Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/centuryoffrenchfOOwellrich A Century of French Fiction A CENTURY OF FRENCH FICTION BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. (Harv.) PROFESSOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1898 REESB Copyright, 1898, By Dodd, Mead and Company. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. V1/4f Preface THIS book is a study of novels, not of novelists. It seeks to show the development of what has come to be the chief genre in the most artistic of European literatures. The limitations that this pur- pose involves are obvious. Biography belongs here only in so far as heredity or environment influence those qualities in an author by which he in turn influ- ences the development of fiction. With some novel- ists, such as George Sand, these are very significant ; with others, such as Daudet, they are hardly signifi- cant at all. The poems, dramas, or essays of novelists are usually passed in silence, though they may be, as with Sainte-Beuve, the chief title to literary distinction. And in regard to the novels themselves, this book is less concerned with what is done than with how it is done ; it seeks, not to retell a story, but to convey an artistic impression, and in the space that it accords to the 115 novelists and 688 novels or short stories that it names it is less influenced by an author's popularity than by the excellence or novelty of his technic, his style, or his ideas of the functions, ethical, social, phil- osophical, or artistic, of the novel. Many writers are little read who have been studied by those who are read much. The former have more interest to us 102929 vi Preface than the latter, Stendhal more than Ohnet, the Gon- courts than Bourget, while writers who offer only clever reflections of the innovating ideas of others are from our point of view of no interest at all. I men- tion that I may not seem to have forgotten, but, fol- lowing Dante's counsel, I " look and pass." If, then, I have given more space to Loti or to Chateaubriand than to Hugo it is because I think them as novelists more significant than he, though their fiction be less read and less entertaining. If more than a quarter of my book is given to Balzac it is because I think that is his proportionate due. To eight others I have accorded separate studies. The remaining io6 are grouped according to the circum- stances of their birth and education, for, as I have come to see in the course of this study, there is a con- nection worth noting between the political condition of France and the gestation of her men of genius, a certain family resemblance among the sons of the First Empire, as among those of the Restoration, of the Bourgeois Monarchy and of the Second Empire. Of course, as in every large family, there are eccen- trics that bear no marked likeness to their brothers, but I trust this arrangement of heterogeneous mate- rials will prove the most helpful and perspicuous. As my book is intended for English readers I have translated all titles of novels, and where there seemed any possibility of misunderstanding I have added the title in its original French form, under which alone it appears in the Index. I have read, so far as was ne- cessary to my purpose, every novel mentioned n this Preface Vll book. I have taken notes of my impressions. I have also read such criticism of these works as was acces- sible to me, both in French and English, note-book in hand. My ideas have often been clarified or crystal- lized, my point of view occasionally modified by what I have read, but to acknowledge such debts in detail, were it possible, would be misleading, for, if I seem in any case to echo the opinion of another, it is because I have been led by independent study to share it. What I have taken consciously from others is quoted by name if the citation is exact, indefinitely if the form is altered or the thought modified. Two years ago I published a book on Modern French Literature, which involved brief mention of the present subject. That phrases of the earher volume should occasionally recur in this is perhaps inevitable. The two books are, however, distinct in purpose and in method. Chapter VIII. and portions of Chapter I. have appeared in " The Sewanee Review." The origins of fiction in France, and its history till the French Revolution, I hope to treat in another volume, for which all materials are well in hand. I desire in conclusion to extend my thanks to the officers of the Boston Public Library, whose untiring courtesy has made this book a possibility, while pro- viding for the author the pleasantest and the most profitable of his studious hours. BENJAMIN W. WELLS. University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn. Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. Fiction under Bonaparte i II. The Novels of Stendhal 30 III. The Fiction of the Romantic School . . 44 >^ IV. Alexandre Dumas and the Napoleonic Gen- eration 68'~' V. The Development of Balzac 88 **" VI. The Maturity of Balzac 130 VII. The Genius of Balzac ....... 165 ""*■ VIII. Prosper Merimee 187 IX. Theophile Gautier 203 — X. George Sand .... ..... 219 XI. GusTAVE Flaubert . 242 — XII. The Generation of the Restoration . . 262 4— XIII. Emile Zola 283^- XIV. Alphonse Daudet 305 XV. The Generation of Louis Philippe . . . 326 XVI. Guy de Maupassant. ....... 348^7* XVII. The Generation of the Second Empire . . 362 INDEX 385 A Century of French Fiction CHAPTER I FICTION UNDER BONAPARTE THE nineteenth century is pre-eminently the age of the novel. What Voltaire could call the work of one writing with facility things unworthy to be read by serious minds has become so predominant in France as almost to absorb in popular literary consciousness all forms of imagi- native writing except the dram'a. This tendency, manifest at the outset of the century, has been accentuated by the spread of superficial culture, the cheapening in the cost of production of books, and the readier means of diffusion by post and railway. The French newspapers, too, by their feuilletons have added greatly to the production of fiction, though they have tended to lower its literary standard. But more important perhaps than any of these factors is that with the first year of our century fiction begins to reflect popular emotions and states of mind. The novel of the romantic school was to be lyric in its style, personal in its appeal. Herein lies the cardinal importance of Chateaubriand. The century in fiction opens with the publication of his Atala in 1801, followed in 1802 by Rene^ both short stories I 2 A Century of French Fiction but of far-reaching influence and most characteristic of the mood of the next generation and of this author, who was its most eloquent representative. He was a Breton noble, born at St. Malo, " within hearing of the waves " as he liked to say, on the fourth of September, 1768, the birth-year of Napoleon, to whom he was also wont to take this occasion to compare himself. Neither mother nor father seems to have been a wise or genial parent, and his chief if not his only childish affection was for a sister, Lucile, a frail, ner- vous invalid, who died young. The relation was certainly morbid, and later in his life Chauteaubriand was pleased to surround it with a sort of incestuous halo that he might ex- plain by this aberration of youth the fascinating indifference that characterised his own relations to women in after years and found their fullest expression in his Ren^, the most strongly marked character, in a sense we may say the only character, of his fiction. He was himself an intense and somewhat morbid youth. He passed his childhood in an ultra-Catholic environment, listening to the strange legends of the childlike Breton peo- ple or nursing meditation by the boundless and mysterious ocean. As a boy he went to various schools, but all within the Breton spell, and then to the gloomy ancestral castle of Combourg ; no wonder that his twentieth year found him untaught, timid, eager, and gloomy, above all dissatisfied with all that life gave or promised. He was suffering already from that maladie du Steele of which it is impossible not to speak at some length in judging Chateaubriand, but which we shall perhaps treat more profitably if we first trace the course of his life until, with the fall of Napoleon, the man of letters was absorbed in the politician. He tried to go to sea and got actually as far as Brest ; he contemplated Fiction under Bonaparte 3 suicide ; then his friends got him a position in the army, and on the eve of the Revolution the young man found himself transported from the solitude of ocean and forest, from the most backward province of France, to Paris, the focus of the intellectual and political world. The effect, as was natural, was immediate and strong. Its literary significance, however, lies in the strength of the reaction that followed and in the literary stimulus that his associations gave him. He learned to know most of the chief writers of the time, Parny the poet. La Harpe the critic, the two Ch^niers, Chamfort the acute philosopher, and most important of all to him, Fontanes, who was the discoverer of his genius, his unswerving friend, and always a shrewd adviser. He began intense though unsystematic studies. Ignorant at twenty, his Essay on Revolutions (1797) published at twenty-nine shows a remarkable mass of information, which indeed was never fully assimilated. But acquaintance with the great writings of the century aroused in him, as greatness always did, mingled admiration and envy. Could he not, he seems to have said to himself, catch the imagination of Rousseau and use it to controvert his ideas and so to destroy his ascendency ? Could he not eclipse Bernardin de St. Pierre by borrowing his style and making it the bearer of sturdier thought? There remained Voltaire, whose wit he could not borrow. Against him and his ideas he would wage a moral war, and win for himself the mantle of Bossuet. Such seem to have been the lit- erary impulses that he gathered from four intoxicating years. Then in 1791 as the clouds of revolution thickened he set sail for America, where he had a commission to search for the Northwest Passage, obviously a mere pretext. He travelled more or less widely in the United States, met 4 A Century of French Fiction Washington, and, according to his own account, which is never above suspicion, saw Labrador and the Great Lakes, the prairies of what was then Louisiana, and the semi-trop- cal forests of Spanish Florida. Here he might observe the ** state of nature " as Rousseau had dreamed and Bernardin described it. Here the morbid imagination of his youth was vivified by contact with a primeval world and untutored man. He was gone but a year and landed again in France in January, 1792, but that year gave him the scene and the direct inspiration for the greater part of his fiction and the indirect inspiration for the rest. The execution of Louis XVL made Chateaubriand an emigre ; he was wounded in the expedition against Thion- ville, went to England in 1793, and remained there till 1800. It was during this period of exiled poverty that he wrote The Natchez J a. huge manuscript of 2,383 folio pages, in which he strove to involve his impressions of America and of life. Of this far the greater part was not printed till 1826, but it served as a sort of storehouse from which he drew successively A fa/a (1801), I^ene (1802), and con- siderable p^s of the Genius of Christianity (1802). This last lies outside our immediate field. Chateaubriand's other contributions to fiction are The Martyrs (les Mar- tyrs, 1809), and The Last Abencerage (Aventure du dernier Abenc^rage, 1826), written about the same time. To these last works he brought the added experience of two years of official life at Rome, but he seems to have wel- comed the murder of the Duke d'^Snghien as an excuse for jesuming a haughty opposition to Napoleon, " who," as he somewhat fatuously assures us, " made the world tremble, but me never." Yet these works were not the immediate result of those years, but of what he called a Journey from Fiction under Bonaparte Paris to Jerusalem (1811), a trip undertaken partly to gather materials for The Martyrs, partly at the suggestion of a lady who was not quite ready to yield to his seductive morgue and who met him, on his return, in the Alhambra, where for some years their names could be deciphered together. The intermingling of sensuahty and religious sentiment is as constant in Chateaubriand as it was in Bernardin and Rousseau. Thus much of the life of Chateaubriand is necessary to any understanding of the ethical purport of his novels. Atala claims to be a story told at the close of the seven- teenth century to a melancholy young Frenchman, Ren^, in whom the author intends that we shall see himself. It is narrated by the old Indian Chactas, who has been in France in the grand Steele ^ has talked with F^nelon, Hstened to Bossuet and to Ninon, seen the tragedies of Racine, and acquired enough of civilization to combine an (Homeric simplicity of picturesque imagery with the dainty refine- ments of the Hotel Rambouillet. | All of which is ridiculous enough, but it serves Chateaubriand's purpose, which is to bring civilization and the "state of nature" into more effective contrast than Rousseau or Bernardin had done. For Chactas, knowing the best that culture has to offer, deliberately prefers the wilderness, as does Ren^ himself, and, as Chateaubriand gives us to understand, he would do also were it not that a weary condescending charity forbids him to deprive society of his presence. Both Chactas and Ren6 have had experiences somewhat similar to that of Chateaubriand and Lucile. Ren^ loves his sister, Chactas a young Indian girl who has sworn perpetual virginity. He is a captive among her nation. She saves him, and to save herself they are forced to fly together. The soUtary jour- 6 A Century of French Fiction ney of the young lovers, for she returns his affection though guarding her vow, is described with a lingering dalliance that some take for sentiniental purity and others for lurking lubricity. As Joubert said, the passions here are " covered with long white veils." However, the pair come at last to the mission station of Father Aubry, the counterpart of Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar and Bernardin's Solitary Walker. There Atala, who " had extreme sensitiveness joined to pro- found melancholy," presently died of the disease that poets call unrequited love, martyr to a romantic and therefore false conception of duty. But while this might detract now from the interest of the story, it added greatly to its charm in 1800, in a generation already predisposed to that maladie du Steele of which Chateaubriand was in part the first tal- ented exponent and in part the cause. This is even more clearly the central point of the interest oi Rene, a second fragment detached from the Genius of Christianity in 1807, probably because its author felt that it would appeal to many who did not fancy the religious dilettantism of the latter work, and would offend perhaps some that the other attracted. The hero of this tale, as the name implies, is the person to whom Atala had been related, namely Chateaubriand himself, as he aspired to be or to be thought at twenty-three. He is a young Werther, full of discouraged world-pain, such as was forced on many men of genius, first by the revolt against the dry rot of eighteenth-century philosophy, then by the lie direct given to the Utopian dreams of the reformers by the bloody satur- nalia of the Revolution. Where men a decade before had felt full of hope and strength, they felt now, at least those of more delicate organization, for it is they alone who had literary genius at this time, helpless and hopeless. From Fiction under Bonaparte this resulted an anxious introspection and an eager utter- ance of egoism that had begun with Rousseau and cul- minated in Chateaubriand and in Byron. Chateaubriand and all the victims of the maladie du siecle are prisoned in themselves. All their invention consists of creating a new environment for their individuality. Hence the growing predominance in fiction of local colour. As Brunetiere says, " wherever the poet may set up the scenery of his work he is and remains its centre." Doubtless other agencies contributed to evoke this state of mind in Chateaubriand and in those who read RenS with eager enthusiasm. Among these it is probably safe to reckon the new cosmopolitanism that had inoculated the literature of France with a virus from the North contrary to its nature and so for the moment toxic. The interest in foreign literatures, the knowledge of English and German masterpieces through translations, which grew more frequent in this generation, troubled as it were the equilibrium of the French genius. Speaking of a period a little later, and of the novel Obermann, George Sand says : " Ambitions took on a character of feverish intensity, minds over- wrought by immense labours were suddenly tried by great fatigues and piercing agonies. All the springs of personal interest, all the forces of egoism, extremely developed under great tension, gave birth to unknown ills for which psychol- ogy had as yet assigned no place in its annals." Of this malady all sensitively organized natures seem to have felt more or less since the days of VVerther and Saint- Preux. Goethe threw oif the disease and attained an Olympian calm, Rousseau became mentally deranged, Bernardin was saved from it by his fatuity, Chateaubriand wrapped himself in egoistic indifference, and in Rene, or the Effect of the 8 A Century of French Fiction Passigns he has given us the most noted French exposition of this state of soul. It is this that made him the father of romanticism. The moral influence of Rene was almost wholly evil and obviously so, yet it was so great and the little tale so sums and characterises the morbid virus of romanticism that it is well to let Ren^ tell his story, as far as may be in his own words as he sits by the banks of the Mississippi, re- garding the world with indifference and his wife and child near by with a weary ennui of which we may read particu- lars in The Natchez quite worthy to rank with the rankest " flowers of evil " of Baudelaire. Ren6 is a character for whom it is hard to feel respect or patience, a man of brilliant genius who becomes the spendthrift of his talent through a complete lack of even a rudimentary sense of social duty or self-control. He has an utter lack of will, being indeed a monstrosity of egoism, very like in this to Chateaubriand, so self-absorbed that nothing outside himself seems worth desire or contempla- tion. Chateaubriand has told us that " people wearied him by dint of loving him," and it was with a somewhat simi- lar condescension to the solicitations of his friends that Ren^ at last consented to tell them " not the adventures of his life, for he had experienced none, but the secret senti- ments of his soul," of which those of his kind were always replete to nausea. He describes himself at the outset, very justly, as " a young man without force or virtue, who finds in himself his own torment, and has hardly any evils to bemoan save those that he had himself caused." We know that Chateaubriand was uncongenial to his parents. Ren6 too has no sympathies in childhood, but it is because he has cost his mother her life and his father has died Fiction under Bonaparte while he was still young. As Chateaubriand owed what he was pleased to imagine his conversion to the emotions attending the death of his mother and sister, so Ren6 receives from his father's death his first presentiment of immortality. The effect of religion, so called, on character was about equally absent in both cases. Chateaubriand could not describe that of which he knew nothing. His character never attained an adult development. It was neither Christian nor pagan, but hermaphrodite. And so was Rent's. In youth this young hopeful, " used to go apart to contemplate the fugitive clouds or to hear the rain fall on the foliage." Naturally, therefore, when he stood before " the entrance to the deceptive paths of life " he cared to enter on none of them. The monastic life, being the most obviously unnatural and apparently useless, at- tracted him most, but " whether through natural inconstancy or prejudice" he changed his plans and resolved to nurse his melancholy on the relics of antiquity till " he grew weary of searching in these grave-clothes where too often he stirred only a criminal dust." At Paris Ren^ found he was only " belittling his life to bring it to a level with society," in the country he was " fatigued by the repetition of the same scenes and ideas." No wonder that after amusing himself by throwing leaves into a brook he