out 
 in England, which had been the most theatrical 
 country in Europe. It was not one of the least 
 satisfactions to the banished Royalists in Paris that 
 they could enjoy their beloved entertainment there, 
 as it was no longer possible to do in London. 
 They could not sit through performances of 
 Fletcher and Massinger and Ford, but they could 
 delight their eyes and their ears with the tragedies 
 of Scudery and Tristan 1'Hermite and La Cal- 
 prenede. You will remind me that they could do 
 better than this by attending the dramas of Rotrou 
 and ten times better by studying those of Corneille. 
 But the curious thing is that while there are de- 
 finite traces of La Calprenede and Scudery on our 
 English drama, there is not, so far as I know, a 
 vestige of Rotrou, and the English attitude to 
 Corneille is very extraordinary. A poetaster, 
 named Joseph Rutter, translated Le Cid as early 
 as 1637, that is to say, in the midst of Corneille's 
 original triumph ; it is interesting to note that 
 Rutter's version was made at the command of the 
 English king and queen. This bad translation, which 
 enjoyed no success, sufficed for English curiosity. 
 On the other hand, Les Horaces was a great 
 favourite in England, and was carefully translated 
 into verse by three or four poets. Some couplets 
 by Sir John Denham, accompanying the version 
 made about 1660 by the matchless Orinda, have 
 a particular interest for us. Denham (who was,
 
 352 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 we must remember, the Racan of the classical 
 movement in England) says of Les Horaces : 
 
 " This martial story, which through France did come, 
 And there was wrought on great Corneille's loom, 
 Orinda's matchless muse to Britain brought, 
 And foreign verse our English accents taught." 
 
 The total ignoring of the Cid, while Les Horaces 
 received boundless admiration, is a curious fact, 
 which can only, I think, become intelligible when 
 we observe that to an English audience in 1665 
 the chivalry and panache of the former play were 
 unintelligible, while the showy patriotism and 
 high-strung amorosity of the other were exactly 
 to the English taste. Wherever Corneille's psy- 
 chological study of the human heart became 
 subtle, he rose above the range of the Royalist 
 exiles. In the English tragedies of the Restora- 
 tion we see the predominant part which violent 
 passion took in the interest of the age. This, 
 together with the laborious and unflagging em- 
 phasis which becomes to us so tedious in these 
 dramatic writers, the English poets borrowed, not 
 from Corneille, whom they venerated but hardly 
 comprehended, but from the lesser heroic drama- 
 tists of the same age. 
 
 A little later in the seventeenth century, when 
 the great men had made their appearance in 
 France, the English dramatists could no longer 
 overlook Moliere and Racine ; but the luminous 
 wit of the one and the harmonious and passionate 
 tenderness of the other were beyond their reach. 
 There is evidence of the favour which Quinault,
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 353 
 
 especially for his Roman tragedies, enjoyed in 
 London, and there was something in his colour- 
 less, melodious, and graceful style which attracted 
 and did not terrify the contemporary English 
 translator. The want of interest shown by the 
 London adapters in the successive masterpieces of 
 Racine is quite extraordinary. A solitary attempt 
 was made in 1675 by John Crowne, or under his 
 auspices, to bring Andromaque on the English 
 stage, but shorn of all its tender beauty. This, 
 amazing as it sounds, is practically the only 
 evidence remaining to show that our Gallicised 
 playwrights were conscious of the existence of 
 Racine. The fact is, no doubt, that he soared 
 above their reach in his celestial emotion, his 
 delicate passion and his penetration into the 
 human heart. English versification in 1675 was 
 capable of rough and vigorous effects, music of 
 the drum and the fife ; but it had no instrument 
 at its command at that time which could repro- 
 duce the notes of Racine upon the violin. Here 
 was an instance of colour which was evanescent 
 and could not be transferred. The substance of 
 Moliere, on the other hand, offered no technical 
 difficulties. It is extraordinary how many of 
 Moliere's plays were imitated or adapted on the 
 English stage during his life-time or very shortly 
 after the close of it. Our great Dryden mingled 
 L'Etourdi with the Amant Indiscret of Quinault, and 
 as the result produced Sir Martin Mar-all in 1667. 
 He used the De'pit Amoureux and Les Pre'cieuses 
 Ridicules in adapting Thomas Corneille's arrange- 
 ment of El Astrologo fingido of Calderon, in 1668. 
 
 z
 
 354 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 The English playwrights, however, had no real ap- 
 preciation of Moliere, though they stole from him 
 so freely. The poetess, Mrs. Aphra Behn, being 
 accused in 1678 of borrowing scenes from the 
 " Malad Imagenere " (as she called it), admitted 
 frankly that she had done so, but " infinitely to 
 Moleer's advantage." 
 
 The poetry of France in the third quarter of 
 the seventeenth century is pre-eminently char- 
 acteristic of a grave and polished system of 
 society. The age of Racine was, and could not 
 but be, an age of extreme refinement. It was 
 useless for the crude contemporary dramatists of 
 London to take the substance of the Parisian 
 masterpieces, since their spirit absolutely evaded 
 them. English society under Charles II. had 
 elements of force and intellectual curiosity, but 
 it lacked exactly what Paris possessed the orna- 
 ment of polished, simple, and pure taste. In 
 the jargon of the time Racine and Moliere were 
 " correct," while even English poets of genius, such 
 as Dryden and Otway, hardly knew that " correct- 
 ness " existed. Hence Boileau, in whom " correct- 
 ness " took the form of a doctrinal system, made 
 no impression at all upon the English poetry of 
 his own time. He could not act upon English 
 social thought until England ceased to be bar- 
 barous, and it is, therefore, not until the age of 
 Queen Anne that the powerful influence of 
 Boileau, like a penetrating odour, is perceived 
 in English poetry, and above all in the verse 
 of Pope. In the First Epistle of the Second Book, 
 published in 1737, that great poet reviews the
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 355 
 
 literature of the last seventy years in lines of 
 extraordinary strength and conciseness : 
 
