THE FRENCH CLASSICAL ROMANCES THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES The French Classical Romances Complete in Twenty Crown Octavo Volumes Editor-in-Chief EDMUND GOSSE, LL.D. With Critical Introductions and Interpretative Essays by HENRY JAMES PROF. RICHARD BURTON HENRY HARLAND ANDREW LANG PROF. F. C. DE SUMICHRAST THE EARL OF CREWE HIS EXCELLENCY M. CAMBON PROP. WM. P. TRENT ARTHUR SYMONS MAURICE HEWLETT R. JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY RICHARD MANSFIELD BOOTH TARKINGTON DR. RICHARD GARNETT PROF. WILLIAM M. SLOANE JOHN OLIVER HOBBES JULES SANDEAU MLLE. DE LA SEIGLIERE TRANSLATED F>-OM THE FRENCH WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD MANSFIELD A FRONTISPIECE AND NUMEROUS OTHER PORTRAITS WITH DESCRIPTIVE NOTES BY OCTAVE UZANNE P. F. COLLIER & SON NEW YORK. COPYRIGHT, I90X BT D. APPLKTON * COMPANY library JULES SANDEAU THE French saying that forty lines may suffice to bestow literary immortality expresses the essence of the French attitude towards art. What is more, its truth has proved to be of sufficiently wide application to make it accepted beyond the confines of the coun- try where it was born. The man or woman of one poem, one book, one play, is not rare in the annals of the literatures of the world. A single epigram, even, has sufficed ere now to preserve a name from generation to generation. It is on the strength of one single, simple story that Leonard Sylvain Jules Sandeau, known as Jules Sandeau, takes his place among the masters of nine- teenth-century French fiction in this series. He has survived among the more generously endowed writers, the volume of whose excellence has gone to the creation of the greatness of that branch of French literature in the century that also saw its rise, because he succeeded, just once in his career, in writing a book that stands unrivalled and alone in its i Vol. 7 y 672781 Jules Sandeau own particular field and period. It is not in the grand manner; it is neither majestic tragedy nor im- mortal humour, and yet, within its unpretentious limits, it has the elements of continued life. To be sure, there was some doubt considerable doubt, in fact among the pundits as to the perma- nence of Sandeau's work, at the time of his death, in 1883. Then the students of French letters hesi- tatingly agreed to recognise the chances of possible survival of his Maison de Penarvan-, but the great reading public, which, after all, is the final judge in all such matters, and which, after all, is rarely wrong in its verdicts, decided otherwise. It has kept alive to this day the fame of Mademoiselle de la Seigliere, never hesitating in its choice, never doubting its wisdom, because never failing to feel the charm of the book; and behold, to-day the critics and the his- torians of literature agree with it. And that, too, is often the way in the world of art. Mademoiselle de la Seigliere is the best picture of the heterogeneous society of the French Restoration extant in the country's fiction. It paints the Mar- quis de Carabas without exaggeration, without en- mity, without desire to caricature; it exhibits to us the charms and foibles, the honour and baseness of a no- bility which, like its returned master, had forgotten nothing and learned nothing in exile. That nobility brought back with it the ideas of caste and govern- vi Jules Sandeau ment that had forced the people of France into revo- lution and excesses; the twenty-six years of the re- public and the empire had been for it but a horrible nightmare, shaken off on the sunshiny morning of the entrance into Paris of Louis the Desired. It could not see that the interregnum had produced changes which nothing could undo, that the middle class was in the saddle. At first resolved to ignore this new or- der of things, it did not attempt to fathom its depth, to measure its strength, to appreciate its dangerous possibilities. It took up its life where it had been interrupted by the storm, as if nothing had hap- pened, nothing had been done. It found a strange body of laws, the Code Napoleon, which hampered it and outraged its notions of the fitness of things; all dreams of a revival of the corvee were rudely shattered. But it succeeded in renewing at least the outwardness of its ante-revolutionary existence, the old courtly life, its graces, its ruffles, its luxu- ries, its superciliousness. There were two ways of interpreting Louis XVIII's saying, " Nothing has changed; there is only one Frenchman more in France," and the nobility adopted the wrong one. Of course, there was ever the dreaded spectre of an- other revolution, but, on the other hand, many were found among the very people who had been benefited by the upheaval that were ready to worship rank and title, to be captivated by the suave manners that vii Jules Sandeau could hide a fathomless contempt when' interest dic- tated their use; and in the countryside there was a ready revival of the age-old, inbred respect for in- herited greatness. I cannot help wondering if in his innermost heart Sandeau did not dearly love a lord. He certainly was captivated by the distinguished charm, the ex- quisite manners, the sumptuous taste, the royal art and science of living, the very insolent pride of the erstwhile masters of the soil. His books inevitably suggest this to whoever chooses to look below the surface. He revels in the luxury of the returned