reflects : " See to what a degree of puerility our proud reason can descend." Ren6 had reached this point in his mental and moral degeneration when he began to feel the desire of sharing it with another. His feelings, here too, are a curious perversion of mingled Christianity and paganism. " Oh, God," Ren6 exclaims, " if thou hadst given me a wife after my desire, if as to our first parent so to me thou hadst brought an Eve drawn from lo A Century of French Fiction myself ! Heavenly beauty, I should have prostrated myself before thee, then taking thee in my arms, I should have prayed the eternal to give thee the rest of my life." This is Chateaubriand's ideal of romantic love. As Sainte-Beuve says (" Causeries," ii. 151), *'what he sought in love was less the affection of any particular woman than an occasion of agitation and fantasy ; it was less the per- son that he sought than the regret, the recollection, an eternal dream, the cult of his own youth, the adoration of which he felt himself the object, the renewal or the illusion of a cherished situation." This appears in the relation of Chactas to Atala, it reappears in the Vell^da episode of The MartyrSy and especially in the astonishing later relation that unites Ren6 to C^luta. To this we shall recur pres- ently. For the moment Ren6 finds in the kisses of his sister, Am^lie, the Lucile of fact, the nearest approach to contentment of which his distorted heart was capable. *' In this delirious state," he says, " I almost came to desire to feel some evil, that I might have at least a real object of pain." His sister shares his feelings, but, with more per- spicacity and decision than Chateaubriand would have thought sympathetic in his blas^ hero, she takes refuge in a convent. She writes to him, painting to him the charms of matrimony with a quivering pen that almost betrays itself at the close. But her separation from her brother is only for a time, the same cradle held them in childhood and the same tomb shall soon unite their warm dust. " If I snatch myself from you in time it is only that I may be joined to you in eternity." Meantime she makes the sensible prop- osition that he should adopt some profession, a suggestion that he must have received with a languid smile. He visits the convent as Amdlie is making her monastic profession, Fiction under Bonaparte ii and hears her ejaculate beneath her shroud : " God of mercy, grant that 1 may never rise from the funeral couch, and crown with thy blessings a brother who has not shared my criminal passion." Ren4 now resolves to abandon civilisation, but while waiting for his ship he " wanders constantly around the monastery," reflecting that " here religion lulls the sensi- tive soul in sweet deception. For the fiercest loves she substitutes a sort of chaste glow in which the virgin and the lover are fused in one." But Am^lie finally died, very much as Atala had done, and Ren^ seems to have thought it proper to spend the rest of his life in diffusing a general atmosphere of unhappiness around him. Of this we learn chiefly from The Natchez. The Natchez, it may be explained, are a tribe of Indians, now extinct, into which Rene has been adopted. This has compelled him to take a wife, C^luta, from among them, but nothing could compel him to act like a Christian or even like a gentleman to her or to their child. Such a conversion as Chateaubriand describes his own to have been implies far less depth of heart than shallowness of mind. " I became a Christian," he says in his preface to the Genius ; " I did not yield, I confess, to any great super- natural illumination ; my conviction came from my heart ; I wept and I believed." So it was with Rene, and, as Sainte-Beuve says, his letter to the wife he has abandoned, dated " from the Desert on the thirty-second snow of my existence," is on this subject the confession of the author's own heart. He tells this mother of his daughter that he does not love her, that he has never loved her, that she does not and cannot understand a heart "whence issue flames that lack aliment, that would devour creation and 12 A Century of French Fiction yet be unsatisfied, that would devour thee thyself." When he is gone, he tells her, she may marry, but he adds in the next paragraph that he knows she will not, " for who could environ you with that flame that I bear with me even though I do not love." Of course this is the height of fatuousness, but more than one woman seems to have loved Chateaubriand's disdain, though he certainly would not have classed liis own spouse with the gentle C^luta. As for Ren6 he assures his long-suifering wife that the trials of his life, which seem to us to be mere figments of a morbid fancy, are such that " they might win a man from the mania of life." He would like, he says, ** to em- brace and stab you at the same instant, to fix the happiness in your bosom and to punish myself for having given it to you," precisely as Atala had desired "that divinity might be annihilated, if only pressed in thy arms I might have rolled from abyss to abyss with the debris of God and of the world." Again in another place Ren^ exclaims " Let us mingle sensuous joys with death, and let the vault of heaven hide us as it falls." Sainte-Beuve says that in writ- ing thus Chateaubriand gave passion "a new accent, a new note, fatal, wild, cruel, but singularly poetic. With him there always enters into it a wish, an ardent desire for the destruction and ruin of the world." But this is merely to reproduce a phase of medieval satanism, and if Satanism is poetic our sanity can only protest that that is so much the worse for poetry. Ren^ finds the world so out of joint that " he is virtuous without pleasure and would be criminal without remorse." He wishes he " had never been born or might be for ever forgotten," even by his daughter. " Let Ren^ be for her," he writes to C^luta, " an unknown man whose strange des- Fiction under Bonaparte 13 tiny when told may make her ponder, and know not why. I wish to be in her eyes only what I am, a sad dream." Which after all is merely another way of saying what we knew before, that Chateaubriand preferred to charm the imagination than to win the heart, making even of filial sentiment a subject of self-glorification and vanity. That Chateaubriand's absent hero presently perished in a massa- cre of the Natchez was surely no loss to the world, though C^luta seems to have caught the contagion of his folly and drowned herself at the news of her release. The daughter that Ren^ abandoned was by no means the only progeny of that melancholy hero. Years afterward, Chateaubriand, still posing as an enntiye^ wrote : " If Refie did not exist, I would not write it, and if it were possible to destroy it I would destroy it. A family of Ren^s in poetry and prose has swarmed. We have heard nothing but tear- ful, disjointed phrases.'' " Evidently," comments Sainte- Beuve, with a healthy scorn, *' Ren6 did not wish to have any children," and to judge by the way in which Chateau- briand treats Rousseau and Bernardin, he " would have preferred in literature to have no father." Rene and The Natchez are, then, as melancholy a travesty of Christian feeling as Atala. They are wholly morbid and essentially immoral, but also essentially autobiographic in their psychology. Their charm and their popularity de- pended on their morbidity, which flattered an exceptional state of the public mind, and on their imagination and style. The stories that resulted from his visit to Palestine, The Last Abencerage^ as well as The Martyrs^ may be more briefly dismissed. The former is more plaintively morbid than the American stories, but the situation is the same as in Atala and RenJ^ namely, the conflict of passion with duty, 14 A Century of French Fiction or superstition, or convention. All are elegies of self-torture, of which the chief cause was lack of common-sense. And the same may be said for The Martyrs^ where the two epi- sodes that give it its character as a novel, the unrequited love and suicide of the druidess Vell^da and the unfulfilled loves of the virgin Cymodocee and Eudore, are character- ised by the same teasing sentimental toying with sensuality. The purpose of the narrative, as of Atala^ Rene^ the Aden- cerragesy and The Natchez, but on a broader field than they, is to bring two modes of life or of ethical conception into juxtaposition and contrast. As there it had been the civil- ised and the savage or the Christian and the Moorish, so here it is the epic of rising Christianity and sinking pagan- ism that he sings in rhythmic prose. Indeed The Martyrs is The Genius of Christianity in action. The time is that of Diocletian. The real subject is the contrast between Christian and pagan morality, and, what is more interesting to Chateaubriand, between the ways in which this morality manifests itself in ceremonial and sacrificial worship. For it is much less important to him that the faith he advocates should be true to salvation than that it should furnish occa- sion for esthetic pleasure and pathetic emotions, that it should afford him what he describes in Atala as " the secret and ineffable pleasures of a soul enjoying itself." The va- rious scenes and descriptions are bound together by the tale of the chaste loves of Eudore, the Christian, and Cymo- docee, the descendant of Homer, a priestess and late con- vert. There is also a druidess of less uneasy virtue than Cymodocee, Vell^da, whom passion leads to suicide, for Chateaubriand seems to think no hero or heroine of interest who does not somehow make shipwreck of his life or fortune in some sort of crusade against common-sense. Fiction under Bonaparte 15 The nearest antetype of llie Martyrs is F^nelon's Tele- machus (1699). Like that work it is made the vehicle of much chronology and geography. We are carried from the Netherlands to Greece, from Rome to Egypt, we are introduced to nearly all the prominent characters of the Ante-Nicene church and, by a daring anticipation, to some of the philosophers of the eighteenth century also. But the great fault of the book is its rhythmic style, that hovers be- tween prose and poetry in a way most exasperating to the modern reader. Chateaubriand may have meant to show us " the language of Genesis beside that of the Odyssey." As a matter of fact his invocations to the Muse, his scenes in heaven and hell, and his spice of the marvellous, sup- posed to be necessary to the making of an epic ragout, seem singularly flat to modern taste, while on the other hand it must be admitted that certain passages, especially the Patriotic Cantos (Chants de la patrie) , give us perhaps the high-water mark of Chateaubriand's prose style. It is this art of language that is Chateaubriand's chief title to literary remembrance. His thought was very largely morbid. It is hardly worth while to inquire how far he was sincere or capable of sincerity. In society and in ethics he was 2l poseur, whose fatuous conceit is endurable now only to those who have ceased to take him seriously. But he was an incomparable artist in words. And if he fell sometimes on the side to which he inclined and erred by excess of ornament, his genius was guided, guarded, saved from itself, by critical friends, whose taste he trusted and whose discreet counsels he accepted, much to the gain of his artistic reputation. His remarkable gifts of vivid de- scription and eloquent appeal, thus restrained from too ob- vious excess, produced a style of which the effect can be felt 1 6 A Century of French Fiction throughout the century. Thierry tells us how passages from the Patriotic Cantos in The Martyrs inspired him to write his Merovingian Tales (R^cits des temps m^rovingiens, 1840), and even declares that all the typical thinkers of the first third of the century " had had Chateaubriand at the source of their studies, at their first inspirations." Nisard, too, thought that " the initial inspiration as well as the final impulse of all the durable innovations of the first half of the century in poetry, history, and criticism " were due to him ; to Villemain he was " a renovator of the imagination," and to the cautious Sainte-Beuve " the first, the most original, and the greatest imaginative writer " of his day. The fruits of this stylistic emancipation of individualism may be seen even in our time. Chateaubriand is the essential prelude not only to Thierry, but to Lamartine and Vigny, to the young Hugo, to George Sand, to Michelet, to Flaubert, to Loti, and to many others. It was the example of his dar- ing that taught men to break boldly, perhaps too boldly sometimes, with literary tradition. For he is the source, not of beauties alone, but of those exaggerations of language in pursuit of emotional effect that mar the writing even of such romantic masters as Hugo. There was an affectation of simplicity in Chateaubriand that was the very antithesis of classic restraint, though this last had itself become a mannerism during the eighteenth century. By his anxious striving for originality, his studious discarding of classic my- thology and modes of thought, he invited a reaction from the sixteenth century as well as the seventeenth, from Ron- sard as well as from Racine, and so became the herald of the romantic generation. It has been said that if the style of Paul and Virginia resembles a statue of white marble, that of Chateaubriand Fiction under Bonaparte 17 is a statue of bronze cast by Lysippus. The former is more polished, the latter more brilliantly coloured. Saint- Pierre would choose a well-lighted landscape. Chateaubriand takes for his matter, sky, earth, and hell. The style of the one has a fresher and younger air. That of the other is more ancient, as though it were the style of all time. Saint-Pierre seems to choose what is purest and richest in the language; Chateaubriand takes from all, even from vicious literatures, but he makes them undergo a veritable transformation. Like that famous metal which at the burn- ing of Corinth was formed from the fusion of all others, so the language of Chateaubriand fuses all his thoughts in poetic fire. It may be admitted that the Hmitations of his genius were almost as striking as that genius itself. His imagina- tion gave a wonderful utterance to the feelings of his own and the following generation. It did little or nothing to direct or develop their thought. But yet his novels are a cardinal point in the evolution of the French literary spirit and of French fiction. They mark perhaps the most im- portant date since the renascence. For, as Madame de Stael prepared the way for the romantic school in the realm of thought, philosophy, and criticism, so Chateaubriand became its master in the realm of art and of creative imagination. The only influence comparable to his during the first and second decades of the century was that of Madame de Stael ; and though this influence was exercised on her suc- cessors and a few of her female contemporaries more by her criticism than by her novels, yet Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) mark dates not to be neglected in the story of the development of fiction. 1 8 A Century of French Fiction Madame de Stael was the daughter of the Genevese banker and French finance minister Necker. She was brought up in the midst of a brilliant literary society that included the best of the philosophers of the pre-revolu- tionary generation. Thus as a child she was breathed upon by the spirit of liberty from America, with its indomitable hopefulness and' restless daring, while at the same time she was acquiring the well-bred, sentimentally virtuous, flowery and smiling style of her elders, with their benevolent optimism, their amiable cheerfulness, and their brilliant iconoclasm. There is probably no writer of the Consulate and the Empire in whom these characteristics persist as they do in Madame de Stael. She is an optimist in spite of everything. The Revolution and its horrors, even her own exile, do not shake her militant faith in the constant progress and final perfectability of human society, though perhaps we should attribute this attitude as much to her vigorous physique and virile mind as to any process of ethical reasoning. In 1786 Mademoiselle Necker married the Swedish ambassador Baron de Stael-Holstein, and under the protec- tion of his flag she remained in Paris, not without dabbling in politics, till 1792. The years of the Terror she spent at Coppet near Geneva, but in 1794 she returned to Paris, where both instinct and vanity led her to oppose Napoleon, and she was banished from the capital in 1803. Already she had written Delphifie (1802). Now, in Germany and in Italy, her critical and esthetic faculties received a fuller and more cosmopolitan inspiration, that was reflected in Corinne (1807) and in her famous essay on Germany. She did not return to France till the fall of Napoleon. She was already an invalid, and died in 18 17. Fiction under Bonaparte 19 On her youthful sentimental essays in fiction there is no reason to dwell, nor on her private life and more or less intimate relations with the literary men of her time. What has been said will suffice to suggest what training and what experience she brought to the writing of her novels, and how the chances of her life aided her genius to sow the century, as has been said, with fertile literary ideas. For Corinne and Delphine are the links that bind Rousseau's New Heldise (1761) to Indiana (1832) and the long series of the novels of George Sand. From her youth Rousseau had been an admired model and one of the first objects of her independent criticism. But while the New Heldise fascinated her she confesses, that she drank eagerly of the sentimental outpourings of Madame Riccaboni, and enjoyed the delicate analyses of Madame de Tencin and Madame de Lafayette. She read Miss Burney, too, and dipped into Fielding, but after Rousseau what seems to have interested and inspired her most was Richard- son's Clarissa Harlowe. It will be observed that all these writers have more or less of that moral sentimentality that characterised the reign of Louis XVL ; and in an essay on fiction written in 1795, as well as in the preface to Del- phine, she states frankly, what Rousseau had implied, that to her the novel was " a sort of veiled confession made to those who have lived, as well as to those who have life before them." To her the end of the novel was to reveal us to ourselves by holding the mirror up to our moral nature. Her novels are analytical observations of good society by a member of good society ; and, since it is easier and safer to observe one's self than others, Delphine and Corinne are drawn in large measure from the author's inner hfe. Thus Madame de Stael was the first to give in 20 A Century of French Fiction fiction a fairly complete psychic portrait of a woman. But to this psychologic interest she added a moral purpose. Dreading lest individuality should degenerate to egoism, she imposed herself on those of her own social station as pedagogue and counsellor in her fiction, just as she was wont to do in her conversation. Like Chateaubriand she was an aristocrat, and her novels are distinctly aristocratic. These are stories of serious moral purpose, and in signing them with her distinguished name she contributed very essentially to win for fiction the place beside the drama in France, and above it elsewhere in Europe, that it has maintained during the entire century. By placing the interest, not in intrigue, but in a picture of soul-life that is its own inter- pretation, she gave to the novel a new source of power and a higher place than Rousseau could claim. That she took up and carried on this part of Madame de Stael's work is the peculiar honour of George Sand. In Delphine we are shown what Madame de Stael her- self possessed, a highly accomplished mind and an undis- ciplined heart, "civilised in her accomplishments, almost savage in her qualities," type doubtless of many in this strange generation. But Delphine, choosing to guide her- self by theory rather than by social experience, finds her private life involved in troubles corresponding to those in which like political ideas had involved the French State. The moral of it all is that, for a woman in society, upright- ness and good intentions are not enough. " A man should know how to brave public opinion, a woman how to submit to it," she says. Delphine tries to follow an inner light without regard to the prejudices or the conventions of society, and society finds itself forced to condemn her in its own defence. Fiction under Bonaparte 21 Obviously enough, this novel is the literary precipitate of Madame de Stael's relations with Benjamin Constant, who has given us his ideas on the same subject in Adolphe (18 1 6). At intervals ever since 1794 she had loved, or thought that she loved, that talented man. Her