 " We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms ; 
 Her arts victorious triumph'd o'er our arms : 
 Britain to soft refinements less a foe, 
 Wit grew polite, and numbers learned to flow. 
 Waller was smooth ; but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full-resounding line, 
 The long majestic march and energy divine. 
 Though still some traces of our rustic vein 
 And splay-foot verse remained, and will remain. 
 Late, very late, correctness grew our care, 
 When the tired nation breath'd from civil war. 
 Exact Racine and Corneille's noble fire 
 Showed us that France had something to admire. 
 Not but the tragic spirit was our own, 
 And full in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone. 
 But Otway failed to polish or refine, 
 And fluent Shakespeare scarce effaced a line." 
 
 When Pope wrote these vigorous verses, he had 
 reached the meridian of his art. He was the 
 greatest living poet not only of England, but of 
 the world. He had to look back over a literary 
 career of nearly forty years, which had been a per- 
 petual triumph, yet in the course of which he had 
 been steadily conducted by the genius of Boileau, 
 who had died in body exactly at the moment 
 when Pope was giving new lustre to his spirit. 
 No critic of authority will question that Pope was 
 a greater writer than Boileau, excellent as the latter 
 is. In the innumerable instances where direct 
 comparison between them is invited, the richness 
 of Pope's language, the picturesque fulness of his 
 line, transcends the art of Boileau. But there is 
 always due a peculiar honour to the artist who is
 
 356 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 a forerunner, and this belongs to the author of 
 Le Lutrin. 
 
 The qualities which entered the English poetry of 
 the eighteenth century came through Pope, but they 
 had their source in Boileau. From him, enemy 
 as he was to affectation, pedantry and spurious 
 emphasis, we learned that a verse, whether good 
 or bad, should at least say something. Boileau's 
 attitude of " honest zeal " commended itself, theo- 
 retically if not always practically, to the mind of 
 Pope, who is never tired of praising the French- 
 man, "that most candid satirist." Both imitated 
 Horace, but even Pope's vanity could not conceal 
 the fact that he studied the great Roman master 
 mainly in the pitres of Boileau. We have here 
 an excellent example of the kind of influence of 
 which we found an example so many centuries 
 back in Chaucer. Here it is not a dull transference 
 of material, ill-comprehended, ill-digested, from 
 one literature to another. It is the capture of the 
 transient charm, the colour and odour of a living 
 art. Few exercises in criticism would be more 
 instructive than an analysis of French influences 
 on the splendid poetry of Pope. They mainly re- 
 solve themselves into the results of a patient and 
 intelligent study of Boileau. If we compare the 
 Essay on Criticism with the Art Poetique we see 
 the young Pope at the feet of the ancient tyrant 
 of letters ; if we place Le Lutrin by the side 
 of The Rape of the Lock we see the knack of 
 mock-heroic caught, and developed, and raised to 
 a pinnacle of technical beauty. The Epistle to 
 Dr. Arbuthnot is vastly superior to the poem A son
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 357 
 
 Esprit ', but Pope would never have traversed the 
 road if Boileau had not pointed out the way. 
 Pope captured the very touch of Boileau, but he 
 heightened it, and he made it English. How 
 English he made it can be seen from the fact that 
 the manner spread, as Pope's and as English, to 
 the literatures of Italy, Sweden, and even of 
 Russia. 
 
 It spread, moreover, to the whole of the fashion 
 of poetry to be written in Pope's own England 
 through the remainder of the eighteenth century. 
 Even where that fashion turned to forms more un- 
 classical or even languidly romantic, a faint varnish 
 of Pope's precision continued to characterise it. 
 But during the eighteenth century (that epoch so 
 curious in the history of poetry, where everything 
 seemed to combine to hold the imagination in a 
 static if not in a semi-paralysed condition) there 
 was no more display of influence from France on 
 England. What influence there was was exercised 
 all in the reverse direction. The moral disquisition 
 in exquisitely-serried couplets gave way in some 
 degree to descriptive poetry as Thomson devised 
 it, to lyrical poetry as it was conceived by Gray. 
 But these writers, eminent enough in their place 
 and their degree, not only owed nothing to France, 
 but they exerted an immediate influence on the 
 poets of that country. The Abb Delille, with his 
 olives and his vines, his corn-fields and his gardens 
 and his bees, was inspired in the second degree, 
 no doubt, by Virgil, but in the first degree, unques- 
 tionably, by the natural descriptions of the English 
 poets of the preceding generation.
 
 358 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 When we come to the dawn of a new age, when 
 we examine for exotic impressions the writings of 
 the pioneers of the romantic revival, we find that 
 the prestige is still all on the side of Great Britain. 
 On Cowper and Burns and Blake we discover no 
 trace of any consciousness of foreign influence, 
 other than is indicated by an occasional and 
 usually hostile acknowledgment of the existence 
 of Voltaire and Rousseau on the prosaic confines 
 of the art. Quite different is the case in France, 
 when we approach a writer in some respects more 
 modern than either Cowper or Burns, namely, 
 Andr6 Chnier, the more conventional parts of 
 whose works display, to an English reader, a far 
 greater pre-occupation with English poetry than, 
 I believe, any French critic has noted. In the 
 latter part of the eighteenth century the deplorable 
 didacticism of verse, with the tedium of its topo- 
 graphical and descriptive pieces, of its odes to 
 Inoculation and to The Genius of the Thames, of 
 its epics on the cultivation of the sugar-cane, 
 and the breeding of sheep and the navigation of 
 sailing-vessels, although it took its start from a 
 misconception of the teaching of Boileau, had long 
 ceased to be definitely French, and had become 
 technically British in character. But the group 
 of Parisian poets, so solemn and so deadly dull, 
 who formed the court of Delille after the French 
 Revolution, were the disciples of the verse of 
 Thomson, in fact, as much as in theory they were 
 the pupils of the prose of Buffon. 
 