Marquis de la Seigliere, the eighteenth-century dain- tiness and beauty and artificiality of the Baronne de Vaubert; but is there not, after all, an attraction for most of us in these polished attributes of aristocracy? They unquestionably give beauty to life, the beauty to which we all aspire, which, when we come to con- sider it, has always been the heritage of the masses at a later date. The aristocracies of the world have ever been its pioneers in the art of living the ma- terial life beautiful. It is not until some righteously indignant son of the soil like Carlyle thunders forth, or some master of humour like Mark Twain produces a Yankee at King Arthur's Court, that we realize the enormous cost of all these adornments of life to the mass of humanity through the ages of the old dis- pensation. viii Jules Sandeau And here observe the saving clause in Sandeau's pleasure in the polished outwardness of the noble life. He had in good measure the sense of humour, and it enabled him to retain his keenness of sight. His aristocrats are mentally and morally men and women like all the rest of the world, possessing only great tact, infinite resources of dissimulation and sophistry to hide the sordidness of their aims and to make it palatable to their own code of honour. There is bit- ing satire in the account of the scheming of the bar- oness, in the progress of the marquis towards his changing goal; and the introduction of the old law- yer furnishes an opportunity for irony that is utilized with a skill rarely excelled. The peasant who makes restitution to his re- turned master of the confiscated estates acquired by him is neither exalted nor scorned. He remains a lout, an unpleasant person to have in a salon; his generosity, like his good fortune, is the result of circumstances. But he is at least honest, which' the marquis and the baroness are not. Noblesse oblige is binding on them only in their dealings with their own caste. Meanwhile they are people of delightful manners, of exquisite taste; and M. Sandeau, who all the time intends to frustrate their plans, is grateful to them for that, as are his readers. The people who are historically in the wrong are often romantically in the right. Wit- ix Jules Sandeau ness the Cavalier - and - Roundhead romances of England. Writing at a period somewhat later than that in which he laid the action of his story, Sandeau was able to give it a touch of social prophecy. Inter- preting backward, he reached conclusions which since have come markedly true, in France and Eng- land especially. The wily old lawyer, keeping fiis ancient enemy, the marquis, squirming on the burn- ing needle of his sharp tongue, advised him to seek security from harm in an alliance with the people; and this drawing together of bourgeoisie and nobility has been taking place ever since, especially for finan- cial reasons. These are, it appears to me, the secondary causes of the survival of Mademoiselle de la Seigliere; it is a socio-historical document. The primary cause, the more important one, lies on the surface; it is the same as that discernible in all enduring successes in fiction. This is a capital story, skilfully planned, and told with engrossing spontaneity, the result of the polished art it hides. Its plot is taken from the more salient minor incidents of the restoration of the Bourbons, entwined with the recurrent consequences of the great upheaval, from the taking of the Bas- tille to the retreat from Moscow; its characters and incidents are results of all that momentous quarter century. But underlying it all, and dominating it. Jules Sandeau is the eternal, world-wide human motive of the way of love with a man and a maid, which never loses its charm. Mademoiselle de la Seigliere is, above all else, a romance of delightful simplicity and purity of thought. Sandeau had suffered early in life at the hands of the wonderful woman of genius who is represented with him in this series a little posthumous irony of fate. His later existence, subdued, uneventful, emo- tionless, indicates that the fragrant blossom of youth, its crown and glory, was killed in his breast, never to flower again, by that short, stormy, wretched con- nection with Mme. Dudevant. But, though the poetry of love was killed in his heart by that early experience, Sandeau kept his ideals alive and sacred in his bosom. What he himself had missed he would give to others, in all its beauty, if only in fiction. Disillusionment had not embittered him; he treas- ured the delicate flower of romance to the end. Hence the freshness of the charm of the nascent love between Helene de la Seigliere and the returned sol- dier-son of the peasant in this story; hence its firm grasp upon the sympathies of the reader; hence also, perhaps, by inevitable reaction, its tragic ending. The workmanship of an author is judged by his characters, his plots, and his style, the relative im- portance of these three components varying accord- ing to the inclination of each individual reader. xi Jules Sandeau Character in fiction is the result of imagination based upon observation, and, in its best presentation, upon unerring intuition; plot is the outcome of observa- tion plus inventiveness; style, of taste plus applica- tion. And all three are conditioned, of course, by talent Sandeau repeats himself time and again in his plots and characters. He had, aw fond, but one story to