husband had died in 1802, the year of Delphine, and at this very time we find her asking the rather striking question if talent in a woman " has any other purpose than to make one a little more beloved." But though her marriage with Constant was a subject of common talk, neither wished to feel bound, and they parted at last in mutual vexation, "he at not having been instantly accepted, she at not having been forced to consent." Then in Delphine she freed her mind. It was a confession, but, like George Sand's She and He (1859), it was also an apology, and so, natu- rally, the man of Delphine's choice is not given a sympa- thetic part. It was said that in externals he resembled Guibert, an old admirer of Mile. Necker, but in character he had much of Constant's egoistical timidity, and in sacri- ficing his love at last to public opinion he did what she wished men to think Constant had done. She let him be arrested and shot for incivism, and in the first edition she made Delphine cut the knot of existence by suicide ; in the second, however, she borrowed a sentimental touch from Chateaubriand and let her pine away, languishing of un- requited love, a concession to a popular taste vitiated by Atala. Delphifie was distinctly the novel of Madame de Stael's youth. There is in these letters a passion as full-blooded as that of Mile, de Lespinasse. When men criticised, and justly, the details of her style she could reply that style is the colour and movement that language gives to ideas, and 22 A Century of French Fiction that, whatever she might lack, her pages had eloquence, imagination, and feeling. And she was right. Her incor- rectness is that of passionate speech and of an overflowing heart. It seems palpitating with feeling, spoken rather than written. A contemporary critic, Fiev^e, said that Delphine " speaks of love like a bacchante, of God like a Quaker, of death like a grenadier, and of the future like a sophist." Madame de Genlis and others thought the book morally dangerous, but it could be so only to the ignorant, and should have been useful to the experienced, for it helped to clear the air of the artificial sentiment that glorified excess of passion and emotion, and, if we may trust some of the novels of the period, caused women to "weep copiously " quite as often as they ate a full meal. In 1803 Madame de Stael was exiled from Paris, and a change of environment changed the nature of her inspira- tion. She now began the study of German literature, visited the literary lights of Weimar and Berlin, and found in German metaphysicians a good antidote for the French philosophers. Then after a short stay in Switzerland she went in 1804 to Italy, and this roused in her a love for the fine arts, and with it an increasing appreciation of nature. Thus intellectually stimulated she returned to Switzerland, and there wrote Corinne during 1806, in the midst of feverish journeyings that betrayed her longing for the homage of literary Paris. The success of Corinne on its appearance was immediate and universal. Indeed it is the crowning point of her hterary career, for it is here that she gives to her ideals their most complete expression. Corinne, as Ch^nier said, is still Delphine, but perfected, independent, giving freer wing to her faculties, and still doubly inspired, by her talent and by love. This, too, is a Fiction under Bonaparte 23 story of an uncomprehended woman, another link to bind Julie to L^lia. Like Delphine, Corinne presumes on the superiority of her mind and heart to seek emancipation from social conventions, and, like her, she dies a victim to her own glory, which as Madame de Stael pathetically says, is only " the bright shroud of happiness." This novel has several curious points of psychic contact with Madame de Charri^re's Caliste (1794). The heroine, who unites Italian to English blood, has gone to Rome to seek a freer artistic life than English society admits. But it is in vain that she abandons her dignity to her love. She dies a victim to social conventionality. Thus the general scheme of Corinne is almost identical with that of Delphine^ but here the details are better elabo- rated and the art is admirable with which Italy is set off against England, ideal love against smug calculation, na- ture against respectability, passion against cant, the glory of the ideal against material wealth and comfort, the Col- osseum and the Capitol against the Bank and the Four- o'clock tea. To Corinne all thoughts, passions, delights are but ministers of love. Glory, to her, is but a means to love, and if love fail glory has no charm. There is a deep pathos in this conception of woman's genius as the victim of passion, in whom every talent is a new occasion of suffer- ing. And whatever exaggeration there may be in such a conception, it is surely less morbid than the posing pessi- mism of Rend, and a healthier factor in the formation of the romantic school. As her own relations to Constant were the prototype of those of Corinne to Oswald, so the minor characters also were taken from life, but it is clear that her interest centres with ours in the heroine alone. For, though she admits at times 24 A Century of French Fiction historical or moral digressions, even the scenery is treated by her, not, as by Bernardin or Chateaubriand, as an object of description for description's sake, but solely for its reflec- tion of, or concord with, the state of soul of her characters. Very curious is the contrast between her treatment of Rome and that of Chateaubriand in the nearly contemporary Mar- tyrs, She is always the emotional thinker, he the conscious artist. But her melancholy, which she shares with Chateau- briand, is only a part of her optimistic idealism. Happiness is always hovering before her and beckoning her on, and it is this that made Corinne for a whole romantic generation the book of generous passion and of ideal love. But it was not by Corinne alone that Madame de Stael acted on the fiction of the immediate predecessors of romanticism and on the masters of that school. By her essays on literature and on Germany she gathered up what was most fruitful in the eighteenth century and passed it on vivified by new esthetic ideals and by a new cosmopolitan spirit. All the Latin literatures, French, Italian, Spanish, had been till then essentially objective, rationalistic, artistic, and often materialistic. She more than any one else intro- duced into French fiction the English and German idealism and individualism. The reawakening of the ego^ heralded by Rousseau and Bernardin, is accomplished in the next generation. That reawakening, that regeneration through the romantic school is in large measure the glory of Madame de Stael. One of the first signs of this reawakening is the increased number of women that seek a literary expression for their feelings. Besides those who belong rather to the closing years of the preceding century, in spirit if not in time, such as Madame de Genlis, Madame de Charri^re, and Madame Fiction under Bonaparte 25 de Souza, there was Madame de Kriidener (i 764-1824), a German from the Baltic, who wandered over the face of Europe and finally died in the Crimea, but who belongs to French literature both by her writings and her associations. For a brief time after Waterloo she played a part in French politics to which, as to her mysticism, it is possible only to allude here. Our interest in her is for her Valerie^ which to the readers of 1803 seemed a French Werther, the worthy rival oi Rene and oiVelphine, and even to-day is not without its charm. Valerie is the first conscious effort to blend the English, French, and German spirits into a cos- mopolitan one. The style throughout is good, remarkable in a foreigner, and there are some bits of description, such as the shawl-dance, that were once regarded as masterpieces. The story as a whole, in spite of some sentimental excesses, deserves to be read still, for its own sake and because it is one of the most interesting of the early utterances of the " misunderstood woman." Following closely in time on the five ladies already named were Pauline de Meulan (i 773-1827) and Madame de Cottin (17 73-1807). The former, who later became Madame Guizot, won more fame for her writings in journal- ism, ethics, and pedagogy than for her novels, in which a sane wit covers a sober observation, that makes The Con- tradictions (les Contradictions, 1 800) or Ayto7i Chapel (la Chapelle d' Ay ton, 1801) pleasant though small oases in the waste of contemporary sentiment. But they are not charac- teristic of their time and met with small success. The vogue of Madame Cottin was much greater, and her Exiles of Siberia (les Exil^es de Sib^rie, 1806) won the praise of imitation from Xavier de Maistre in his Young Siberian 6^/W (la Jeune sib^rienne, 1825). Its vogue passed, how- 26 A Century of French Fiction ever, as rapidly as it rose, and in the next generation Sainte- Beuve tells us that Madame Cottin's books were read only " out of curiosity to learn the emotional moods of our mothers." In 1802 another lady conspicuous in Parisian society, Madame Sophie Gay, conceived the idea of writing Laure d'Estell to show how much she liked Madame de Stael and disliked Madame de Genlis. The mock melancholy of this book was far more in the spirit of the time than in her own, which found its natural voice in Leonie de Montbreuse (18 1 3), an admirable study of the straw-fire of youthful pas- sion, leading to the thoroughly French conclusion that the sure way to happiness for a girl is to marry the choice of her father. During the Restoration and the Orleanist mon- archy Madame Gay wrote a vast number of novels that re- flect so well the taste of their several dates as to call for no notice, and much the same may be said of the novels of her daughter, Delphine Gay (i 804-1855), who became Madame de Girardin and was a voluminous writer of soci- ety novels, of which the best is doubtless The Eyeglass (le Lorgnon, 1831). A more marked individuality is Madame de Duras (17 78-1829), who belonged to the literary generation of the Empire, though she wrote later " with the emotions of great catastrophes behind her," and never quite recovered from the terror that had blighted her youth. So both her Ourika (1823) ^^^ ^^^ tdouard (1825) deal with social inequaUties and prejudices. In the former the heroine is a gentle maid from Senegal, of French nurture and negro blood; in the latter we have an anticipation of George Sand's Miller of Angibault (1845) in the love of plebeian and noblewoman. Through both novels there runs, how- Fiction under Bonaparte 27 ever, as would hardly have been the case a little later, a deep spirit of Christian resignation. Here priests are once more confessors, austere spiritual guides, and the convent is still a refuge for storm-tossed lives. So while these books are marked by the Terror, they are marked also by the Genius of Christianity and by the resigned melancholy of Lamartine's Meditations. Thus her work, though slight, has great interest for the literary psychologist, because, while she represents the best phase of the culture of the Restora- tion, she represents also, as Sainte-Beuve has noted, by her oscillation between passionate revolt and Christian resigna- tion, by her style and by her life, " something of the most touching destinies of the seventeenth century." Many other women there were who sought literary utter- ance at this time, among whom it may be well to note Madame de Montolieu and Madame de Remusat ; but the fact that they wrote is more significant than their writing. Meantime, among men, Senancour and Constant had taken up, each in his way, the melancholy burden of Ren^. Se- nancour is known solely for his Obermann (1804), a novel in letters, that strikes the deepest note of despair and reveals the profoundest pessimism in this disillusioned age. " Ren6 says : * If I could will I could do.' Obermann says : * Why should I will? I cannot.' " This epigram of George Sand exhibits a new phase of despair. No writer had pushed pessimism to such blank negation as Senancour, nor will any writer of the century, save only Vigny, give it more eloquent expression j for these reveries of impotence are conducted with admirable literary skill, in spite of an ap- parent lack of system and co-ordination. Obermann is cast in the form of a novel, but it is rather a series of melancholy reflections on nature and society 28 A Century of French Fiction exactly suited to the morbid sentiment of the romantic generation, so that after a period of comparative neglect the book became exceedingly popular during the days of Charles X. and Louis Philippe, and like feelings have made it again a favourite in our day in a narrow circle of minds too delicately organised to brook our modern life. It should be noted, however, that it is isolated, that it did not translate, as did Rene, the spirit of its time, but rather that of 1830 and of our own day. Another novel stands in isolation at the close of the period we are considering, the Adolphe (18 16) of Benjamin Constant (i 767-1830), which was the literary precipitate of the author's relations with Madame de Stael, as Delphine had been hers. It was the sole novel of this versatile politician, and is a clear, keen, relentless, and realistic analysis of the mutual degradation that results from an ill- assorted union. The story is brief, almost cruelly simple, and told in a style as precise and dry as that of a mathemat- ical demonstration. The feeble egoism of Adolphe may seem contemptibly romantic, but the novel is a faithful piece of psychic auto- biography. Externally the story may be taken from the relation of Chretien de Lamoignon and Madame Lindsay and the author has been gallant enough to dissociate Ellenore from Madame de Stael. But Adolphe is Constant, his father is Constant's father, his former lover is Madame de Charri^re, his officious lady friend is Madame R^camier ; and the best commentaries on this true cameo of romantic psychology are his correspondence, his journals, and indeed all that we know of a life spent, as Sainte-Beuve says, in seeing emotion always without ever attaining to passion. One would not quite do justice to this pre-romantic Fiction under Bonaparte 29 generation if one failed to note that, together with the vociferous despair of Ren^, the voluntary ataxia of Ober- mann and Adolphe, and the hyperaesthesia of Madame de Stael's sentiment, a clear though slender plea for com- mon-sense was raised by Xavier de Maistre (1763-185 2) whose work began with that genial afterglow of eighteenth- century wit, the Journey around my Room (Voyage autour de ma chambre, 1794), and culminated in The Lepers of the city of Aosta (les L^preux de la cit6 d'Aoste, 181 1), though The Young Siberian Girl ( 1 8 1 5 ) and The Prisoners of the Caucasus (les Prisonniers du Caucasse, 1815) have maintained for two generations their eminence as models of vigorous and direct narration. They combine, as does all the fiction of Maistre, an observation and power of description almost as exact as that of Merim^e with a senti- mental affection that suggests Sterne, or perhaps rather Marivaux. Thus he stands apart, not wholly of the eigh- teenth nor of the nineteenth century, and wholly aloof from that romantic school whose fall he lived to see and whose rise we shall presently consider. CHAPTER II THE NOVELS OF STENDHAL HENRI BEYLE, who called himself and is more generally called " Stendhal," took pleasure in pos- ing as an isolated and peculiar nature born out of due time, and though doubtless there was much affectation in his attitude, yet we too must consider him so, though not, indeed, because he languidly affected to detest his family, his parents, his teachers, his native province, and even his fellow-countrymen en masse, and pretended to feel at home only in Italy, where, as he said, " the human plant lives more vigorously than elsewhere, for it is the sole country of art, of poetry, and of love." As a critic, Stendhal was perverse and contradictory. Whatever Frenchmen agreed to admire he assumed to slight, and he chose their greatest aversion for his admira- tion. It was as though in literature and art he had said : " Evil, be thou my good ; and good, my evil." Moli^re had for him no great comic genius, Chateaubriand would be soon forgotten, Hugo's sound and fury signified nothing, Vigny's gloom was silly pessimistic posing. On the other hand, the exiled Emperor was his ideal liberal in govern- ment, and Racine utterly unworthy of comparison with Shakspere. Many of these views have a very considerable element of truth in them. Some seem almost common- place to-day, but during the Restoration, at least in its first decade, they seemed perversely iconoclastic. And the The Novels of Stendhal 31 man himself irritated opposition rather than evoked sym- pathy. Endowed by nature with a most commonplace physique, his efforts to distinguish himself in dress and manner served only to give him the repute of a ridiculous affectation. Thus it happened that his personality was lit- tle esteemed and his writing little admired in his lifetime. Balzac alone seems to have recognized in him a kinship to the analytical side of his own manifold genius. In the next generation Sainte-Beuve ventured to caution Taine, who, in his French Philosophers (Philosophes frangais, 185 7), had pronounced Stendhal " a great romancer, the greatest psychologist of the century." To Sainte-Beuve his novels were "never quite satisfactory, in spite of pretty portions, and take them all together, they were detestable." Gradu- ally, however, as the memory of the man has receded, his works have seemed to draw nearer. He had said himself that he "would be understood about 1880," and curiously enough this date does represent the period when his repu- tation reached its culmination with the rising prominence of the psychological school in fiction, who joined with the naturalists in claiming him as their legitimate ancestor. Bourget, for once, could echo the sentiment of Zola and accept Stendhal as " the father of us all." To understand the unique place of his fiction, it is neces- sary to have in mind both the chief facts of his life and also of his social philosophy. He is the only novelist with whom we shall have to deal who brings to his writing the experience of active participation in the Napoleonic cam- paigns. This alone would tend to give him a place apart, but the experiences of his youth had already segregated him from the common type of his generation. He was born in 1783 and found the influences of the household / 32 A Century of French Fiction in which he passed his childhood so irritating that he was impelled to oppose anything that they seemed to approve. Did his family seem devoted to church and king? Then he would be sceptic and jacobin, would find the reign of Terror mild, and " feel the liveliest joy " at the execution of Louis. The only sincere prayer of thanksgiving that he seems to have uttered was when, on hearing of the death of his aunt, he threw himself on his knees " to thank God for that great deliverance." From the clergy who superintended his early education, and for whom he enter- tained very similar feelings, he was delivered also, some- what later, when in 1 799 he went to Paris, whence in the next year he was enabled to go to join Bonaparte in Italy and to take up the life of action to which he had so long aspired. He tells us that he " was so absorbed in the excess of joy " at this departure that he cannot recall and analyse his feelings, though his character appears delight- fully in a little scene thus recounted by his biographer Rod: — " He faced fire for the first time under the fort of Bard, , . . but all that he could recall afterward was this remark of a captain, whom he had asked, * Are we within range ? * ' Look at the fellow who 's afraid already,' said the old veteran. As there were seven or eight persons present, the remark had its full effect. Beyle exposed himself as much as he could, exhibited his courage without however attract- ing particular observation, and that evening asked himself in all sincerity, * Is this all ? ' This disappointed excla- mation was to escape from him often in the course of his existence, active and filled as it was. There was always a disproportion between events and what he expected of them. To his hunger for emotion, war and love, which The Novels of Stendhal 33 he preferred, remained always beneath his desires, yet he never ceased to seek and to enjoy them. During the Russian campaign by the bivouac fire he used to ask as before the fort of Bard, *Is that all?' This phrase was always the melancholy refrain of his Hfe, the Leitmotiv of his experiences." That Italiaii campaign was, he says, " the best period of his life," and one sees it reflected in the enthusiasm of