 The reaction against dryness and flatness in 
 imaginative literature was complete and systematic
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 359 
 
 in England long before it had been accepted by 
 the intelligent classes in France. The authority of 
 Chateaubriand, although most of his important work 
 was published already, was not in any wide degree 
 accepted until after 1810, even if this be not too 
 early a date to suggest for it, while the formular 
 Tendency of the whole work of the author of Atala 
 and Rene was rather to the revival of a vivid, 
 picturesque, and imaginative prose than to the 
 study of verse. But in England, before 1810, the 
 revolution was complete in the essential art of 
 poetry itself. Wordsworth and Coleridge had 
 completed their reform, and it was of a nature 
 absolutely radical. In 1798 they had determined 
 that " the passions of men should be incorporated 
 with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature," 
 and they had, working on those lines, added to 
 the poetry of the world some of its most perfect 
 and its most durable ornaments. Crabbe, Camp- 
 bell, even Sir Walter Scott, had completely re- 
 vealed the nature of their genius before France 
 was awakened to the full lesson of Chateaubriand. 
 When the second romantic epoch was revealed in 
 France, the great era in England was over. The 
 year 1822, which saw Alfred de Vigny, Victor 
 Hugo, and Lamartine ascend the Parisian horizon 
 as a new constellation of unequalled effulgence, 
 saw the burial of Shelley in that Roman garden of 
 death where Keats had shortly before been laid, 
 and saw the retirement of Byron to Genoa, his 
 latest Italian home. 
 
 It was physically impossible, therefore, that the 
 belated Romantiques in France, at the beginning of
 
 360 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 the nineteenth century, could exercise any influence 
 over their British brethren, who had been roused 
 from slumber one watch earlier than they had. 
 Far north, in the valleys of Somerset, by the Isis 
 at Oxford, long before there was any motion of 
 life by the Seine or by the Rhone, the spirit of 
 living poetry had arisen, singing, from the ground, 
 and the boyish Lamartine and Vigny, had they 
 been aware of the fact, might have whispered of 
 their English predecessors in 1810 : 
 
 " By rose-hung river and light-foot rill 
 
 There are who rest not, who think long 
 
 Till they discern as from a hill 
 At the sun's hour of morning song, 
 
 Known of souls only, and those souls free, 
 
 The sacred spaces of the sea." 
 
 The English Romantics of the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century earnestly and pointedly repu- 
 diated the influence which French poetry had 
 exercised in England a hundred years earlier. 
 This deliberate revolt finds a very interesting 
 expression in the Sleep and Poetry of Keats, a 
 poem of much importance in the history of 
 criticism. Sleep and Poetry was written in 1816, 
 six years before the first C6nacle was formed 
 in Paris, and four years before the publication of 
 Lamartine's Meditations Poe'tiques. In the course of 
 it, Keats describes the practice of the Anglo-Gallic 
 writers of verse in picturesque and stringent lan- 
 guage, culminating in an attack on the impeccable 
 Boileau himself. He says :
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 361 
 
 "A schism 
 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought wise who could not understand 
 His glories : with a puling infant's force 
 They swayed about upon a rocking-horse 
 And thought it Pegasus. . . . Ill-fated race ! 
 That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face 
 And did not know it, no, they went about, 
 Holding a poor, decrepit standard out, 
 Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
 The name of one BOILRAU ! " 
 
 During the ninety years which separate us from 
 the early enthusiasms of Keats and Shelley, it 
 cannot be said that this influence of France has 
 to any marked degree asserted itself on the poetry 
 of England. It would be in the highest degree 
 fantastic to pretend that it can be traced on the 
 texture of Tennyson or of the Brownings. It is 
 a remarkable fact that the genius of Victor Hugo, 
 although of such overwhelming force among the 
 Latin nations, failed to awaken the least echo in the 
 poets of the North. The allusions to Hugo in the 
 writings of his greatest immediate contemporaries 
 in England are ludicrously perfunctory and un- 
 appreciative. Tennyson addressed to him a well- 
 intentioned sonnet which is a monument of tact- 
 lessness, in which Victor Hugo is addressed as 
 " Weird Titan " and in which the summit of 
 the French poet's performance appears to have 
 been reached in his having been polite to one of 
 Tennyson's sons. " Victor in drama, victor in 
 romance," the English poet sings in artless 
 wit, and shows no appreciation whatever of the 
 unmatched victories in the splendour and per-
 
 362 FRENCH PROFILES 
 
 fection of lyrical melody. It was Mr. Swin- 
 burne who, about 1866, earliest insisted on the 
 supremacy of Victor Hugo : 
 
 " Thou art chief of us, and lord; 
 
 Thy song is as a sword 
 Keen-edged and scented in the blade from flowers ; 
 
 Thou art lord and king ; but we 
 
 Lift younger eyes, and see 
 Less of high hope, less light on wandering hours." 
 
 In spite, however, of Mr. Swinburne's reiterated 
 praise of that " imperial soul," and of the respect- 
 ful study which has been given to the poet in 
 England for the last forty years, Victor Hugo has 
 asserted little or no influence on English poetry. 
 Much lesser talents than his, however, have offered 
 in the later years of the century a colour to a 
 certain school of our poets, and it is in Theophile 
 Gautier and Theodore de Banville that our English 
 Parnassians found something of the same aesthetic 
 stimulus that their predecessors of the fourteenth 
 century found in Guillaume de Machault and 
 Eustache Deschamps. 
 