tell, but one set of characters to employ, and he scrupled not to borrow upon occasion a whole pas- sage from one of his earlier works for use in its suc- cessors. His inventiveness was apparently of thin texture; his critics aver that he was simply incurably indolent. It is certain that, whether from an uncon- querable unwillingness to stir his imagination into activity or from a lack of resource, he became a spe- cialist, so to speak, in one single phase of the chang- ing life of the French Restoration. Most artists of the second rank have this tend- ency to use time and again the material that has erved them well; some cling to the situations and characters of a first success; others develop them from stage to stage until perfection is reached in an ultimate production. Sandeau did neither. Made- moiselle de la Seigliere was neither his first story nor his last. With him the fulness of fruition came after a few preliminary attempts. He gave in this book all that he had to give of his observation, his im- zti Jules Sandeau agination, and his inventiveness at their best, and he wrought surpassingly well. He was not incapable, on the other hand, of tak- ing infinite pains with his style. Indeed, on occasion he had too much style; he worked over it too assidu- ously, too anxiously, maugre his reputed indolence. He polished and refined until the result was artifi- ciality rather than art. This sin of commission is, however, hardly discernible in Mademoiselle de la Seigliere. To be sure, we find in it such flights as " les hotes de nos bois," when game is meant; the fact that it is midnight is classically announced thus: " La journee touchait a sa fin; les deux aiguilles de la pendule etaient pres de se joindre sur 1'email de la douzieme heure," but these are imperceptible blem- ishes in a tale that is distinguished throughout by good taste and direct simplicity of narrative. The occurrence of a few survivals of the stilted French literary classicism in the story is worth noting only because Sandeau began life as a follower of Victor Hugo, an enthusiastic romanticist, a rebel of the rebels against the shackles of tradition. He certainly was a master of landscape. The smiling, lowly beauty of Le Limousin, La Marche, and Berry, the more rugged grandeur of Bretagne, La Vendee, and Le Bocage, found in him a painter in words of admirable simplicity. He loved nature and understood her. Therefore he eschews grandilo- xiii Jules Sandeau quent phrases and flamboyant adjectives; her har- monies are reflected in his work. He was, if I may be allowed to coin the expression, an impressionist with an etcher's needle. The opening pages of this book will illustrate my meaning. The popularity of Mademoiselle de la Seigliere as a novel led Sandeau to cast it in dramatic form. The result justified him. Produced on the Paris stage in 1851, the play achieved instant success. It was a good play in its day, old-fashioned now, as all but the greatest work must become in the course of time; but it had a more enduring result in Sandeau's collaboration with Augier on Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier, produced in 1854, which is and will remain one of the great comedies of the French stage in the nineteenth century. It but sounds another change upon the subject which Sandeau had explored in all its bearings and understood to perfection. Hence its merits, which brought it, besides fame and popu- larity, the sincerest form of flattery in liberal meas- ure. Many have been the Poiriers on the French stage since its appearance, and in French fiction, too. Strange to say, its very excellence has led many students to the conclusion that Sandeau's famous collaborator was chiefly responsible for its writing, a conclusion that cannot be seriously maintained if the evidence be well weighed. For the Marquis de Presle, M. Poirier, the plot, the alliance with the rich xiv Jules Sandeau bourgeoisie sought by the nobility for its own preser- vation, the flattered willingness of the middle class thus to ally itself with the great all this is San- deau's own, the ripe fruit of his observation, the re- sult of his lifelong study of his own little corner of the world around him. Whoever reads his books carefully, and then the play, can reach no other con- clusion. The striking harmony, moreover, of the dialogue with plot and characters suggests that at least a goodly portion of that, too, must have been his work. Augier was a gifted dramatist, sure of his place in the literature of the stage. It can do no injustice to his reputation to assume, on the strength of this inner evidence, that in the case of Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier his work was confined to the technical arrangement, the masterly presentation of the brilliant material contributed by his collaborator to the common fund. Sandeau was born at Aubusson on February 19, 1811, and destined for the bar by his family. He began his legal studies in Paris, but soon fell under the influence of the romanticist movement in letters, then at its height, its general Bohemian tendency, however, being probably a greater attraction to him than its purely literary purposes. If he was ready to follow Gautier's red waistcoat into the thick of the fray over Ernani, he was even readier to take his xv Jules Sandeau share in the glorious, inspiring pastime of despising and shocking the Philistines, to