his posthumous Life of Napoleon (1876), and in his best novel. The Chartreuse of Parma (la Chartreuse de Parme, 1839). This period of active ambition lasted, by his own account, till 181 1, and was succeeded from 1811 to 1818 by love for a woman who deceived him, and then by more transitory affections and jealousies, on which he has left curious comments of self-analysis in his Love (Sur 1 'amour, 1822), and still more in hxs Journal (1888). Ill health had constrained him to leave the army somewhat before the battle of Leipzig. He withdrew to Milan, always his favourite residence, and watched with apparent calm the abdication and final struggle of his old chief. Expatriated by choice, he remained in Italy, with brief visits to Paris, until his death, isolated thus socially, as he was also morally and esthetically. He was absolutely out of sym- pathy with his age and with romanticism. The revamped medieval Christianity of Chateaubriand affected him much as it would have done Voltaire. The sentimental self- torture of Ren6 disgusted him much as it does us to-day. To him emotions were objects of study, not occasions of sympathy. He made himself and his friends the subject of constant relentless analysis, in which he would suffer no embellishment and no intrusion of the imagination. He notes on hearing the death of his father that " during 3 ^- 34 A Century of French Fiction the first month I sought in vain to be grieved. The reader will think me a bad son, and he will be right." Elsewhere he says that his life has been filled with un- happy love-affairs, and notes eleven names of ladies with the reflection, "I was not gallant, not enough." Again he resolves to achieve the reputation of being the greatest poet of France, *' not by intrigue like Voltaire, but by deserving it." Elsewhere we shall find him admiring " the inimitable physiognomy of my conversation " and " the reflection, a la Moliere, that I made at that moment." But we shall be in danger of colouring our judgment if we dwell too long on the facile fatuousness of his Journal. The best that is in him, all that concerns us here, is in his novels, and to these we may turn, recalling only the wide experience and habit of indefatigable analysis that he brought to their composition at the ripest period of his mind's development. These novels are ^rw««r and even with this precau- Prosper Merimee 199 tion, while Jos^ Navarro, the soldier, smuggler, highway- man, and murderer, is made acceptable to our imagination, there is more of the inexplicably demoniacal in Carmencita, the fascinating and savage Delilah, gipsy cigar-girl and smugglers' spy, than there was in the Corsican maid. Once under her spell, he obeys because he must. His struggles to free himself involve him the more. At last, made frantic by her alternations of tender affection and faithlessness, swayed perhaps in his weakened will by her grim prophecy, " I first, then you," and hoping to the last that she will beg for mercy, he kills her and surrenders himself to certain execution, still doubting in his prison cell whether she was a poor misguided child or a demon, but knowing that she has destroyed him, body and soul. Of that dainty bit of irony Abbe Aubain (1846), M^ri- m^e's only story in letters, it may suffice to state the situa- tion. A lady living in the country to restore her fortune by economy grows intimate with a young abb^, and finds him so sympathetic that she imagines him in love with her, and so secures him a promotion that implies a removal, which he shrewdly or naively attributes to her conscious or unconscious love for him. Much of the interest of the story lies in the food for psychological speculation that its incom- pleteness affords. This, too, is a phase of literary affecta- tion, but one that is easily pardoned. It was apparently about the time of Abbe Aubain that M^rim^e became interested in the Russian novelists Pushkin and Gogol. On the latter he wrote an article (185 1), with translations of scenes from two stories ; and from the former he rendered four tales, which, though they bear the stamp of M^rira^e's individuality, interest us here only from the fact of his choice. The first, The Queen of Spades (la Dame 200 A Century of French Fiction de pique, 1849), is a weird bit of ghosdy diablerie and gambling, culminating in insanity. The Bohemians (1852) is a tale of savage love and jealous murder, recalling Car- men. The Hussar (1852) is a phantasmagoria of witch- craft in four pages. And finally The Pistol Shot (le Coup de pistolet, 1856) shows the intense passions of a semi-civili- sation in which admiration for skill and courage overcomes the deadliest hate. It seems then that, as was natural, M^rim^e was attracted in others by the qualities that he himself possessed, — by the intense, the exotic, and the exceptional. Of original stories M^rim^e wrote but three after the publication of the stories collected in 1852. These are: The Blue Room (la Chambre bleue), written in 1866; Lokis, printed in 1869; and perhaps the posthumously published DjoumanCj though internal evidence would lead one to place this wild Algerian dream in the earlier and more romantic period, for while it opens with a clean-cut, realistic description of gipsy snake-charmers, it soon passes over into a weird, fantastic vision of serpent caverns, orien- tal voluptuousness, and inhuman horrors, much more in the spirit of 1830 than of the second empire. The Blue Room^ a mediocre piece of rather gruesome fooling in the manner of tlie last century, with more snickering in the irony than is usual in M^rim^e, seems to reflect the influence of the imperial court and the evenings at Compiegne, but Lokis carries us once more to the weird lands of crime and pas- sion, interweaving the vampire and werwolf superstitions of the past with modern theories of heredity. Here a son, whose mother before his birth had lost her reason in a bear's embrace, couples the nature of his noble ancestors with brute ferocity. The bears have an instinct that he Prosper Merimee 201 shares their nature, and ghastly presentiments prepare us from the outset for the denouement where, in excess of love, he sucks the life-blood of his bride and escapes to the beasts of the forest. The tale is treated with admira- ble restraint. There is the same artistic preparation here as in Carmen and Colomba^ gradually leading up to the foreboding presage of the soothsaying snake-charmer in the Lithuanian forest morass that hurries the story to its dreadful close. But though the imagination be romantic, the style here and always is thoroughly realistic, and it is by this art that he succeeds in making Lokis^ Cannen, or Colomba seem to us as natural to their environment as gloves and evening dress to our own. Thus he fascinates us by the extraor- dinary at the same time that he evokes our sympathy by the appearance of reality. This tends to give a certain malignity to his ironical scepticism. It has been said that he " despised " men too much to have faith in their progress. We shall not look for moral inspiration to one who could say of a drama, " The piece appears wearisome, although immoral ; " nor can we look for intellectual in- spiration to one who poses as a dilettante and is sure that to excel in any art " one must be a little beie.'^ No doubt M^rim^e toyed with morality, and no doubt his fiction con- tributed to the weakening of the will that characterised his generation. But as an artist his work has a refined dis- tinction that is the more charming for its seeming lack of effort, hiding the most consummate art of limpid harmony. His work appeals only to a refined taste, and to that it will appeal always for its restrained and delicate sense of pro- portion, so singularly lacking in his naturalistic successors. He is in the novel what Gautier is in poetry, the represen- 202 A Century of French Fiction tative of art for art's sake. His style has been compared to a sheet of glass, through which all that he wishes to show appears clear and distinct, while the medium itself leaves at the first reading no sensation. Yet if the critic concentrate his attention on this style, he will find that all in it has been subordinated to an esthetic purpose that produced its full effect of aristocratic daintiness and elegance, even while unrecognised. Among all French novelists M^rim^e is pre-eminently the artist. CHAPTER IX TH^OPHILE GAUTIER THEOPHILE GAUTIER holds an important place among the critics of France and among her poets, but he is surely most widely and perhaps most deservedly known for his work in fiction. An epigrammatic critic has said that he is the only successful writer who gave his whole Ufe to writing without ideas, feeling, or imagination, and yet with no love of commonplace. Like most epigrams this is but a half-truth. Whether we consider Gautier's brilliant books of travel, his volumes of criticism, his poems, or his novels, we shall not find in any of them a philosophic view of history or of morals. In his novels psychologic analysis is either absent or laboriously futile. He has not even strong imagination, but he has an admirable fancy, and above all a power of picturesque description that is unri- valled in our century. In his literary esthetics he stands apart from his fellows of the romantic school. Where they were seeking a Gothic intensity of purpose, he sought, so far as the stress of his life gave him time, a Greek perfection of form. The romanticists had felt strongly drawn to the middle ages. For him the centuries between Titus and Louis XIII. were a blank. The romanticists had sought to make of environment and of description in general a symbol of the ideal and of character. Gautier professed and showed for this the most supreme indiiference. He 204 A Century of French Fiction described for the joy of the spiritual eye. His place among the noveUsts is that of a sincere and true painter in prose. Gautier was born at Tarbes, an ancient city in the department of Hautes Pyr^n^es, in 1811. But he came very young to Paris and was educated there. It is charac- teristic of all his literary life that in these earhest years, though a regular and close student, he showed more interest in archaic and decadent Latin than in the classics. He was attracted less by the normal than by the primitive or the over-refined. It is difficult to account for this pre- dilection, but easy to see that he shares it with many of the creatures of his fancy, especially with the Albert of his Mile, de Matipin. His first eifort in composition was an attempt to imitate Musseus, his second to reproduce Coluthus* Rape of Helen. Already, however, the authors of the French renascence began to interest him. He revelled in Brantome and Rabelais, and, thinking that he discerned in himself a taste for painting, he embraced that profession with romantic enthusiasm and contempt of commonplace. It was now, at the age of eighteen, that he met Hugo and was presently received into the Cenacle of the roman- ticists. Gradually he abandoned painting and became the centre of a group of " flamboyants," ultra-romanticists, who, more in sport than earnest, delighted to bait in countless ways the bears of academic classicism. He tells us himself, in his half-comic History of Romanticism , how with flowing hair and scarlet waistcoat he led the fight for dramatic emancipation in many Parisian theatres, and especially in the famous " battle of HernaniT This early period was marked by the publication of two volumes of verse. Poems (Poesies, 1830) and Albertus (1S32), which showed a very Theophile Gautier 205 highly developed technic and a power of description strangely weird and minutely realistic. But the most characteristic work of Gautier's youth is his first volume of collected stories, Young France (les Jeunes- France, 1833), with which are now bound eight tales alleged to be " humour- ous" that call for no comment. Young France is a book easily misunderstood, and many have mistaken its irony for earnest. Here, with the non- chalance of youth, he mocks with delicious persiflage both the romantic liberties that he claimed and the classic restraints that he scorned. In The Bowl of Punch he shows young men " the danger of putting modern fiction into action," parodying by turns Janin, Sue, Hugo, and even Balzac. Romantic medievalism is satirised in Wildman- stadius, its penchant for vice in Under the Table, its taste for the weird in the nightmare life-in-death of Onuphrius^ with a little of the author's own mind, as we shall see, its bourgeois imitation in Daniel Jovard, and the real banahty of its passion in She or She (Celle-ci ou celle-1^), the longest, the wittiest, the most libertine, and the most thought- ful of them all, for its apparent licentiousness masks a strong plea for sanity and realism. And lest the whole be misunderstood he adds to it all a preface of most admirable fooling. In short. Young France is genius laughing at its own joy of life. But its moderation of style deceived many into taking it seriously as the programme of the ultra-roman- ticists. This restraint, even in satire, was no affectation, it was part of his literary character. It showed itself in dis- dain for politics during these years of intense excitement, and in the disengaged poise that characterised his whole literary life, in which the only events were his books and his travels to Italy, Spain^ Russia, Algeria, and the East, 2o6 A Century of French Fiction T while for his support he depended to the last almost wholly on journalistic criticism. Gautier's next novel, Mile, de Maupin^ was the frankest expression of his hedonistic creed and also a curious attempt at self-analysis. Gautier's Albert is Ren^ in the last phase of his disease, a precociously corrupt enthusiast of beauty, whose pursuit of a fleeing ideal persuades him that the dream is not only more precious than the reality, but also more true. And Fortunio, two years later, is on the same verge of confident but ever-deceived hedonism, naturally joyous and wholly pagan. These two characters stand ethically quite apart in Gautier's work, partly, no doubt, that he might not offend a public on whom he de- pended, partly too because life had brought experience. Even in the fiction of the forties, a sort of moral resigna- tion, though not a moral reconciliation, succeeded to the hedonism of youth. Mile, de Maupin is an exquisite work of art, but it spurns the conventions of received morality with a contempt that was to close the Academy to Gautier forever. With a spring- board of fact in the seventeenth century to start from, he conceives a wealthy and energetic girl of twenty, freed from domestic restraints and resolved to acquire, by min- gling as man among men, more knowledge of the other sex than the conventions of social intercourse would admit. He transfers the adventures from the real world to a sort of forest of Arden, where the Rosalind of Shakspere might meet a Watteau shepherdess and a melancholy Jacques. Thus he helps us over the instinctive repulsion that we feel for the situation, and gives a purely artistic interest to the self- revelation that comes to his heroine and to Albert from their prolonged association. Various forms of love reach- Theophile Gautier 207 ing out for an unattainable ideal occupy the body of the book, and when once the actors learn to know themselves and each other Gautier parts them forever. In its ethics the book is opposed to the professed morality of nearly all, and doubtless to the real moraHty of most, but as Sainte-Beuve said of it : " Every physician of the soul, every moraHst, should have it on some back shelf of his library," and those who, like Mithridates, no longer react to such poisons will find in Mile, de Maupin much food for the purest literary enjoyment. Gautier calls Fortunio (1837) "a hymn to wealth, beauty, and happiness, the only three divinities that we recognise." Ethically this book is open to the same criti- cism as Mile, de Matipin, but artistically it merits higher praise, because it transplants us frankly to wonderland, and having set us down there makes no attempt at psycho- logical analysis or justification. Fortunio has boundless wealth and has been educated in Oriental luxury. No material wish or whimsey has been left ungratified. He comes to Paris, where lavished fortunes enable him to guard his seraglio in Eastern seclusion. He has also a paviHon at Neuilly for his whimsicalities and for his pet lion and tiger. He is the masculine ideal of a sensualist fancy, a composite of Apollo and Bacchus, and if he mingles in Parisian society it is only in that undiscovered corner of it where everybody is rich and fair and young. The social and personal ethics of Fortunio are of course false, but the well-worn theme of the purification of the courtesan by love is treated with a sentimental nonchalance that disarms criticism. It is surely a venial sin if disgust at canting hypocrisy betray the joy of youth too far in its generous protest. There is no mortal poison here. Satiety 2o8 A Century of French Fiction stands too obviously behind the curtain. But the art of the tale is as perennial a joy as that of Aladdin or The Forty Thieves, FortuniOf says Gautier, *' is the last work in which I have freely expressed my true thought." But during all his life he found in short stories a means of partial self-projection, of fixing those dreams that he regarded as " the most enduring of the goods of this world." There is something of himself in all his heroes. It is clear, too, that the de- mands of conventionality galled him more at first than later. His next volume of fiction, the Trio of Novels (Trio de romans, 1850), is distinctly his worst. It were difficult to imagine a story that should unite in higher degree the improbable and the commonplace than The Innocent Roues (les Rou^s innocents, 1846). Militona (1847) contains some bits of brilliant description of Spanish hfe, but its humour is grotesque exaggeration, and its fabulation belongs to the childhood of the feuilleton. Indeed the story is chiefly interesting for a sort of sub-acid irony of protest against its own banality. But the restive Pegasus feels the editor's hand on the bridle and checks his natural instinct of artistic liberty. "They have made me a kennel," he writes in a poem of this time, "where I watch, pressed down in \.