 But our hour is over, and this brief and imper- 
 fect discourse must come to an end. We have 
 very lightly touched on the events of six hundred 
 years. Are we to speculate, imperfect prophets 
 that we are, on the future relations of the two great 
 countries of the west, which, far beyond all others, 
 have always been in the vanguard of liberty and 
 light ? That is a feat of daring beyond my limited 
 imagination. But I cannot help nourishing a 
 confident belief that in the future, as well as in
 
 FRENCH INFLUENCE 363 
 
 the past, the magnificent literatures of France and 
 of England will interact upon one another, that 
 each will at the right psychological moments flash 
 colour and radiance which will find reflection on 
 the polished surface of the other. To facilitate 
 this, in ever so small and so humble a degree, must 
 be the desire of every lover of England and of 
 France. And in order to adopt from each what 
 shall be serviceable to the other, what is most 
 needful must be a condition of mutual intelligence, 
 That entente cordiale which we value so deeply, and 
 which some of us have so long laboured to pro- 
 mote, it must not be confined to the merchants 
 and to the politicians. The poets also must insist 
 upon their share of it.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abbl Constantin, M. Ludovic 
 
 HaleVy, 274 
 
 Abbl Mouret, Zola's, 132 
 Abbi Roidelet, Fabre, F., 160 
 Abbi Tigrane, Fabre's, 153, 160, 
 
 161, 162, 163, 166, 179 
 Addison, Joseph, 184 
 Adelaide du Guesclin, Voltaire, 
 
 45. 58 
 
 Ai'ss6, Mademoiselle, 35-67 
 Alcaforada, Mariana, 72. See Mari- 
 ana 
 
 Alexis, Paul, 131, 133, 141 
 Al fieri, 98 
 
 Amaide'e, d'Aurevilly's, 94-95 
 Amant Indiscret, Quinault's, 353 
 Amour Impossible, d'Aurevilly, 95 
 Amour Marin, M. Paul Fort's, 
 
 327 
 
 Amoureuses, Les, Daudet, 114, 126 
 Andromaque, Racine's, 353 
 Anneau d" Amtthyste, 269 
 Annunzio, G. de, 196, 246 
 Aphrodite, M. Pierre Louys, 271 
 Apres-Midi d'un Faune, Mallarme"s, 
 
 307.309 
 Artthuse, M. de Re'gnier, 294, 
 
 295 
 Argental, Comte d', 38, 51, 52, 
 
 60 
 
 Armand, the actor, 53 
 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 30, 197, 301 
 Art Poftique, Boileau, 356 
 Asse, M. Eugene, 49, 88 
 Atala, Chateaubriand, 359 
 Athe'es, A tin Dinr.rd', d'Aurevilly, 
 
 96, 105, 106 
 
 Aumont.'Duc d', 57 
 
 Aurevilly, Jules Barbey d', 93-107 
 
 Avec Trots Mille Cent Francs, 
 
 Daudet, 113 
 Aventures du Grand Sidoine, Zola, 
 
 134 
 d'Aydie, Chevalier Blaise Marie, 
 
 45-48, 51, 55, 56, 57, 60-61, 62, 
 
 63. 64, 65 
 Aziyadt, P. Loti, 204, 219 
 
 BA!F, 345 
 
 Ballades Franfaises, M. Paul Fort's, 
 
 325 
 
 Balthasar, A. France, 191 
 Balzac, Honor6 de, 127, 160, 246, 
 
 267, 270 
 
 (John Louis Guez), 69, 70 
 
 Banville, Theodore de, 362 
 Barante, M. de, 49 
 Barbauld, Mrs., 290 
 Barbin, Paris publisher, 71 
 Barnabl, Fabre F., 160 
 Barres, M. Maurice, 261, 271 
 Barrie, Mr., 268 
 Batilliat, M. Marcel, 300 
 Baudelaire, t C. t 318, 319, 324, 329, 
 
 333 
 
 Bazin, M. Ren6, 273-290 
 Beauvois, M. , 72, 73, 75, 76, 88, 
 
 89, 90 
 Be"darieux, 154, 155, 159, 172, 
 
 1 80 
 
 Beerbohm, Mr. Max, too 
 Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 354 
 Beja, 72, 75, 77, 88, 91 
 
 365
 
 3 66 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Benserade, 349 
 
 Bercail, Fabre, F., Le, 160 
 
 Bernard, Claude, 152 
 
 Berry, Mde. la Duchesse de, 45 
 
 Blake, William, 358 
 
 Boccaccio, 341, 342 
 
 Boileau, 85, 350, 354, 355-357, 358, 
 
 361 
 
 Boissier, M. Gaston, 69 
 Boissonade, M. , 72 
 Bolingbroke, Lady. See Villette 
 
 Lord, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 58 
 Bonheur dans le Crime, Le, d'Aure- 
 
 villy, 98, 105, 106 
 Bon Plaisir, M. de Re'gnier's Le, 
 
 302 
 
 Boufflers, 130 
 Bouillon, Duchesse de,'59 
 Boule de Suif, M. Maupassant, 
 
 142 
 
 Bourges, M. Ele'mir, 272 
 Bourget, M. Paul, 94, 113, 138, 
 
 180, 269, 239-270 
 Bournonville, Mme. la Princesse 
 
 de, 52 
 Bouton, Noel, Count of St. Le"ger- 
 
 sur-Dheune, 73. See Chamilly 
 Bridges, Mr. Robert, 323 
 Browning, Elizabeth, 249, 361 
 Brummell, Du Dandyisme et de 
 