revel in noises by night, and to sing under their windows songs ob- noxious and insulting to the probity and peaceful respectability of the worthy tradesmen of the Quar- tier. His subsequent career indicates, nevertheless, that the literary side of the revolt was not without its influence upon him. About this time in 1830 Sandeau met Mme. Dudevant at Coudray, near La Chatre, at the house of friends. A mutual attraction was the immediate result, and when she left home it was to join him in Paris. They collaborated on work for the news- papers, and in the production of a first novel, Rose et Blanche, signed " Jules Sand," which became the foundation of the famous pen-name which Mme. Dudevant adopted. It was all she retained of their two years' unhappy union, whose dispiriting influ- ence upon Sandeau endured to the last. He was her debut, merely the first episode in her eventful ca- reer; she was the beginning and the end of his emo- tional life, its birth and grave. There were, of course, two sides to the question. There always are in affairs of this kind. There were two sides to the Musset episode, and the Chopin trag- edy. We all have read Elle et Lui and Lui et Elle; many of us are aware of the existence of Chopin's little allegory of the White Blackbird; but Sandeau's xvi Jules Sandeau contribution to this surprising literature of the emo- tional life of George Sand is practically forgotten. And yet Marianna is well worth reading for its por- trait of that woman of genius; it is in the fullest sense what in these later days of objective and subjective mental inquiry we have come to call a " psycholog- icarstudy " and a "human document"; and it con- tains some rememberable pen pictures of the outward woman as she appeared to him in the days of her youth. George Sand told the whole story one night, to- wards the end of her days, to Balzac, who came to visit her at Nohant; Balzac told it to Mme. Hanska in one of his later letters; and the Vicomte Spoel- bergh de Louvenjoul gave it to the world in his edi- tion of these epistles, published a few years ago. Sandeau was indolent, no doubt; he would not help himself, and he was too downright lazy to let others help him. It was misery for her, no better than that which she had left behind her under the conjugal roof. Yet it takes two to make a quarrel, and Au- rore Dudevant was not for nothing a grand-daughter of Maurice de Saxe. I certainly doubt if it was quite so much a case of the eagle and the crow as it has been represented to be: Sandeau's mental inferiority to her can hardly have been so striking as all that. The trace of the Ouartier Latin was still over his mind and his habits when they met and loved; and, xvii Jules Sandeau for an indolent man, he certainly achieved a respect- able amount of work. Their rupture sent him to Italy, whence he re- turned in 1834, to make Paris thenceforth his home. He was made conservator of the Mazarin Library in 1853, elected to the Academic Franchise in 1858, and appointed librarian at the Palace of St. Cloud in 1859, a sinecure which gave him the means and the leisure to devote himself undisturbed to his literary labours. Napoleon III often rendered such services to art and letters, mostly at the prompting of Morny. Sandeau died on April 24, 1883. His place and significance in the romantic move- ment of his time are, perhaps, negative rather than positive. That movement began, in France as in England, with mediaeval history in fiction. Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris was its notable first result; but at the same time Stendhal saw the value of the pres- ent, of the Restoration, as material for fictional study. Sandeau followed him in this choice of sub- ject, but whereas Le Rouge et le Noir is of less value to us as a novel than as a study of the earlier emer- gence of the " struggler for life," whom Daudet was to take up at a later date, and even as a revelation of Nietzsche's Uebennensch long before the German philosopher preached his coming, an unavoidable re- sult of the new order of things evolved out of the chaos of the Revolution, Sandeau believed, and the xviii Jules Sandeau faith that was in him endures to this day, that in a novel the story, the romance, is of paramount im- portance. It is curious to observe, by the way, that in the closing days of her career George Sand was converted to this faith, in such books as Le Marquis de Vilkmer and han de la Roche, stories told for their own sake, and for the simple pleasure they gave their readers. Romance with a significant historical back- ground, this was what Sandeau gave to the world, his view-point being that of the social student more than of the social psychologist. Though the romantic movement claims him chronologically, it is perhaps best, after all, to set him apart from it as a simple teller of tales. The later evolutions in French fic- tion moved him not; neither the realism of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, nor the archaeological erudition of his Salammbo, affected him; he saw the rise of natu- ralism in the Goncourts and Zola without swerving from his path; the third empire he left to his suc- cessors, notably to Daudet. And here ends the list of his contemporaries, for Bourget is of a later gen- eration. Mademoiselle de la Seigliere is all that the world has cared to preserve of his fiction, but to that it clings with real affection. A brilliant picture of a period in the development of modern social life in France, the book owes its charm, in the last analysis, xix Jules Sandeau to its happy combination of what is merely local and temporary with the universal romance of the youth of mankind, which, repeating itself from generation to generation, remains ever new and ever fresh, in fiction as in life. RICHARD MANSFIELD. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE JULES SANDEAU, whose baptismal names were Leonard Sylvain Jules, was born at Aubusson, in the Creuse, on the ipth of February, 1811. He was sent to Paris to study for the law, but during his holidays in the year 1830 he went over to Nohant, and met George Sand (Madame Dudevant), who formed an intimate friendship with him and afterward accompanied him to Paris. It was she who first encouraged Sandeau to occupy himself with literature, and she collaborated with him in his first novel, " Rose et Blanche/' 1831. This intimacy soon came to an end, and in later life the two novelists met at a publisher's without recognising each other. Sandeau did not imme- diately pursue the path of novel-writing, but in 1834 he 'published " Madame de Sommerville." His steady activ- ity, however, began in 1839, with the issue of " Mari- anna " ; this was followed by " Le Docteur Herbeau " in 1841, " Fernand" in 1844, "Catherine" in 1845, " Va- lor euse" in 1846, and in 1848 what is Sandeau' s best romance, " Mademoiselle de la Seigliere" Sandeau never. took any part in politics, but he acquiesced in the Empire. He now turned his attention to the stage, collaborating* romanticist as he was, with the typical enemy of Romanti- cism, mile Augier (1820-1899). They wrote three xxi Biographical Note plays together, the first of which, " La Chasse au Roman" 18^1, is not remarkable; the other two, "La Pierre de Touche " (1854) ana " Le Gcndre de Monsieur Poirier " (1854), are admirable comedies. Augier, however, hav- ing made this experiment, determined in future to return to his own sphere of sarcasm and good sense. In 1853 Sandeau was appointed keeper of the Masarin Library in Paris, from which he was transferred in 1859 to the Imperial Library at St. Cloud, a post which he held until 1871, when he retired on a pension. The later novels of Sandeau were " Madelaine" (1848}; " Un Heritage" (1850); " Sacs et Parchemins " (1851); " La Maison de Penarvan" (1858}; " Un Debut dans la Magistrature " (1862) ; "La Roche aux Mouettes" (1871); and "Do Thommeray" (1873). Sandeau died on the 24th o/j April, 1883. E. G. xxii CONTENTS FACBS Jules Sandeau ......... v xx Richard Mansfeld Life of Jules Sandeau ...... xxi xxii Edmund Gasst Mile, de la Seigliere I ~3O7 The Portraits of Jules Sandeau. . . 309-317 Octavt Uzanne xxiii MADEMOISELLE DE LA SEIGLlfeRE CHAPTER I SHOULD it ever happen, in passing through Poi- tiers, that one of the thousand little accidents that make up human life compelled you to sojourn an entire day in that city, where, as I suppose, you have neither relations, nor friends, nor any interest that appeals to you, you would infallibly be overtaken at the end of an hour or two by the sad and profound ennui that envelops the province like an atmosphere, and is exhaled more particularly by the capital of Poitou. Throughout the entire kingdom I know no other place, save Bourges perhaps, where this invisible fluid, a thousand times more fatal than the mistral or the sirocco, is so penetrating, and so subtle in- filtrating one's entire being in the most sudden and unexpected manner. At Bourges, moreover, to ex- orcise the scourge, you can make pilgrimage to one of the finest cathedrals ever erected by art and by the Catholic faith. There you will find enough to fill you with admiration for a week or more, without 3 Mademoiselle de la Seigliere counting the Hotel de Jacques Coeur, another mar- vel, where as a further distraction you can meditate at your leisure on the ingratitude of kings. In short, along these deserted streets, where the grass grows between the paving-stones in front of those vast hotels, sadly retired within their silent courts, that ennui will soon, and all unconsciously, assume a character of melancholy that is not without its charm. Bourges offers the poetry of the cloister; Poitiers is a tomb. Should, therefore, some malevolent genius, some untoward fate, despite my heartfelt vows to Heaven on your behalf, arrest your steps within these sombre walls, it will be well for you to quit them hastily. The open country is within a step; the environs, though not picturesque, have a fresh and smiling aspect. Go to the banks of the Clain. The Clain is a tiny river to which the Vienne yields the honour of watering the capital of its department. The Clain is not for that more turbulent or more proud. Equable in its moods, modest in its ways, it is a de- corous brook, with no affectation of pretensions on passing at the foot of a royal court, an episcopal pal- ace, and a prefecture. If you pursue the path, walk- ing up-stream, after a couple of hours you will come upon a valley moulded by the circular expansion of two hills, between which the Clain has carved its bed. Imagine two verdant amphitheatres, uplifted 4 Mademoiselle de la Seigliere face to face, and separated by the river that reflects them both. An ancient bridge, with arches set with moss and maiden-hair, is thrown across from shore