\\t feuilleton of a newspaper, like a crouching dog." And one feels the same restraint in the last of this Trio, John and Jenny (Jean et Jeanette, 1850), where social emancipation is danced to a minuet when we feel he would have preferred the Carmagnole. The date of the story gives it its chief interest. Beneath the conventions of the feuilleton we catch the spirit of Sue's socialistic novels, and of the second manner of George Sand, with some- thing of the emancipatory spirit of 1848 and something Theophile Gautier 209 of that joy in luxury that marks the coming of the Second Empire. The volume of short stories, published in 1 845 and again in 1858 and containing eight tales besides a republication of FortuniOy is of a different tone and a much higher artistic value. The stories are of various dates, but the key-note is struck by Foriunio and the emancipated inspiration of romanticism is far more apparent. One of the tales, The Nightingale's Nest i^Q Nid des rossignols), dates from 1833, and The Dead Leman (la Morte amoureuse), probably the best, from 1836 ; but as they were revised at the time of their collected publication, there is no reason for insisting on their chronological order. Enough that taken together they represent the frankest expression of Gautier's ideas during fifteen years of enforced literary toil. It is said that he put most of himself into the hero of the first of them as they are now arranged, The Golden Fleece (la Toison d'or, 1839), and certainly its hero, Tiburce, is a curious character, whose singularity, as Gautier says, " had the advantage of not being affected." Many things that are said of him seem to accord remarkably with the impressions of the friends of the author. Like Gautier, Tiburce had been a painter. Like Tiburce also, Gautier " would stay for whole days on his divan supported by two piles of cushions, with- out saying a word, his eyes shut and his hands hanging '* and " troubling himself as little about the affairs of the time as of the news from the moon, preferring to do nothing than to work, wholly detached from all human things, and so rea- sonable that he seemed crazy." Much psychological self- insight is shown in the analysis of the artistic nature of the poet-painter. His search for physical beauty had made him sceptical of moral beauty, and, as physical dissimulation 14 2IO A Century of French Fiction was more difficult than psychic, he clung to material per- fection. " Art had taken possession of him too young and had corrupted him and falsified him," so that he had be- come "bold in thought, timid in action," loving fiercely, but loving a chimera of his fancy that, like a captive bird, was ever seeking some opening through which to soar into the blue of heaven. Now the psychic result of such a state of mind, as Balzac well shows in The Hidden Masterpiece (le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu), and Zola in The Work (I'CEuvre), is to place the ideal so far beyond the power of material execution or attainment as to paralyse effort. Thus here Tiburce so loses himself in the beauty of Rubens* Magdalen in the " Descent from the Cross " at Antwerp that her living counterpart serves only to suggest the picture, until Gret- chen dissipates this phantom barrier to their marriage by inducing him to give external artistic form to his ideal, and thus wins him back from cerebral to natural love. The stretching out of loving arms toward a figment of the brain that found an artistic expression in The Golden Fleece pursued Gautier as phantom love through his whole literary career, for one finds it in his youthful poem Albertus^ and it persists to the last both in his tales and his novels. In Omphale (1834) it is the piquant eighteenth-century mar- chioness who descends from the picture in the rococo pavil- ion of the rococo garden to bring visions of the regency to the young bachelor, until the prosaic uncle rolls up the canvas and sends it to the garret. In The Dead Leman^ (1836) it is the courtesan seen at his ordination that haunts the country priest and makes his life at first a desperate struggle and then a weird double existence of which he hardly knows which half is real and which a fantasy. The Theophile Gautier 2 1 1 artistic structure of this tale, the gradual initiation of the reader into the realm of uncanny spirits, is above praise. The wild night-ride that brings the priest to the bed where Clarimonde lies dead, the watch where prayer yields to passion, and the dead lips and arms respond to the kiss that gives her ghost the right to visit him, until, nursed vampire- like upon his blood, she turns into dust when touched by holy water, and leaves her priestly lover in horror-struck regret — all this is treated with a restraint, yet with a power, that make The Dead Leman one of the great ghost-stories of the literature of the world. Again we find Gautier seeking a phantom love in the grandiose life of ancient Egypt or Lydia or Greece, enjoy- ing, as he says, "the high contemplation of a human soul whose least desire translates itself in vast actions, enormi- ties of granite or bronze," for in our time " man no longer finds scope for his imperial fantasy." Such a dream is The Golden Chain (1837), that tells us of the love of Ctesias for the Athenian Plangon, who would recover in his affection her virginity of soul. A Night with Cleopatra (1838) is a similar dream of the hero of low degree, Meiamoun, made worthy by his love to buy with his life the ephemeral favour of Egypt's queen of beauty, a dream suggested, no doubt, by the " Sleeper Awakened " of the Arabian Nights, or by Shakspere's Christopher Sly. Very closely allied to this, though with a happier ending, is King Candaule (1844), where Gautier has lavished all the re- sources of rhetorical harmony to evoke soft Lydian airs, and all the colours of his literary palette to paint the grandiose luxury of the last of the Heraclidae. On the story itself there is no reason to dwell, for it is taken, even in its de- tails, from the first book of Herodotus ; but the splendour of 212 A Century of French Fiction the descriptions stands out in sharper outHnes and clearer colours here under the Lydian sky and there beneath the sun of Egypt than in any work that had preceded. Here, as in the more trivial Nightingale' s Nest and The Marchion- ess's Pet Dog one seems to see the author giving himself over, like his own Tiburce, to an unbridled fancy, heedless alike of the demands and of the limitations of reality, but with a most exquisite feeling for beauty in nature and in man, with senses most delicately responsive to every stimu- lus, and with a power to convey sensation in words that is most rare. A second collection of stories, ten in number, followed in 1863, though the greater part of the volume had been already published before the close of 1852. Here the weird and uncanny element that was observable in the best work of the earlier collection gets decidedly the upper hand, and shows a preoccupation, so common in the sceptics of hedonism, with occult philosophy and spiritism. Thus Avatar (1856), the first story in the series, busies itself with the curious though quite futile question of what situa- tion would be created by a transfusion of souls so that the spiritual nature of one man should be combined with the body and mental aptitudes of another. Less attractive, because less frankly unreal, is Jettatura (1856), a story of Naples and of the evil eye. That Nea- politan porters should shrink from the cross-eyed aristocrat Paul is probable enough, that Count Altavilla should do so is possible ; but that this should worry a Parisian gentle- man such as d'Aspremont into a vague terror in which he thinks himself responsible for the obviously hereditar}"- con- sumption of his fiancee Alicia, is what would require greater skill in morbid psychology than Gautier possessed Theophile Gautier 213 to make other than incredible, unless indeed one is prepared to agree with him that *' dreams are as real as reality." There is in Jettatura a fine duel fought in the ruins of Pompei, and this is also the scene of Arria Marcella (1852), — a remarkable story of retrospective passion, and the most vivid of all Gautier's resuscitations of antiquity. Phantom love is again the subject, and again we feel that, in the hero Octavien, Gautier has painted a phase of his own nature. Octavien is a young artist who lives so in the realm of the beautiful that he loves its ideals beyond all reality. He " could love only outside of time and space," and "had composed for himself an ideal seraglio with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana of Poictiers, and Jane of Aragon." He had loved statues too, and now the lava print of a woman's form found in the house of Arrius Diomedes at Pompei has filled him with a longing to trans- port his soul to the century of Titus. In this mood he has a vision of restored Pompei as he sleeps amid its ruins. He converses with a courteous citizen, who escorts him to a play of Plautus. Among the spectators is Arria. She takes him to her home, for, as she explains to him, " the flame of your thought has darted to me ; my soul felt it in that world where I float invisible to gross eyes. Belief creates the god, and love the woman. . . . Your desire has restored me to life." But her Christian father enters to trouble joy, and under his exorcism Marcella crumbles back to dust. Somewhat similar, though less highly wrought, is The Mummy' s Foot (le Pied de morale, 1840). The little story opens with a dazzlingly minute description of the shop of a collector of antiquities, where the author in his search for a paper-weight chances on the foot of Hermonthis, a 214 A Century of French Fiction Pharaoh's daughter, and dreams that night that the princess comes to seek it, talks with her severed member, receives it kindly as his gift, invites him to visit her father, and takes him through marvels of more than Egyptian grandeur, where, " holding him by the hand, she saluted graciously the mummies of her acquaintance." In return for her foot he begs her hand, but her father declines because of the disparity in age, and at that moment he awakes. Again, in The Opium Pipe (la Pipe d'opium, 1838), it is a dead or sleeping beauty that revives in answer to his love, and here as there, and as also in The Hashish Club (le Club des hachichiens, 1846), the mode of the story is a dream. In the same group may be placed also the feebly fantastic tale of peri-love, The Thousand and Second Night (la Mille et deuxieme nuit, 1842), of which the author says in mock penitence that it caused the death of the sultana who ventured to narrate it to the critical Schahriar. The other stories in this volume call for no notice. During the twenty-five years between the writing of Fortunio and the publication of the last of these short stories Gautier had written three novels. The first. The Mummy's Tale (le Roman de la momie, 1857), works to a rather dangerous length the antiquarian vein of some of the best of the short stories; the second. Captain Fracasse (leCapitaine Fracasse, 1861-3), is described by the author himself as "a bill drawn in my youth and redeemed in middle life," and is a uniquely fascinating romantic fancy; while the third, Spirite (1865), is the author's last dream of phantom love, with an appeal to sceptical credulity more successful, though not more artistic, than that of Jettatura, With this novel Gautier fittingly closed his literary career. The Mummfs Tale elaborates into a novel one of those Theophile Gautier 215 vivid glimpses of the past that were rendered so wonder- fully in The Mummfs Foot and in Arria Marcella. But for this fuller treatment Gautier lacked, as perhaps the science of his day lacked, adequate preparation and direct knowledge of the country ; yet, in spite of this, he was able to produce a book that satisfied the antiquarians perhaps better than it could the literary critics. The style is indeed marvellously polished, and in some of the descriptions of landscape and architecture he has written with an art that he himself has hardly rivalled. But all this masks a psychic unreality that is truly exasperating, and the story, for all its elaboration, produces far less effect of illusion than those shorter evocations of a mysterious and ghostly antiquity. Captain Fracasse had been announced in 1836. It began to appear in December, 1861, and it would seem from the preface that the first chapter was not written till 1855. Gautier had already shown his interest in the period of Louis XIII., and had proved his minute knowledge of it in The Grotesques (1844), a volume of literary studies. Here he has treated the same epoch in the spirit of 1830, and has given us what Sainte-Beuve calls " the classic of romanticism." The novel, however, falls into two parts of nearly equal length, but very different in character and very unequal in literary value. The former and better part re-* sembles superficially Scarron's Comic Novel (le Roman comique, 165 1), for both tell of the adventures of a band of strolling players in the days when Moliere was of their number, and in both a beautiful maid, of birth above her station, is made the centre of intrigue and of romantic in- terest. It was wholly characteristic of Gautier's artistic temperament that he should prefer to study life in comedy, than, like Balzac, to note comedy in life. His personages 2i6 A Century of French Fiction stand out with wonderful precision, not as characters but as picturesque figures. Gautier says that he would have the reader feel " as though he were turning over etchings by Callot or engravings by Abraham Bosse," and this is much the effect of these harmonious and well-ordered pages, where we see men, animals, ruined castles, palaces of princes, and dens of thieves as vividly as in a dream, and yet penetrate as little beneath the surface to the spirit of the individual or the society. Every freak of fancy is punctuated with a realistic detail. This first half of Cap- tain Fracasse is the most complete expression of Gautier's genius as a painter in prose, and yet the death and burial of Matamore is the only touch of true pathos in it all. Wholly different is the second part, a phantasmagoria of freakish adventures that might have sprung from the brain, though it could never have flowed from the pen, of Alex- andre Dumas. French critics are agreed that the second part of Captain Fracasse '* does not exist for those of delicate taste." But in the former Gautier has caught the spirit of Scarron's Comic Novel so completely, and yet given to it, as Sainte-Beuve says, such a bath of youth and art in the Castilian spring of his style, that he has, as it were, encrusted this modern book in the literature of a long past age, and his novel is in its way an even more astonishing evocation of a vanished society than Hugo's Notre-Dame, It is a picture, not of an epoch alone, but also of a romantic ideal that had slowly matured in Gautier's mind during the three decades that separate it from Young France, The second part, however, is by no means devoid of interest. Indeed, individual chapters are equal, if not su- perior, to anything that went before. He has made the Theophile Gautier 217 Paris of Richelieu live, and his Pont-Neuf is almost as real to us as that of our own day. It is only when he abandons description for action that his work ceases to be unique and threatens at times to grow commonplace. Most ad- mirable, too, are the scenes of criminal life in that den of thieves, the Radis couronnee. The whole is instinct with the nonchalant gaiety and bizarre joy of sense and colour that characterised the " grotesques " of this curious reign, Cyrano, Scarron, Saint-Amant, and that poor martyr to his wit, Theophile de Viau, not in vain the namesake of " Our Th^o." It is difficult to conceive a stronger novelistic contrast than that between this picturesque evocation of the past and the nebulous, mystic spiritism of Gautier's last novel, Spirite (1865), in which he returns to that phantom love / that so often haunted the short stories. Here he has not recourse to a dream, as in The Mummy's Foot or in Arria Marcella^ nor yet to the Oriental hocus-pocus of Avatar, He bases his story, as Balzac had done Seraphita on the Swedenborgian teaching of angels and of celestial marriage. In this conceptibn of the spirit world that " has its infatua- tions as well as ours," there is a suggestion of Dante's Beatrice, but we know that this love " enkindled by the \^impossible " and gradually passing into an hallucinated "cer- tainty of future happiness," where, in the climax of passion, " art itself is forgotten in love," is a favourite situation with Gautier. Still, for those who do not sympathise with this doctrine the idea has found more artistic expression, and such readers will remember Spirite most pleasantly for its beautiful descriptions of the Acropolis and of the Parthe- non. As a whole, the book is an appeal to the sceptical credulity of a generation in search of a new faith. It struck 21 8 A Century of French Fiction the popular fancy, but gained the author more immediate fame than lasting reputation. Indeed, if we consider Gautier's fiction as a whole, we may say of it all, as of Spirite, that its supreme excellence lies in the dazzling brilliancy of its descriptions and in the rippling harmony of its diction. Gautier lacks insight into character and the touch of natural sympathy that belongs to the highest genius. His vision is fascinating, but it is not inspiring. Let us recognise frankly his limitations, and then let us surrender ourselves on fit occasion to the delight of his plastic art, by which this artist of language builds the soulless fabrics of his vision with a vocabulary of unmatched resource and a perception of the delicate nuances in words that is as exquisite as it is unrivalled. Like Shelley he seems capable of creating from the shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses, from lake-reflected suns and yellow bees in the ivy bloom, pictures so clear, so clean cut, so exquisitely finished, that they have become things of beauty and joys forever to those whose eyes are trained to see them. His work can never be very popular, but it will remain for generations far from the limits of a vulgar fate. In epic imagination he is inferior to Hugo, possibly even to Vigny. In humour and charm he is inferior to Musset. And yet to those who love his form of literary art his fiction gives the more enduring delight. CHAPTER X. GEORGE SAND. THE most fertile of the contemporaries of Balzac, if we except the dubious fecundity of Dumas, and surely the most facile of women writers in all time, is she who was Lucile-Aurore Dupin by birth, Madame Dudevant by marriage, and by choice and fame George Sand. To those who are fascinated by the problems of heredity, few men of genius offer a more interesting study. On her father's side she was descended from an old and wealthy bourgeois fam- ily. No one more eminently respectable than her paternal grandfather Dupin de Franceuil, the tax-contractor {fer- mier gineral) and friend of Rousseau, who had married in middle life, a daughter of Maurice de Saxe, the famous general and son of the otherwise famous Countess de Konigsmark and the also notorious King of Poland, Augus- tus the Strong. Her grandmother had been previously married to Count Horn, a natural son of Louis XV., and thus she could claim a sort of connection with the royal family of France, while her mother was a plebeian of the plebeians, the daughter of a certain Delaborde, a bird- trainer and dealer in Paris, herself by profession a dress- maker, quite without all accomplishments but those of a native charm that she had been somewhat negligent in guarding. It was this that attracted the notice of the gay young officer, Maurice Dupin, who, much against the will of his 2 20 A Century of French Fiction aristocratic mother, married her in 1803, and having ful- filled his mission by giving to the world this child in 1804, was killed by a fall from his horse four years later. The young Aurore had the curious fortune to be " born among roses, to the sound of music." She inherited from father and paternal grandfather a dashing temperament and demo- cratic sympathies, and from her mother she acquired her taste for an adventurous life, while both influences were much modified by the aristocratic training of her father's mother, under whose care she remained till she was thir- teen. But Aurore continued to visit, love, and admire her mother, and so was brought in contact with conflicting affections, whose double-twisted thread can be traced throughout her life and her works. Her childhood was passed at the ancestral homestead at Nohant in Berry. Here she was formally instructed after the rigid precepts of old-school pedantry, and, with a demo- cratic independence, proceeded to supplement this instruc- tion in two ways : first, by the sentimental novels then in vogue, especially the New Heldise, Paul anaVirgimay Atalal^diVid Corinne ; secondly and most, by contact with nature in this French Arcadia, brooding in sombre valleys over the memories of her childhood and the faint echoes of the Napoleonic tragedy, or chasing butterflies by the Indre and learning to know the beauty of nature as none of her contemporaries knew it, because she loved it more than they. Thus she came to know the life of an artificial society, of sentimental fiction, and of peasant reality, and already as a child she was putting all this material to use with the crea- tive instinct of the born romancer. Encouraged by her mother she began, like Goethe, to tell stories before she George Sand 221 could read or write, continuing them, just as she was to do in later years, until her fancy wearied of the situation and the characters she had conceived, and then dropping the thread for another. Thus she entertained the peasant chil- dren at Nohant, where also she invented and acted little plays with her sister and Ursule, a child companion. But when she was thirteen her grandmother seems to have thought that a little Parisian polish would add to her chances of marriage, and she was sent in 1 8 1 7 to the fash- ionable convent school of the English Ladies, where, curi- ously enough, both her mother and her grandmother had been imprisoned during the Revolution. Now the effect of this convent life on the future novelist was to give her a deeper idealism and a comprehension at least of religious feeling, to which till then she had been wholly a stranger. She had come here proficient in shooting, fencing, and danc- ing, but ignorant of the sign of the cross. She took at first a natural place at the head of the rebels to discipline, and went by the name of the Tomboy. But presently she underwent a psycho-physiological change. She had periods of sadness, waves of undefined longing, until one evening, alone in the convent chapel, her spirit was touched, as she thought, by the spirit of God and she was converted. This change was sentimental, not rational. Her ardent imagina- tion had fed on the rich food of Roman ritual and she had cradled herself into a religious dream. So the practices of piety which at first she embraced with ardour were soon abandoned, but she never ceased to feel and to respond to the religious sentiment, and a thread