 Georges, 94, 100, 101 
 Brunetiere, M. , 269 
 Buffon, 358 
 Bunbury, MissLydia, later Comtesse 
 
 de Vigny, 13, 14 
 
 Sir Edward, 13 
 
 Burle, Zola's Le Capitaine, 145, 
 
 146 
 
 Burns, Robert, 358 
 Byron, Lord, 5, 10, n, 13, 31, 98, 
 
 99- 101,315, 359 
 
 CALANDRINI, Madame, 48, 49, 55, 
 
 56, 59, 61, 62, 66 
 Calprenede, Gautier La, 351 
 Campbell, Thomas, 359 
 Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, 341 
 Cantilenes, Les, Moreas', 186 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 100, 195 
 Garnet de Danse, Zola's, 131 
 Ceard, M. Henri, 142 
 Celle qui m'aime, Zola, 133, 134, 
 
 135 
 Chamilly, Marquis of, 71, 72, 74, 
 
 75, 77, 78, 86, 88 
 Chanson de Roland, 6, 337 
 Chapone, Mrs., 290 
 Charcot, the physician, no 
 Chariot d" Or, A. Samain's, 320 
 Chateaubriand, F. de, 5, 94, 95, 
 
 359 
 Chats, Les Paradis des, Zola, 
 
 138 
 Chatterton, Thomas, 19, 20; 
 
 Vigny's tragedy, 21 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 334, 338-342, 
 
 356 
 Che'nier, Andr6, 2, 5, 19, 296, 301, 
 
 358 
 
 Cherbuliez, V., 268 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 212 
 Chevrier, Fabre, F. , 160, 177, 
 
 1 80 
 
 Christianisme, Genie du, Chateau- 
 briand, 5 
 
 Chrysantheme, Loti's Madame, 204 
 Cid, Corneille's, 351 
 Cinq-Mars, Vigny, 12 
 Citt des Eaux, M. Henri de Re'g- 
 nier's, 297-302 
 Claretie, M. Jules, 118, 153 
 Clllie, Mile. ScudeYy, 69 
 Coignard, M. Jerdme, A. France, 
 
 191 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 7, 333, 359 
 Complications Sentimentales , Paul 
 
 Bourget, 250-252 
 Contes d Ninon , Zola, 135 
 Contes a Ninon, Zola's Nouveaux, 
 
 136-139 
 
 Contes CAoisis, Daudet, 114, 128 
 Contes de Lundi, Daudet, 113 
 Coppe'e, M. Franfois, 320 
 Corneille, P., 69 
 
 Thomas, 353 
 
 Cotton, Charles, 349
 
 INDEX 
 
 3 6 7 
 
 Cowley, Abraham, 347 
 
 Cowper, William, 358 
 
 Crabbe, George, 315, 359 
 
 Cre'billon, 130 
 
 Crime d" Amour, Un, Bourget, 
 
 236 
 
 Criticism, Pope's Essay on, 356 
 Crowne, John, 353 
 
 Dame Romaine, La, Vigny, 5 
 Dandy cCavant les Dandys, Un, 
 
 d'Aurevilly, 100 
 Daniel, Samuel, Delia, 345 
 Dante, 2, 132, 342 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 108-128, 268 
 M. Ernest, Man Frere et Mot, 
 
 III, 112 
 
 Davenant, Sir William, 347 
 Debacles, M. Verhaeren, Les, 314 
 Deffand, Madame du, 44, 45, 46, 
 
 59,66 
 
 Delavigne, Casimir, 16 
 Delille, The Abte, 357, 358 
 Delpit, M. Albert, 121 
 Deluge, Le, Vigny, 9 
 Denham, Sir John, 347, 349, 351 ; 
 
 Cooper's Hill, 349 
 Depit Amoureux, Molieres, 353 
 Deracines, M. Barres' Les, 261, 
 
 271 
 Deschamps, Emile, 6 
 
 Eustache, 340, 341, 342, 362 
 
 Desert, Le, P. Loti's, 203, 204, 205- 
 
 207, 208, 209, 210, 216 
 Desportes, Philippe, 345 
 Dessous des Cartes, Le, d'Aurevilly, 
 
 105, 106 
 
 Destinies, Les, Vigny, 3 
 Destouches, N ; , 36, 58 
 De Toute son Ame, M. Ren6 Bazin, 
 
 281-283 
 
 Diaboliques, Les, d'Aurevilly, 106 
 Dickens, Charles, 102, 103, 121, 
 
 246 
 Don Juan, Le Plus Bel Amour de, 
 
 d'Aurevilly, 99, 106 
 Donne, John, 311 
 Dorval, Marie, 16-17, 18, 21 
 
 Double Conversion, La, Daudet, 114 
 Double Maitresse, La, M. Henri de 
 
 Re'gnier, 302 
 Dryade, La, Vigny, 5 
 Dryden, John, 183, 353, 354, 355 
 Du Bartas, 345 
 
 Du Bellay, Joachim, Visions ,'344 
 Dubreuil, M. 1'Abb^, 156, 157 
 Duchesse Bleue, La, M. Bourget's 
 
 244-249, 269 
 Dumas, Alexandre, 27, 32, 267 
 
 Eloa, Vigny, 7, 10, 11-12, 16 
 Embarrassments, Mr. Henry 
 
 James's, 244 
 
 Empedocles, Matthew Arnold, 301 
 Endymion, Keats's, 300 
 English poetry, the influence of 
 
 France upon, 330-363 
 Ensorcelee, L', d'Aurevilly, 96 
 d" Epicure, Le Jardin, A. France, 
 
 191, 198 
 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope's. 
 
 356 
 Espinasse, Mademoiselle de L', 36, 
 
 37. 48 
 
 tape, L', Bourget, 260-265 
 toiles, Les, Daudet, 115 
 J&tourdi, Moliere's, 353 
 Evangeliste, Daudet, no, 119 
 
 FABRE, Abb Fulcran, 155, 156 
 
 Ferdinand, 153-181, 268 
 
 Fantome d Orient, P. Loti, 203, 
 
 221, 227 
 
 Fie Amoureuse, La, Zola, 130 
 Ferriol, Baron d'Argental, Charles 
 
 de,*37, 38, 41, 44,56 
 Madame de, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 
 
 51, 56, 62, 65 
 Feuillet, O, 150, 268 
 Fielding, H., 246 
 Figures et Chaises qui passaient, P. 
 
 Loti, 220-227 
 Fitzjames, Duchess of, 57 
 Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Mr. James, ix, 
 
 340 
 Flaubert, G., 118, 127, 142, 270
 
 3 68 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire, 318 
 
 319 
 
 Fleury, Cardinal de, 55 
 
 Forces Tumultueuses, Les, M. Ver- 
 
 haeren, 315 
 
 Forgeron, Le, Zola's, 138 
 Fort, M. Paul, 324-329 
 France, M. Anatole, 174, 189-201, 
 
 269 
 Friendship's Garland, Matthew 
 
 Arnold, 269 
 Froissart, 340 
 Fromont feune et Risler AinJ, 
 
 Daudet, in, 119, 120, 121 
 
 Galilee, P. Loti's La, 216, 217, 
 
 218, 219-220, 227, 234 
 Gautier, The'ophile, u, 131, 362 
 Gay, Delphine, 7, 13 
 Gesvres, Due de, 39, 40 
 Ghil, M. Rene", 293 
 Gilbert, poet, 19, 20 
 Goethe, 95, 103 
 Goncourt, Edmond de, 117, 118, 
 
 137, 180, 268 
 Gower, John, Cinquante Balades, 
 
 342 
 Grandeur et Servitude Militaires, 
 
 Vigny, 6, 24-25 
 Granson, Oton de, 340, 342 
 Gray, Thomas, 59, 334, 357 
 Grignan, Madame de, 50, 70 
 Gue'rin, Maurice de, 94, 95 
 Guerres, Zola's Trots, 143-144 
 Guilleragues, Pierre Girardin de, 
 
 85,86 
 
 HALVY, M. Ludovic, 273 
 Hardy, Mr. T., 155, 172, 176, 180, 
 
 268 
 
 Harland, Mr. Henry, 183, 184 
 Hennique, M. L6on, La Devoute, 
 
 142 
 
 Herbert, Edward, 311 
 Heredia, M. de, 295, 323 
 Hdrodiade, Mallarme', 305, 309 
 Hervieu, M. Paul, 270 
 
 Histoire Comique, A. France, 198, 
 
 200, 201 
 Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne, 
 
 Pr6vot, 58 
 Histoire san Nom, Une, d'Aurevilly, 
 
 97 
 
 Homme d' Affaires, Un, Bourget, 
 270 
 
 Hommes, Les (Euvres et les, d'Aure- 
 villy, 103 
 
 Horace, 356 
 
 Horaces, Les, 351, 352 
 
 Howel, James, 68, 69 
 
 Hugo, Victor, i, 5, 6, 8, 10, 16, 93, 
 184, 315, 329, 359, 361, 362 
 
 Humble Amour, M. Ren6 Bazin, 
 285 
 
 Huysmans, M. Joris Karel, 142, 
 271 
 
 IBSEN, H. , 189, 196 
 
 Idylle Tragique, Une, Bourget, 251 
 
 Immortel, L', Daudet, 119 
 
 Isez, the surgeon, 53 
 
 Italie, Bourget's Sensations a", 
 
 2S3 
 
 I taliens d'Aujourd'hui, Les, M. 
 Bazin, 289 
 
 Jack, Daudet, 113, 119, 120 
 James, Mr. Henry, 45, 120, 202, 
 
 244, 247, 251, 269 
 Jardin de I Infante, Au, A. Sa- 
 
 main's, 320, 321-323 
 Jean Gourdon, Zola's Les Quatre 
 
 Journles de, 139-141 
 Jean Le Maire des Beiges, 343 
 Jephtt, La Fille de, Vigny, 6 
 Jeux Rustiques et Divins, Les, M. 
 
 H. de Re'gnier's, 295 
 Jonson, Ben, 311 
 Jusserand, M., 75 
 
 K.EAN, Edmund, 15 
 
 Keats, 7, 109, 295, 299, 300, 302, 
 
 334. 338, 359, 360 
 Kyd, Thomas, 345
 
 INDEX 
 
 3 6 9 
 
 LACORDAIRE, 162, 163 
 
 La Fontaine, Jean de, Adonis, 350 
 
 Lamartine, A. de, 2, -319, 359, 360 
 
 Lammenais, F. de, 13 
 
 Langland, William, 339 
 
 La Terre, Zola's, 129 
 
 Lauzun, 99, 100 
 
 Leblond, Ce'le'nie, 47, 63 
 
 Lecouvreur, Adrienne, 59 
 
 Lee, Mr. Sidney, 345 
 
 Ltlia, George Sand, 95 
 
 Le Lutrin, Boileau, 356 
 
 Lemaitre, M. Jules, 119, 153, 269 
 
 Le Petit Chose, Daudet, in, 112, 
 
 114, 121, 122, 126 
 Les Precieuses Ridicules, Moliere's, 
 
 353 
 L' Estrange, Sir Roger, Five Love 
 
 Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, 
 
 go 
 Lettres de man Moulin, Daudet, 
 
 114, 115, 126 
 
 Lettres Portugaises, 68, 71 
 Litteraire, A. France's La Vie, 191, 
 
 269 
 
 Lodge, Thomas, 345 
 Lords, Guillaume de, 337, 338 
 Loti, Pierre, 138, 202-238, 268, 284 
 Loves of the Angels, Moore's, 10, n 
 Lucifer, Fabre, F., 160, 162, 166, 
 