of mystic idealism can be traced through the greater part of her volumes. At sixteen she was withdrawn from this hot-bed of arti- ficial emotions to the deathbed of her grandmother and to 222 A Century of French Fiction nature and freedom. Again she walked or rode by the Indre and mingled familiarly with the peasantry. She began to read more widely, and indeed with more zeal than comprehension, letting Chateaubriand think for her now, as she had let Rousseau feel for her before, and as in later years she was inclined to take ideas ready-made from socialistic friends without quite understanding their impli- cations. A natural result of this was mental dyspepsia. She had gloomy moods, meditated suicide or the cloister, but was withdrawn from these vagaries by legal complica- tions attending her grandmother's estate, and while visiting with her mother met a burly country squire, Casimir Dude- vant, whom in 1822 she was overpersuaded to marry. George Sand was no woman to be content with a mar- riage of convention, and of all men a realistic philistine must have been most uncongenial to this free-minded and warm-hearted girl. He managed her dower of five hundred thousand francs most admirably, but he neglected her heart. Still they lived together, " suffering each other's foibles for accord," for eight years, interrupted by travel and a brief stay at her old convent, and they had two children, to whom she was always a devoted mother, the need of loving being one of the most marked traits in her character. But almost as prominent was her independence. She could not brook the subjection to a Boeotian squire. In 1829 she claimed and obtained the right to live for considerable intervals at Paris on a monthly allowance of 250 francs that he made her from her large fortune, and she endeavoured to eke out this pittance by decorative painting and kindred feminine arts. At last in 1831 a partial separation was agreed upon, and this was made final in 1836. It is important to dwell on this unfortunate marriage, for its humiliations and reve- George Sand 223 lations completed the outfit of the novelist for the first period of her development. It was the ferment of blighted hope, of discontent with the society that made such mar- riages as hers natural, that penetrated like a yeast this talent composed of intimate knowledge of aristocratic life, inherited democratic sympathies, close contact with nature and its children, and the ideal aspirations kindled by re- ligious sentiment. All these things were necessary that George Sand should write even her first novel, Indiana, Almost every one has hidden in his Hfe the possibility of one novel, but George Sand did not immediately discover this, and her articles printed in the Figaro attracted little notice. She had already written a story, but with the self- criticism of which she was always capable decided that it was unworthy of publication. At the office of the Figaro she met Jules Sandeau, a young lawyer and afterward a novelist of some note, and together they wrote Rose and Blanche and signed it Jules Sand. This book had merit enough to attract publishers, and in 1832 she published her first independent novel, under the name George Sand. Indiana achieved a great success, and if we seek the causes of this in the criticism of the time it will appear that it was because men felt that the story was naturalistic, im- perfect perhaps in execution but broadly human in concep- tion. Here was no romantic medievalism, but the persons and manners of her own day, living a familiar life, talking a familiar language, and feeling as strongly as was still pos- sible in an age of social restraint. It is well to stress this point here at the outset, because George Sand is as much the mother of " naturalism " as Flaubert is its father, though it must be confessed that her child has often the defects of her qualities. To this matter there will be frequent occa- 224 A Century of French Fiction sion to recur. As for Indiana itself, the opening, as usual with George Sand, is better than the close. There she was on familiar ground. She could find in her own heart the blighting ennuis of the ill-mated heroine, her expectations of a fairy land of sentiment, and her discovery of a desert of sordid domesticity. She had known, too, how under these conditions the pent-up fire of passion might break a way for itself if it felt the attraction of a kindred sym- pathy, and she knew also, perhaps, that most men who lend themselves to satisfy such feelings are petty and contemp- tible. Her Indiana is a nobler Emma Bovary. Her lover Raymon, the most interesting character, is even more con- temptibly seductive than Flaubert's Rodolphe, because he has perverted a nobler nature. Clearly in 1832 this was a new note in fiction. Could the note be held and the suc- cess maintained? That question was answered, almost before the critics had asked it, by Valentine (1832), written during a visit to Nohant, whence it drew much of its picturesque inspiration. Yes, George Sand had not merely the power to look within and tell what she saw there. She had a perennial spring of creative imagination, that in the course of the next forty- three years was to pour out in a constant stream eighty-four volumes of novels, ten of correspondence, eight of memoirs, five of dramas, and leave many more for the gleaner in this abundant harvest. It is impossible here to speak of all the novels in detail, or to speak of some of them at all. Nor is this necessary to the present purpose. All of them in her first period, from Valentine (1832) to Mauprat (1837), have the same inspiration and the same general character- istics. All represent projections of various phases of her own experience and re-assertions of an intense individualism. George Sand 225 They are types of the domestic novel, the lyric cry of the misunderstood wife. They are transpositions into narrative prose, sometimes so rhetorical and warm as to be almost rhythmic, of the romantic dramas of Hugo and the roman- tic odes of Musset. Their intense assertion of indepen- dent personality is of their time, and finds in that time a passionate echo and a revolt as passionate. To some she was in these years "the true priestess, ... an inspired bacchante who leads in our century the choir of intelli- gences." To others she seemed profoundly immoral, anti- social. The battle over Valentine^ where also the beginning is good and the end weak, reached its height on the appear- ance of Lelia in 1833, a story produced under conditions public and personal that tended to make it a gloomy cry of despairing genius, beating its wings against the confining bars of social law and custom. In the political world the revolu- tion of 1830 had aroused more hopes than it had justified; the cholera of 1832, the failure of the emeutes of 1833, and the Polish massacres of that year had caused a deep dis- couragement among liberals everywhere; Saint-Simon and Fourier had shown to women a bright horizon that had roused a general restlessness among them both in France and Germany ; and meantime her own domestic life had brought her many disillusions. " She was at this time," says Sainte- Beuve, " in a vein of bitterness and social misanthropy, on the eve of breaking an old tie, in a true moral isolation," seeking for some heart worthy to receive the outpourings of her overflowing affection, and presently to find it, as she thought, in the poet Musset. For the moment, however, she had lost faith not only in marriage but in love itself, and the waters of bitterness gush with geyser energy in the sombre periods of this eloquent poem in prose, the 226 A Century of French Fiction revolt of passion bruised by masculine egoism, nauseated by masculine fatuousness, despairing of finding any object worthy of its devotion, and bursting at times in its enforced sterility of heart into imprecations of society and of creation itself. Lelia marks a climax in this Byronic, dithyrambic declam- atory vein, from \s\{\qS\ Jacques (1834) and Leone Leoni (1835) afford a descent to earth. The former is a sort of gospel of free love. The husband here is no longer the unsympathetic boor of Indiana nor the unsympathetic gen- tleman of Valentine. He is a hero of magnanimity, who makes way for the lover by considerately killing himself. The lover, too, who in Indiana had been so ingrained a hypo- crite as to be hardly conscious of his hypocrisy, and in Val- entine had become an attractive and not altogether ignoble gentleman, is in Jacqties a hero as capable of passion as Madame Dudevant, who is throughout the heroine. This wild assertion of the divine right of passion was the herald of a long line of similar novels in France and Ger- many, that continued to remind the author of her youthful aberrations long after she had herself outgrown them. For already Z^^;2(? Leoni (1835) though it may place passion above reason shows an attempt at serious psychic analysis, while her work during 1834 had been made, as she says, to sell rather than to read. This change had been wrought in her by Musset, with whom she had made a journey to Italy in the winter of 1833-4 that has been the subject of numer- ous books and of acrimonious controversy. We are con- cerned with it here only as it affected her novelistic talent. It gave her her first passionate love, and her first realisation of the inadequacy of passion as a rule of life. "I am deadly sad," she writes to Sainte-Beuve on her return to George Sand 227 Paris ; " I do not know if I shall survive this terrible crisis of the thirtieth year." Both she and Miisset were racked with like pains, but they poisoned his nature while they greatly deepened hers. In She and He (Elle et lui, 1859), the novelistic precipitate of this journey, she says: " God makes some men of genius to wander in the tempest and to create pain. I studied you in your light and in your darkness, and know that you are not to be weighed in balances like other men." And so she presently recovered her self-poise. New friends began to gather about her, Balzac, Liszt, Dela- croix, and the philosophic priest Lamennais. But though calmed she felt morally exhausted. In February of 1835 she sought refuge at Nohant and in the next year she arranged a final separation from her husband that left her a woman of independent fortune. Such conditions were most unfavourable to literary pro- duction, but the effect appears less in the quantity than the quality. Greater depth and tenderness come with 1835, the former in Leone Leant, the latter in Andre^ which is the idyllic prelude to Devil's Pool (1846) and Little Fadette (1849). Then in 1836 the result of separation from her husband appears in the more balanced art and firmer draw- ing of character of Mauprat, in which this first individualis- tic period of her genius reaches its full development ; for The Last Aldini (la Derniere Aldini, 1838), The Master Mosaists (les Maitres mosaistes, 1838) and The Companion of the Tour de France (le Compagnon de la Tour de France, 1840) show the arrested development that marks a coming transformation in her thought and fiction. Individualism, says Bruneti^re, culminates always in a negation of order and social justice. In George Sand prosperity, fame, travel modified the generous enthusiasms 228 A Century of French Fiction of youth. The mother's point of view is not that of the bride. As early as 1836 she tells her son that ambition should not be for self, but for society. The sentimental socialism of Lamennais, Barb^s, and others begins to attract her enthusiastic assent. There is some timid socialistic kite-flying in The Companion of the Tour de France, and in Spiridion (1840) there is a brief and futile effort to seek the solution of society's troubles in mystic interpenetration of politics and religion. Then the new sympathies fire completely her genius, and for eight years she dazzles the world with brilliant pleas for the ideals of the revolution of 1848. Life at Nohant, with the stimulus of frequent visits to Paris, proved very favourable to steady and rapid pro- duction. Between 1841 and 1848 she issued forty-four volumes, all more or less tinged with this general warmth of universal sympathy, where aristocratic dames marry artisans, and mechanics refuse the proffered hand of wealth and nobility. The best of these novels are Consuelo (1843) and The Countess of Rudolstadt (1844) ; the most radical are Mr. Antony's Fault (le P^ch^ de M. Antoine, 1847) and The Miller of Angibault (le Meunier d'Angi- bault, 1845). None of them can be read with satisfaction to-day. In them all the heart is right, but the head is wrong. They are declamatory and exceedingly uneven. But they seem very attractive to those minds, numerous after every political convulsion, whose thirst for truth is not satisfied by philosophy or religion, and who are as sure as Hamlet that the world is out of joint, and as powerless to set it right. And these novels are also very significant in the evolution of fiction both at home and abroad. George Sand was among the first to see that a sympathetic study George Sand 229 of the lower classes would give new life to romanticism, which was in its nature democratic and even, as she said, "revolutionary." And so these studies of artisan and peasant life, beginning in 1840, and thus preceding Balzac's Peasants, or Sue's Mysteries of Paris, or Hugo's Mis^-ables, are an essential prelude to the topsy-turvy naturalism of Zola. That is the historical significance of novels that widened their author's heart and chastened her sympathies for the more artistic and wholly delightful work of her third period, when the revolution of 1848 and its collapse had given to her socialistic dream a rude awakening. In February of that year she had been drawn into active journalistic life, but the obvious incapacity of the people for self-government soon cooled her enthusiasm, and after the accession of Napoleon she withdrew once more to her country estate at Nohant in Berry, where she resided almost continuously until her death in June, 1876. During all this time her pen was ceaselessly busy, and the complete bibliography of her writing, from 1849 to her death, counts one hundred and thirty-five volumes, some of them of course smaller than those in which her works are published to-day. Her later manner shows itself first in studies of the peasantry of Berry, of which the spirit and manner had been anticipated in the preceding period hy Jeanne (1844) and by The Devil's Pool (la Mare au diable, 1846), while in Teverino (1846) she seems to have sought relief from her socialistic friends by a flight into fairyland. Of the country idyls, the most noteworthy beside the ever exquisite DeviVs Pool 2iXQ Francois le Champi (1849), Little Fadette (la Petite Fadette, 1849), and The Bell Ringers (les Maitres sonneurs, 1853). It is difficult to speak too strongly of 230 A Century of French Fiction the idyllic charm and gentle sympathy with the children of nature that pervades these books and makes them redolent with the scent of wild thyme and sage. Love had pulsed in her first novels, the passion for humanity in the socialistic tales. Here was the third element, foreshad- owed since Valentine^ the sentiment of nature, that led her to observe with loving care the material details and the revelations of soul in life among the lowly. If she still moralised as in the socialistic novels, it was now as an optimistic reaUst, admitting, as she says, " the right of the Hterary artist to sound and exhibit the plague spots of society," as Balzac had done, but feeling that fear increases rather than heals egoism, and believing that the mission of her art was " a mission of sentiment and of love." More and more from year to year this habit of thought built up in her a more objective esthetic mind, until in 1867 we find her writing that " the whole secret of the beautiful, the only truth, love, art, enthusiasm, and faith " is in loving persons for what they are in themselves, and not for any reflection of one's self that one finds in them. But that is to assert the impersonality of art in its noblest form. In an introduction to The Devil's Fool the author says she is a realistic optimist, but the tale has in it nothing of Utopia. It is a dehcious idyl of a ride by day and night, and of an often interrupted conversation in which Marie reveals her simple, loving heart to the honest Germain, and reaps the fruit of quickly ripening seed sown quite uncon- sciously. It is a trifle and yet a masterpiece of rustic poetry, a work of perfect nature. Again before 1848 she struck the same note in Franqois le Champi (printed in 1849). Here as in The DeviPs Fool it is a Uttle boy that brings his elders to a reaUsation of their George Sand 231 love, and the whole is treated with a most dainty charm, as though she truly loved the peasants of whom she wrote. Then the collapse of socialism in 1849 g^^e her back wholly to her art. She sees that " direct allusions to pre- sent ills, the appeal to fermenthig passions, is not the road to salvation. Better a gentle song, a rustic pipe, a tale to lull little children without fear or pain, than the spectacle of real woes reinforced and darkened by the colours of fiction." Thus Little Fadette becomes, as Caro says, the first pledge of the reconciliation of Madame Sand with her genius. We can see that she has been reading to good effect her Virgil in the depths of Berry. As in The Devil's Pool she had endeavoured to render the charm of the prattle of childhood, so here she goes a step further in an endeavour to convey the flavour of rustic language, putting her story into the mouth of a countryman, but modifying his words so that she might seem, as she put it, " to speak clearly for a Parisian, simply for a peasant." Our modern dialect writers have more courage, but few have attained such a happy result in what is at best an artificial rather than an artistic excellence. The psychology of childhood, both in the twins Sylvanet and Landry and in the shrewd little Fanchon Fadet, poor yet proud, who passes for ugly till metamorphosed by her love, is admirably seized and developed with precision and yet with sympathetic pathos, and we find the same traits also in The Bell Ringers (les Maitres sonneurs, 1853). But this bucolic genre, however charming, could not long afford scope for her genius. She could not let slum- ber in her those stronger and more intense feelings that had found expression in her earlier novels. But now these qualities were to show themselves no longer obscured by 232 A Century of French Fiction the smoke of passion, but burning clear and bright in the serener air of the rich experiences of half a century. She turned first from the pastoral to the drama, whither we will not follow her, and then in the novel, which was to her the more natural genre, she took all society for her theme, and wrote a number of stories excellently told and quite free from social or political preoccupations. She tried historical novels also, returned to the working classes in The Black City (la Ville noire, 1861), and in the same year gave us her best novel of aristocratic life in The Marquis of Villemer, having in the preceding year published her most curious psychological novel, Jean de la Roche. On the whole it is perhaps these last with Mile, la Quintinie (1863) that best unite the various elements that make up her literary genius. The subject of Jean de la Roche is that studied with such marvellous acuteness in Zola's Page of Love ^ the morbid jealousy of a child, in this case a brother, in Zola's a daughter, that bars the course of normal love. This morbid passion and its physical accom- paniments are acutely dissected, and in their gradations serve as the mainspring of an action by which two noble hearts are tempered and strengthened. The whole work breathes a tender and hopeful magnanimity, and the close is more deftly managed and more artistically satisfying than is usual with George Sand. The Marquis of Villemer has for its heroine Caroline de Saint-Geneix, lady-companion to the Marchioness of Villemer, one of the most delightful aristocratic figures in fiction. She has been described as " a compHcated charac- ter, marred by the abuse of social relations, incapable of living alone, incapable even of thinking when alone, but charmingly witty when brought into touch with the wit of George Sand 233 others, whose sole joy in this world is conversation which does her the service of stirring her ideas, of drawing her from herself." Here as in Jean de la Roche the real theme is love discovering itself and overcoming some barrier not lightly to be despised or put aside. This is indeed the nature of all love stories. But in this last and most genial period of George Sand's genius the note is never forced, the situation never reaches the tension of tragedy. So