 179 
 Lys Rouge, Le, A. France's, 191, 199 
 
 MACAULAY, Mr. G. C., 342 
 Machault, Guillaume de, 340, 342, 
 
 362 
 Madame Corentine, M._Ren6 Bazin, 
 
 283-284 
 
 Maeterlinck, M., 313, 314 
 Maintenon, Madame de, 85 
 Malherbe, F., 346 
 Mallarme', St^phane, 182, 293, 294, 
 
 30S-3I 2 
 Mannequin tf Osier, Le, A. France, 
 
 191, 193 
 
 Manon Lescaut, 58, 119 
 
 Mariage de Loti, Le, P. Loti, 202, 
 
 221 
 
 Mariana Alcaforada, the Portuguese 
 
 Nun, 72-89 
 Marot, Clement, 344 ; L Adolescence 
 
 Clementine, 343 
 Ma Tante Giron, M. Ren6 Bazin, 
 
 273. 2 74. 275 
 
 Matelot, P. Loti, 203, 227 
 Maupassant, M. Guy de, 113, 127, 
 
 141, 142, 150, 242, 244, 270 
 Ma Vocation, Fabre, 155 
 Medailles dArgile, M. Rggnier, 
 
 299 
 Meditations Poetiques, Lamartine, 
 
 360 
 
 Meung, Jean de, 337, 338, 340 
 Milton, John, 2, 13, 334, 348 
 Mirour de FOmme, 342 
 Moines, Les, M. Verhaeren, 314 
 Mo'ise, Vigny, 8 
 Moliefe, 58, 350, 352, 353-354 
 Man Frere Yves, P. Loti, 228 
 Montagne, M.iPaul Fort's, 327 
 Montaigne, M. , 192 
 Montesquieu, 36 
 Moore, T., 10, n, 13; The Loves 
 
 of the Angels, 10, 11 
 Morels, M. Jean, 184, 186, 187-188 
 Moreau, He'ge'sippe, 23 
 Morice, M. Charles, 184 
 Motteville, Madame de, Memoirs, 
 
 82 
 Moulin, Zola's L'Attaque du, 142, 
 
 143 
 
 Mussel, Alfred de, Confession cTun 
 Enfant du Siecle, 291 
 
 Nabab, Le, Daudet, 119, 127 
 
 Nana, Zola's, 129 
 
 Nichina, La, M. Hugues Rebell, 
 
 271 
 
 Nodier, C., 6, 13 
 Noellet, Les, M. Bazin, 284 
 Notre Cceur, Maupassant, 244 
 Nouveaux Lundis, Sainte-Beuve, 3 
 Numa Roumestan, Daudet, 119, 
 
 120, 127 
 
 Nun's Love Letters. See Portuguese 
 Letters ; see Mariana Alcaforada 
 2 A
 
 370 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Oncle Celestin, Man, Fabre, 156, 
 
 160 
 Orme du Mail, L , A. France, 191, 
 
 192, 193, 194 
 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 324 
 Othello, Shakespeare's, 266, 345 
 Otway, Thomas, 354, 355 
 Outre-. \ler, M. Bourget, 252, 259 
 
 PALOLOGUE, M. , 13, 27 
 Parabere, Madame de, 43, 48, 51. 
 
 57, 64, 66 
 Paris, Gaston, 269 
 Paris Sentimental, M. Paul Fort's, 
 
 327, 328-329 
 
 Parnasse Contemporain , 307 
 Parnassians, 295, 298, 307, 323 
 Pascal, 190 
 Pater, Walter, 179 
 Pecheur dlslande, P. Loti, 227, 
 
 228, 284 
 
 Pekin, P. Loti's, 234-238 
 Pellissier, operatic star, 52 
 Penruddock, Mrs., 70 
 Perraud, Cardinal, 153 
 Petrarch, 341, 342 
 Philips, Katherine, " Orinda," 351, 
 
 352 ' 
 Philosophe Marie, Lf, Destouche, 
 
 58 
 
 Pichot, M. Ame'de'e, 159 
 
 Pleiade, the, 344 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, The Raven, 
 
 translated by S. Mallarm6, 306 ; 
 
 also Poems, 307, 324 
 Poemes, Anciens et Romanesques, 
 
 M. Rggnier, 295 
 Poemes, Vigny, 5, 6, 7 
 Polypheme, A. Samain, 320 
 Pont-de-Veyle, Marquis de, 38, 52, 
 
 60 
 
 Pontmartin, M. de, 92 
 Pope, Alexander, 2, 354-355. 35 6 - 
 
 357 
 
 Portuguese Letters, 68-90 
 Prttre Marie, Le, d'Aurevilly, 96, 
 
 97 
 Prevost, M. Marcel, 270 
 
 Prevost d'Exiles, Abbe", 47, 58 
 Propos dExil, P. Loti, 227 
 Province, M. Bazin's En, 289 
 Prudhomme, M. Sully, 298 
 
 QUELEN, Archbishop de, 163 
 Quinault, 352 
 
 RACAN, 348, 349 
 
 Racine, 329, 333, 335, 350, 352, 353, 
 
 354, 355 
 Ramuntcho, P. Loti, 221, 226, 227- 
 
 =33 
 
 Rape of the Lock, The, Pope, 356 
 
 Raphael, 12 
 
 Ravenel, M., 49 
 
 Rggnier, M. Henri de, 293-304 
 
 Renan, E., 153, 197, 292 
 
 Renl, Chateaubriand, 359 
 
 Rideau Cramoisi, Le, d'Aurevilly, 
 
 99, 105 
 
 Rieu, Mademoiselle, 40, 45, 46 
 Rod, M. Edouard, 272 
 Rots en Exil, Les, Daudet, 119 
 Rollinat, Maurice, 319 
 Roman de Louis XI., M. Paul 
 