again in Mile, la Qiiintinie (1863) the obstacle is religious difference in two nobly minded lovers where the indig- nation that George Sand felt at Feuillet's Sibylle (1862) never alters the self-restrained delicacy with which she portrays the various attitudes of the French mind toward Catholicism. In all these stories and in the others also we feel that the obstacle that separates the magnanimous youth and the tender maid is very largely a figment of their imagination, to be dispelled by some mutual confidence that their love impels, or perhaps by some chance. The psychology is shallow perhaps, but it is not false. You are not shown the abysses of the human heart, but you are pleased to watch the moonbeams playing on its rippling surface. George Sand seldom asks you to think. She is content to win your sympathetic interest. Indeed it is doubtful if she herself thought clearly. Her best characters are those of women, energetic and resourceful and of artistic temperament, which is only to say that, here at the last as at the first, she unconsciously introduced herself into the creatures of her imagination ; but, as her sympathy kept her ever young, her young girls, so timidly romantic, so modestly coquettish, were almost always charming. These are the special characteristics of the works of her last years, from i860 to her death, work very uneven, often 234 ^ Century of French Fiction prolix, but on the whole the most broadly human of all, and including those novels which with T/ie Devil's Pool 2xq likely to have the widest and most enduring popularity. George Sand, says Faguet, was one of the best balanced organisations that ever lived. Her mind was clear but not wide, admirable for superficial observation whether of manners or of men, fond of ideas yet not fully apprehend- ing them, with the instincts of a thinker and without his power, much more calm herself than the creations into which she poured what had begun to ferment in her mind, and so freed herself of its possession. But if her thought is not deep it is quick, and so is her feeling, which is always generous, and her imagination, which is always alert. There- fore she begins by being romantic, and she remains more or less romantic to the close, though she has described with singular felicity in Mile, la Quintinie and Mile. Merquem (1868) the transition from the romantic spirit of the reign of Louis Philippe to the materialistic, positive spirit of the Second Empire, a transition of which it has been said that it left fathers more youthful in feeling than their own sons. To George Sand, whether as individual or as novelist, love is the mainspring of life. " Nothing is strong in me but the necessity of loving," she writes. It is love alone, sexual, parental, or altruistic, that gives meaning and value to existence or meaning and charm to nature. It is love alone, and in the greater part of her novels, sexual love, that is the motive of all effort, the inspiration of all struggle. If one can love without effort and without struggle, if there is no obstacle, the rest of paradise has begun on earth, there is nothing more for the lovers to do but to exist and love. Of course this is most marked in the novels of the first period, where it reaches at times an exaggeration that is George Sand 235 almost comic. The altruistic element is most marked in the second period, and later we find a fusion of both. There is in her attitude a touch of mysticism. " Love," she tells us, in Valentine^ " is superior to all other sentiments because it has a divine origin." In Jacques we are told that Providence presides even over inconstancy, an idea developed with eloquent ingenuity in Luci-ezia Floriani (1847), ^^d even as late as 1857, in Daniella love is presented as an initiation into a fuller comprehension of Deity. " There is no crime where there is sincere love," says Jacques. Society is responsible. Of course when George Sand writes thus she means by love what Goethe means by his Eternal Womanly, "the holy aspiration of the most ethereal part of our soul toward the unknown," as she makes L^lia say. But this mystic Plato- nism has never far to seek for its sensuous symbol, and we do not need to go outside her own novels to find a mock- ing commentary on what Caro calls " the hallucinations of cynical chastity." Out of this theory of her first period, that love is a divine thing that brooks no contradiction, springs naturally the view of her second period, that it aboHshes social distinc- tions of wealth or caste. By this she appealed to the in- stinct of sacrifice that characterises romantic love, and she won the sympathy of many who, it is to be hoped, did not try to practise her preaching. For love does not level ranks, though it is to this thought that we owe the generous and gracious inspiration that created some of her most charming young women, the Marie of The DeviPs Fool, the Caroline of Marquis de Villefnery Genevieve, Edm^e, and Consuelo. But to one who has this conception of the sacred rights 236 A Century of French Fiction of passion, submission to the conventions, moral and social, becomes a fault, if not an impossibility. There is in her work no Christian resignation. The pride of passion quiv- ers through it all. Hence the declamatory element in her second period. Hence, too, those strikes for moral free- dom and appeals for social liberty, those prophetic visions of conjugal Utopias in the work of the first period, though she says herself, in response to some criticisms of Nisard, that her nature is that of a poet rather than of a legislator, and that she may well have said in her haste " social laws " when she meant " social prejudices," abuses, or vices. Her attacks, first on marriage, and then on social conven- tions generally, on what she called " the infamous decrepi- tude of the world," being based on sentiment and instinct rather than on coherent reason, on the inspiration of ambi- ent socialism rather than on original thought, naturally yielded to the experience of life. Valvedre (1861) contra- dicts yiair^z^^^ (1834). The most that can be said for the socialistic novels is that they are more readable than any of the works that inspired them, and that they are the aberra- tions of a good heart as well as of a great genius. But what if we bring this heart and this genius back to nature ? Let country scenes soothe the disappointed political re- former, and let their mysterious charm calm her perturbed spirit. For her poet nature this will be the most favourable of all environments, not merely for the development of her powers of artistic description, but for healthy ethical growth. No one has watched nature with such sympathetic closeness as she who says that she has "always found it infinitely more beautiful than she expected," and never gloomy save in the hours when she saw it with gloomy eyes. So, to her, nature was both a consolation and a recreation^ George Sand 237 for as she says again : " The creations of art speak to the mind alone, but the spectacle of nature speaks to all faculties. It penetrates us through all pores as through all ideas. To the purely intellectual sentiment of admiration the sight of the countryside adds a sensual pleasure. The freshness of the brooks, the perfumes of the plants, the harmonies of the winds circulate in the blood and the nerves at the same time that the splendour of their colours and the beauty of their forms insinuate themselves into the imagination." If one sees nature with such eyes one will not describe it objectively. It will always be a response to human feeling or a symbol of human thought. The smell of sage clinging to the hand from some now distant mountain plant will sug- gest *' how precious a thing is perfume, which taking noth- ing from the plant whence it emanates clings to the hand of a friend and follows him on his journey to charm him, and to recall to him long the beauty of the flower that he loves. The perfume of the soul is memory." Passages like this are found in her work from the outset. Almost always the psychic situation stands in relation to landscape, and therefore almost all her stories are of country life, of men in touch with nature, responding and corresponding to their environment, which in its turn seems to sympathise with them. It was fitting that her last thought should have been of her garden, and her last words, " Don't destroy the green." George Sand was of no literary school and answered to no shibboleth. No novelist ever had in greater measure the story-telling instinct, the perennial flow of imagination. No sooner had she written the last word of one story than she was ready to begin another. She knew no anxious 238 A Century of French Fiction elaboration. She never took, as Balzac tells us he did, ten days to think out a story before putting pen to paper, much less the laborious years of Flaubert's literary gestation. Her mind was full of interesting situations. She selected what struck her fancy and " let her pen trot." When the situation ceased to interest her she drew her work to a close, preferring to give literary life to another of the crowding children of her brain. Naturally and inevitably, then, her work lacks design and ordered composition. Quickly conceived it passed almost as quickly from her mind, until presently she could hardly recall the characters or situations of former creations of her fancy. She could never have knit her volumes into the unity of the Human Coffiedy, Her characters are not real to her, as Balzac's were to him. For while the details of her work are ob- served with minute realism she is apt to combine these into *' superior beings " and romantic adventures, even when she proposes to write a book "wholly of analysis and medi- tation," such as the half- autobiographic Lucrezia Floriani (1847). But even here there is more realism than we at first perceive, for the romantic generation had a mode of expressing passion that was all its own, and George Sand did not escape the spirit of her time any more than Balzac escaped it. As romanticism began to wane she became conscious of this tendency to exaggeration. So in a preface to Lucrezia Floriani she tells us that she " loves romantic events, the unforeseen, intrigue, action," and yet " does all she can to keep the literature of her time in a practicable path between the peaceful lake and the torrent." Her instinct would urge her to the abyss, but with calmer reason she sees that the torrent of imagination has pushed before it acts of un- George Sand 239 reason, or of crude improbability, and "a retrograde move- ment forces her back toward the smooth and monotonous lake of analysis," and as she does not recompose her story the reader has to make all these transitions with the author, and the novel loses in art what it gains in freshness of con- ception. It is only occasionally that the inspiration re- mains with her to the end, and then the excellence that she attains is rather the gift of genius than the conquest of tal- ent and will. In this she forms the most striking contrast possible to the novelists of the scientific generation who fol- lowed, or even to her early contemporary Balzac. From the point of view of the originators of fiction, no book would be a good novel that was not a good story. Many of our modern novelists might well shrink from the application of this canon. None could bear it with more equanimity than George Sand, in spite of her lack of delicate reserve and concise sobriety. If now from her general conception of the novelist's art we pass to her style in the narrower sense of diction, it would seem that she had almost from the very first the qualities that distinguished her to the last. Her style was like herself, full, rounded, supple, mobile, almost always easy, often fiery, sometimes too high-pitched and over-em- phatic, and sometimes passionately eloquent. She seemed to possess, instinctively, all the resources of the language, writing well as naturally as most write ill, and so falling sometimes into the fault of her talent, into that facile pro- lixity that leaves no scope for revery, and mars at times the work of all natural stylists, such as Hugo, and rarely that of the conscious artists, such as Flaubert. A worse fault than prolixity is the occasional false emphasis, the author being 240 A Century of French Fiction carried by a stream of words beyond the depth of her ideas. And then, sometimes, she plays with her talent, giving free bridle to fancy in long conversations that doubtless amused her, and may amuse us, but do not advance the story. And finally the books date themselves as of the romantic school by an excess of sentiment and of false notes in its expres- sion. But all this need not, and should not, blind us to a merit and charm that no change in popular taste can take away, though George Sand's fame will, no doubt, seem to rise and fall as the literary pendulum sways between realism and idealism. It surely reached its lowest point in 'the decade that followed her death (1876), and now tends to wax with the waning of pseudo-scientific fiction. But whether she be widely read or generally forgotten, it is but justice to say, as has been said, that there is hardly a woman anywhere to-day whose life she has not affected, for her influence has been felt in every changed idea in the re- lation of the sexes in our generation. And more, in French literature her influence has been steadily tonic. For there pulsed through her a splendid confidence in the power of the human will ; she was as fundamentally and naturally optimistic as Madame de Stael. If she protested against marriage it was only in the name of purity. All her ex- cesses grew from her greatness of soul. As Matthew Arnold has well said, " though others in the literature of our century may have been greater, wiser, purer, more poetic, the most varied and attractive influence is hers." Her passions and errors will be forgotten, while "the immense vibration of her voice will not soon pass away. There will remain of her the sense of benefit and of stimulus from the passage upon earth of that large and frank nature, that George Sand 241 large and pure utterance — the utterance of the early gods. There will remain an admiring and ever widening report of that great soul, simple, affectionate, without vanity, without pedantry, human, equitable, patient, kind. ... In her case we shall not err if we adopt the poet's faith, — * And feel that she is greater than we k'Sow.' " x6 CHAPTER XI GUSTAVE FLAUBERT DURING the first half of the nineteenth century the two French writers of most commanding genius are surely Hugo and Balzac, Hugo for imagination and form, for lan- guage and style, Balzac for the breadth of his conceptions, for his scientific spirit and psychologic insight. And now at the opening of the second half- century comes one who seeks to unite the minute realistic vision of Balzac with the highest rhetorical skill, and we have the few precious mas- terpieces of Gustave Flaubert ; only five volumes as against Balzac's fifty, but five volumes that can perish only with the extinction of literary art. For his labour was as intense, as indefatigable, as that which piled up the half-hundred vol- umes of the Human Comedy, and it was more prolonged. There are few, if any, men of letters whose life has been a more enduring martyrdom to an endeavour to realise what was perhaps an unattainable ideal. If it be true to say, with Bourget, that French prose is unique among all languages of the world for its capabilities of polished precision, if France possesses the kingdom of the Written Phrase, surely Gustave Flaubert is a king in this realm, who, though dead, has as yet no successor. But the importance of these five volumes is not only in their faultless style, but also in the precision with which they enunciate a view of the art of fiction that was to exer- cise a dominating influence on the succeeding generation. Gustave Flaubert 243 It seemed, says Zola, as though with the appearance of Madame Bovary^ m 1857, the code of the new art, " the formula of the modern novel, scattered through the colossal work of Balzac had been deduced and clearly enunciated in these four hundred pages." It became a type, a definite model. " Not one of the beginners of that day who has come to anything that will not recognise at the least an initiator in Gustave Flaubert." He was born in 182 1. His father. Dr. Achille Flaubert, was chief surgeon at the hospital at Rouen, where his virtues have remained legendary, and he bequeathed many of them to his son, in whom he would have desired to see his suc- cessor. Gustave Flaubert had always a certain unerring power of psychic dissection. His interest in truth con- quered, or at least he strove to make it conquer, any mani- festations of personal sympathy, and this gave to his writing the appearance of hardness. But for medicine he had no aptitude. Indeed, it is rare that any vocation is more strongly or earlier marked than his for literature. The first letter of his correspondence, written at the age of nine to a schoolfellow, proposes a literary partnership in which he should write the comedies, and to the end he welcomed no diversion from his art. In this aspiration he found, how- ever, no sympathy at home. But the family were wealthy, he was able to travel on leaving school, and since he showed no aptitude for medicine he began in 1 840 to study law and literature in Paris, returning, however, for consider- able periods to Rouen, and already blighted with the knowl- edge that he was an epileptic. The influences, both at Paris, and previously at school, were strongly romantic. At fourteen he had conceived a violent love for a lady whom he has pictured as Madame Arneux in Sentimental Educa- / 244 ^ Century of French Fiction fion, and from 1846 to 1854 he carried on a tender corre- spondence with Madame Colet, a Hterary lady of some dis- tinction in Paris, His first sympathies were wholly with the men of the thirties. " I do not know," he writes, in a no- tice prefixed to the poems of a schoolmate, Louis Bouilhet, "what may be the dreams of schoolboys now-a-days, but ours were superbly extravagant. Inspired by the remote echoes of romanticism . . . those gifted with enthusiastic hearts sighed for dramatic scenes of love with the obligatory gondolas, masks, and ladies swooning in post-chaises on Calabrian hills ; sterner minds aspired to the conspirator's sword. . . . And we were not only troubadours, revolution- ists, and orientalists ; above all we were artists. We ruined our eyes reading novels in the dormitory, we carried dag- gers in our pockets like Antony. . . . We merited little praise, but then how we hated everything mean, how pas- sionate was our craving for greatness, . . . how we wor- shipped Victor Hugo." Meantime the young enthusiast of beauty was growing up in the most prosaic of all recent French regimes. He found himself therefore with a nature and an education out of touch with his surroundings, and it is such natures as that, in various environments, that he has chosen for the special object of his study. Having no sympathy with the materialistic trend of a democratic society, and wishing also to hide an infirmity of which the dread was never absent from his mind, he became more and more a recluse. With the exception of two journeys to the East and to Carthage, both undertaken for literary ends, he spent his life between his suburban house at Rouen and occasional visits to Paris. At times he would remain cloistered for months together, and after his mother's death there was little of luxury or Gustave Flaubert 245 even of comfort in surroundings where everything spoke of the unremitting study in which he sought consolation for the domestic Ufe that his disease forced him to forego. This had a controlling influence on his artistic point of view. "All the occurrences of life appeared to me," he says, "as material for description. Nothing, even my own existence, has to me any other significance." That is to say, literature was to him an end in itself. He was the type of the artist for art's sake, and naturally so, because it was in art that he sought diversion from the pain of self- contemplation, from his epileptic's fear of life. If litera- ture was to be his consolation it could be so only by being rigidly, uncompromisingly objective. He defends this view of the novelist's art with passionate iteration in the whole series of his ten years' correspondence with George Sand. It was under these circumstances and with these aims, personal and literary, that he wrote Madame Bovary, which was first published in the Revue de Farts, during the last quarter of 1856. Precisely how long he had had it in hand is not clear, possibly since 1852, for though he worked intently and incessantly, " eighteen hours out of the twenty-four," it is said, his interest was in the labour, not in its completion. " I have in my mind," he writes, " a cer- tain method of writing, a certain fitness of style that I seek to attain. . . . When the time comes and I think I have plucked the apricot I may be willing to sell it and let people applaud if they find it good. But if by that time it is too late, if nobody cares for it any more, never mind." " I seek something better than success, I seek to please myself."