 Fort's, 326 
 Roman de la Rose, Lorris, 337, 338 , 
 
 339 
 
 Roman dun Enfant, P. Loti, 224 
 Roman dun Spahi, Loti's, 205, 
 
 228 
 
 Roman Experimental, Zola's, 267 
 Ronsard, P., 344, 345 
 Roscommon, Earl of, 347 
 Rose et Ninette, Daudet, 119 
 Rosny, 271 
 Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque, A. 
 
 France, 191 
 Rotrou, 351 
 Rougon-Macquart series of Zola., 
 
 129, 135, 136, 137, 149, 267 
 Rousseau, J. J., 88, 358 
 Route d'Emeraude, M. Eugene 
 
 Demolder, 271 
 Ruffec, Due de, 52 
 Ruskin, John, 35 
 Rutter, Joseph, 351
 
 INDEX 
 
 37i 
 
 SAINT-AMANT, 348 
 
 Sainte-Bcuve, C. A., 3, 17, 37, 
 
 160 
 Sainte Claire, Le Putts de, A. 
 
 France, 191 
 
 Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 343 
 Saint-Simon, L. de Rouvroi, Ducde, 
 
 71, 85, 86 
 
 Saint- Victor, Paul de, 106 
 Samain, Albert, 318-324 
 Sand, George, 18, 133, 155, 160, 
 
 267 
 
 Sandeau, Jules, 160 
 Santillana, Spanish poet, 340 
 Sapho, Daudet's, 109, no, 119, 120, 
 
 121, 122 
 
 Sarcelle Bleue, La, M. Ren6 Bazin, 
 
 277-280 
 
 Scarron, Paul, no, 349 
 Sceve's, Maurice, Dtlie, 345 
 Schomberg, Count of, 73 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 12, 13, 359 
 Scude'ry, 351 
 
 Mademoiselle de, 69 
 
 Se"ch6, M. Le"on, 4, 13 
 Segrais's Eglogues, 349 
 Serao, Madame Matilde, II paesedi 
 
 Cuccagna, 247 
 SeVigne', Madame de, 36, 37, 50, 70, 
 
 82 
 Shakespeare, 13, 15, 334, 338, 345, 
 
 355 
 
 Shelley, P. B. , 2, 219, 359 
 Sir Martin Mar-all, Dryden's, 
 
 353 
 
 Sleep and Poetry, Keats, 360 
 Smollett, T.,303 
 Soumet, A. , 13 
 Southey, Robert, 13 
 Spectator, The, 91 
 Spenser, Edmund, 344 
 Stanley, Dean, Sinai and Palestine, 
 
 207 
 
 Stella, Vigny, 18 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 180, 268 
 Suckling, Sir John, 347 
 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 343, 
 
 344 
 
 Swift, Dean, 194, 197 
 
 Swinburne, Mr. A. C., 306, 333, 
 
 362 
 Symons, Mr. Arthur, 182 
 
 TAINE, H. , 153, 154, 163, 179, 262, 
 
 263 
 
 Tarascon, 124, 128 
 Tencin family, 35, 38, 43, 48, 57 
 Tennyson, 197, 295, 338, 361 
 Terminations, Mr. Henry James, 
 
 224, 247 
 Terre qui Meurt, La, M. Bazin, 
 
 285-289, 290 
 Thais, A. France, 190 
 Thtrese Raquin Zola's, 136 
 Thyard, Pontus de, 345 
 Tissot, M. Ernest, 104 
 Tocqueville, A. de, 252, 255 
 Toussaint Galabru, Fabre, 176 
 Trebutien, M., 94 
 Trois Ames d A rtistes. See Duchesse 
 
 Bleue 
 Trollope, Anthony, 120, 159 
 
 ULBACH, Louis, 136, 137 
 
 Vacances (Fun Jeune Homme Sage, 
 
 Les, M. de R^gnier, 302-304 
 Vaines Tendresses, Les, M. Sully 
 
 Prudhomme, 298 
 Vathek, Beckford, with preface by 
 
 Mallarme', 307^ 
 
 Verhaeren, M. Emile, 313-318 
 Verlaine, Paul, a first sight of, 182- 
 
 188 
 Versailles-a-ux-Fant *,M.Marce 
 
 Batilliat, 300 
 Viau, Thebphile de, 348 
 Vieille Maitresse, Une, d'Aurevilly, 
 
 97 
 Vigny, Alfred de, 1-34, 301, 319, 
 
 359. 36o 
 Villes Tentaculaires, M. Verhaeren, 
 
 316 
 Villette, Marquise de, 41, 42, 
 
 46-47 
 Vogii6, M. Melchior de, 242
 
 372 INDEX 
 
 Voiture, Vincent, 69, 70, 349 
 Voltaire, 36, 42, 45, 49, 53, 58, 59, 
 
 64- 335. 358 
 
 Voyageuses, M. Paul Bourget, 239- 
 1244- 247. 250 
 
 WALLER, Edmund, 346, 347, 355 
 Whitman, Walt, 325, 329 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 2, 19, 30, 
 
 325. 359 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 343, 344 
 
 YEATS, Mr. W. B. , 323, 326 
 
 ZOLA, Emile, 117, 118, 129-152, 
 189, 246 
 
 THE END 
 
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 Edinburgh & London
 
 
 
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