\ Once before the public Madame Bovary attracted 246 A Century of French Fiction immediate and wide attention, stimulated at first no doubt by the astounding fatuity of the government, who saw fit to prosecute its author and pubHsher for immorality, and that in the heyday of the Second Empire. The prosecuting attorney's speech is such a monument to human imbecility as almost to make Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet super- fluous, and the acquittal was accompanied with " considera- tions " that one would have expected rather under the Long Parliament in England than in the France of Louis Napoleon. The ultimate result was to make the author famous in spite of himself, and to make of his first novel a starting-point of a new school in fiction, as The Lady with'- the Camellias four years before had been in the drama. Madame Bovary is not only not romantic, it is the bit- terest satire on romanticism. Its scene is the world of commonplace and the lesson of it is that in that world sentiment leads to shipwreck, and self-sufficient mediocrity to success. And in this, as Sainte-Beuve observed at the time, it marks the new epoch, the epoch of science, minute observation, maturity, and contempt or dread of sentimental sympathy. Holding his pen in the same spirit that his father had held the dissecting knife, he lays bare for us here first the weary banality of provincial life, and then the hope- lessness of the romantic revolt against banality. There is of course another solution of the difficulty and a brighter side to the picture, but that it is not his present purpose to see. Throughout the book we shall not find a person to imitate or an act to admire. The first of the personages to be introduced to us and one of the most interesting characters of the book is Charles Bovary, a doctor mediocre and almost contemptible even in his goodness, as true to nature and as common in real Gustave Flaubert 247 life as he is fatuous and banal. We see him first at school, the typical dull pupil, then struggling through his medical examinations and bundled by his parents into a marriage that was not expected to bring him sympathy, and did not actually bring him money. Then he is attracted to the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, Emma, the chief figure of the novel, whom after his first wife's death he awkwardly courts and presently marries, himself apparently the more innocent of the two ; for Emma's education had been that of religious sentiment spiced by Lamartine's poetry, English Keepsakes and romantic novels, a deliberate perversion of soul, the results of which it is the purpose of this novel to show. Charles was happy in his marriage. " He went about ruminating his bliss like those who savour still after dinner the taste of the truffles they are digesting." Emma mean- time was still " seeking to discover just what in life people meant by the words 'felicity,' 'passion,' ' intoxication,' that had seemed to her so beautiful in books." Clearly her hus- band was not one of those gentlemen " brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as men never are, always well dressed, and who wept like water jars," of whom she had read at fifteen in novels from the circulating library. His conversation was " flat as a street sidewalk." She grew weary of his monotonous caresses, and presently an event came into her life that acted as a transforming yeast in her moral nature. She was invited to an aristocratic ball. From the moment that she had come in contact with this new social sphere there began to grow in her a ferment that did not cease till it had destroyed her, body and soul. In her desire she confounded the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of 248 A Century of French Fiction sentiment. " She desired at the same instant to die, and to live in Paris." Her husband, watching her lassitude with stupid affection, thought a change of environment would help her, sacrificed his growing practice to her incip- ient infidelity, and was doubtless despised the more for his affection. Their new home was still in Normandy, at Yonville near Rouen. Here the passive incubation of Emma's moral disease reaches a critical stage. She meets L^on, a law student who shares her romantic sympathies, but he is too timid and she not yet sufficiently corrupt that their relations should pass beyond the platonic, and he leaves Yonville to pursue legal studies and lose somewhat of his naivetd in Paris. At this point we are introduced to M. Homais, a charac- ter as typical as any in the novel, and so finely drawn as to have become almost from the first a byword. He is the incarnation of commonplace, " one of our first citizens, pompous, a self-made man, and believing in his maker," but a shrewd intriguer, knowing how to use the press and to manufacture and guide public opinion, with his mouth always full of half-masticated science, the bright peony- flower of mediocracy, just the man to impose himself on the masses, and on those whom they naturally choose to govern them, and to be crowned with honour and deco- rated with the Cross at the story's close, — the true type of "triumphant democracy." Set off against Homais is the curate Bournisien, he too hopelessly commonplace and unable to comprehend, much less to guide, poor Emma's aspirations toward a higher social life, and to teach her to bear ennui, to create for herself worthy aims, or at least innocent distractions. .A number of minor characters also Gustave Flaubert 249 make their appearance, — the sacristan Lestiboudois, the notary Guillaumin, the money-lending merchant Lheureux, — all admirably individualised, but none of them essential to our present purpose save only the burly country gentle- man Rodolphe, to whose vulgarity, masked under a veneer of sentiment that is the ironical echo of her own, Emma falls victim after having tried to get sentimental consola- tion in religion, and finding it, when so approached, as stale and as commonplace as her domestic relations. The courtship of Rodolphe is a scene of admirable irony. The mocking parody of romantic sentiment is relentlessly bitter as he whispers his temptation to her at a country fair, between the pauses of a politician's speech in which fatuous demagogy reaches its artistic climax and ultimate expression. The fatal step once taken, "the summits of sentiment seemed to be sparkling beneath her, thought and ordinary existence appeared only far away, below, in shadow between the intervals of these heights." But from this pinnacle she is drawn irresistibly down to the common- place, and below it to the base, the sensuous, — yes, there are moments when we see, as by a flash, that she would not shrink from the criminal, from murder itself. In vain she beats her poor wings to rise to the heights of senti- ment, and strains language to make it say what she can no longer feel. " Their great love seemed to diminish be- neath her like the water of a river that had been absorbed into its bed, of which she saw now the muddy bottom.'* The eternal monotony of passion wearied her lover also, and when in utter desperation of thwarted romanticism she suggests flight together, he writes her a letter, over which he sprinkles water with his fingers to simulate tears, and elects to travel alone. 250 A Century of French Fiction The shock was terrible. Again she sought refuge in the religious sentiment, "addressing to the Lord the same tender words that once she had murmured to her lover," and comparing herself, in the pride of her devotion, to La Valli^re. To distract her, Charles takes her to the opera at Rouen, and we have a good pendant scene to Fielding's Partridge at the theatre. The sentiment of Italian opera is poison to her, and when now she meets L6on once more she is so charmed with the situation, and with the necessity of defending herself, that she neglects the defence. Admirable is the account of the mental and moral disintegration of Emma under this new relation. She comes to feel a cowardly docility toward her husband, and at the same time plunges into debt and reckless false- hood ; but, since " she was more charming for her husband than ever, made him pistache-cream-cakes, and played waltzes after dinner," he thought himself the happiest of mortals. We need not follow her in the last steps of this corruption, " almost immaterial, it was so deep and so dissimulated." Here as before it is a desperate and a vain struggle to sat- isfy false sentiment, culminating in the revelation that the second idol of her romantic fancy was a sensual coward as the first had been a sensual Don Juan. Here, then, is her final shipwreck. Abandoned with a base subterfuge by L^on, once more rejected " with that natural pusillanimity that characterises the strong sex" by Rodolphe, without once suspecting, so distorted had her moral sense become, the depth of such abasement, the only refuge that remained to her from the bitter dregs of sentiment deceived and mocked was poison. Her education had made it impossi- ble for her to adapt herself to the actual world. Her ideals Gustave Flaubert 251 of religion were as unreal to her as her ideals of domestic or of social life. Flaubert would have us regard her as a typical victim of romanticism, somewhat overcharged, as all types are apt to be, and yet essentially true. She is the tragic reduction to the absurd of romantic love, and with all her faults more sinned against than sinning. Admirable in its unflinching realism is the description of her last hours, to which the mortal banality of the funeral is a most artistic foil. To the last and even beyond the grave she held the love of the poor simple Charles, whose vulgar head, as Sainte-Beuve says, needs but a single touch of the sculptor's thumb to become nobly pathetic. Even when he discovers her faults he blames himself rather than her or her lovers, feeling perhaps, in his dim way, that she too was of those who love not wisely but too well, a victim of her environment. Such is the story and such the social and ethical bearing of Madame B ovary ^ but no summary can do justice to the many passages of vivid narration or of exquisite descrip- tion, whose studied euphony appears first when they are read aloud, as Flaubert himself was wont to read repeatedly every paragraph that he wrote. Only when we subject them to such tests do we realise how some of his pages stand, as he himself said, " by the sheer power of their style, balanced like the earth without support in the heavens," now with the serenity of a Grecian marble, now with the finished detail of a Dutch master, now with the subtle harmony of Lydian airs or with the sinuous grace of a Tennysonian song ; quite lost on the majority of readers, but an enduring delight to the few, as surely they were to their author. And then there are scattered up and down through the book a multitude of happily turned phrases, usually 252 A Century of French Fiction uf irony, where we seem to see the author poising on his needle-point the acid drop and placing it with slow, delicate precision upon the quivering nerve. The danger of romantic imagination — such had been the subject of Madame Bovary^ and such continued to be the subject of Salainmbd seven years later, but with a radical difference ; for while in Madame B ovary ^ he had used the realistic method on his own Normandy, he undertook here to apply it to an age and land of which his ideas were in- evitably the products of trained imagination, the Carthage of 240 to 237 B. c, during the revolt of the mercenaries that followed the first Punic War. He called this "epic realism." The result is an interesting literary feat, more interesting, perhaps, than Chateaubriand's Martyrs^ with which it is natural to compare it, but the book is not so popular, and surely it is not so significant as Madame Bovary. It does not live as a whole. Its characters may be true or not for their country and time, but they are not true for us. We do not sympathise with them, because we do not understand them, and therefore their fate rouses a languid interest beside Emma's shipwreck and Homais* success. There seems to be, as an acute critic has said, a disproportion between the subject and the means used in treating it. To recount the story is quite unnecessary to our purpose, but it contains passages, and they are not a few, which in picturesque brilliancy surpass anything attempted in the former novel. One of these is at the very opening, an orgiac feast granted by the timorous Carthaginians to their mercenaries returned from the long war with Rome. The confusion of peoples, customs, and languages, the varied profusion of meats and drinks, the gradations of drunken recklessness, Gustave Flaubert 253 the apparition of Salammbo in mystic splendour chanting her rhythmic liturgies, — all this is done with great skill ; and an African sunrise in this chapter is perhaps the finest half- page that Flaubert ever penned. But the story is ill-artic- ulated. Its construction is defective not merely artistically, but logically. The style may be always restrained, but the subjects, crucified lions, immolations to Moloch, and the like, are intentionally bizarre. Flaubert may tell us nothing that is not suggested by his scanty authorities, but he does not treat them in a critical spirit. All that could be observed by the attentive traveller is handled as well, possibly better here than in Madame Bovary^ but what could not be observed, the psychology, is at least fanciful and illusory. It attains the exotic only by ceasing to be broadly human. Salammbo, as the author shows her here and as she appears throughout, is too " different," in Stendhal's sense, from any type of mind that we know, to be interesting or even intelligible to us. Though passing her life in virgin adoration of the feminine principle of fecundity, Tanit, to which Moloch is the corresponding male principle, it is as a Venus Urania that she worships her, and her days are passed in an unaroused innocence of mystic revery. She is, in fact, as Sainte-Beuve says, a sort of sentimental Elvire, as unreal as that figment of Lamartine's romantic dreams, and suggesting also the Vell^da of Chateaubriand's MartyrSy as romantic, though of course from her environment more artificial than she. It may be that the modes of thought and feeling in ancient Carthage were radically different from ours. If they were, then that time and country are not good subjects for historical fiction, for you can restore antiquity, but you cannot resuscitate it. Taken as a whole, then, Salammbo must be regarded as a 254 ^ Century of French Fiction failure, but it was a failure such as only a great, inde- fatigable, and high-souled artist could have made. Here more than in any other of his novels we feel the struggle between the old romanticism and the new scientific spirit. The book arouses wonder rather than sympathy. It will be admired, it will not be enjoyed. In a natural reaction against the milk-and-water antiquity of F^nelon and the Young Anairharsis it describes cruelly a cruel civilisation, but we feel, rather than know, — for who knows ? — that the impression is at least incomplete. Then, after this supping full of the horrors of Moloch, the author invites us to break- fast with the jackals and "the eaters of unclean things." There is a too constant evocation of the ghastly and weird, and the superb descriptions, magnified and irradiated by the sun of Africa, do not suffice to relieve the monotony. Seven years after the world had been perplexed by Salanunbd it was perplexed once more by Seniijnental Education (PEducation sentimentale, 1869), which fell on evil days for literature, for it appeared just as all France was intent on the life and death struggle of the Second Empire. Thus it failed to attract the critical attention that might otherwise have fallen to it, and since the novel needed criticism to be understood, it quite failed to be enjoyed. Indeed even to-day fewer critics discuss the question whether it is good than why it is bad. As the title may suggest, the novel is a pendant to Madame Bovary. That was to show the effect of sentimental education on a provincial woman ; this should show it in a Parisian, Fr^d^ric Moreau, with the revolution of 1848 and its preludes for a background. The story is of the slightest, slighter even than that of Salammbd, The book is the picture of a generation and of its political and moral bankruptcy culminating in the Second Empire. Gustave Flaubert 255 If it be urged that the novel lacks unity, Flaubert would reply that life lacks it, and that this is an advance in realis- tic art ; and as such the school of the Goncourts regarded it, with considerable temporary effect on the development of fiction. Thus to Zola it seems " the only truly historical novel that I know, the sole true, exact, complete one, in which the resurrection of dead hours is absolute, with no trace of the novelist's trade." Such an attempt may show praiseworthy daring, and to it Flaubert gave the most minute and intense study, but it was inevitable that the result of this painful gestation should lack interest, because it lacked unity. We do not seek in a novel the reproduction of life, but the impression of life. And then the tendency that we noted in Madame Bovary to present only characters of a contemptible mediocrity, whether of vice or virtue, is pushed here beyond reasonable limits. It might be as true as the multiplication table, but it would not be interesting. But is it true ? Is not Flau- bert the dupe of his own limitations? He liked to boast that he was implacable to humanity, but he forgot that he had himself said that disillusion is of the nature of weak minds. " Distrust the disgusted. They are almost always the impotent." One cannot but feel that Sentimental Education marks a growing sterility in Flaubert's genius. " Withered Fruits " was the book's original title, and the novel itself may seem to be one of them, though the book is one of considerable interest and power, and contains some very brilliant episodes. Flaubert is not merely " implacable " to humanity, he is unjust. In Madame Bovary there was a corner left for true sentiment and honest pathos. Here there is nothing of this. Nobody is magnanimous, frank, or noble \ all is petty. 256 A Century of French Fiction vulgar, contemptible. Flaubert's irony itself has no gene- rous fire, and the strongest sentiment that we feel in finish- ing the novel is pity for the man who has such an outlook on the world. We may call it " a magnificent marble temple erected to impotence," and speak of " epic plati- tude," but, as Brunetifere finely asks in connection with this novel, " Of what use is it to love art if one does not love mankind?" Throughout this long panorama of social disillusion and political incompetence the style is curbed, held rigidly down to the mediocrity of the subject. One cannot help feeling that it must have cost almost as much effort to the author as it does to the reader, though there are occasional flashes of irony that reveal the depths of human nature. Nor should the episodic scenes in the novel be forgotten, the boat trip on the Seine at the opening, the ball in the demi-monde contrasted with the cold banality of the banker's reception, and a death-bed ghastly in its egoism. Still better is the charming idyl of love at Fontainebleau, with the sad tale of the youth of Rosanette, who had found it a misfortune to have a mother. Excellent, too, are the historical scenes, the joyous sacking of the Tuileries and the brutal desperation of the mobs of June, with their yet more brutal suppression. While, then, no one would claim that Seniime7ital Education is a good novel, it may be read with profit and even with pleasure as the imaginative projection of a close study of the national mind of France in a critical period of its evolution. Again there was a pause of years in Flaubert's produc- tivity, and in 1874 he pubHshed The Temptation of Saint Antony (la Tentation de Saint Antoine) , the shortest of his novels, if indeed that name can be stretched to cover this Gustave Flaubert 257 unique production, on which we are told he had laboured for twenty years. It was a strange and paradoxical thing, this effort to convince the thoughtful of the futility of thought. In the nature of things the book could be interesting and even intelligible only to those of wide and recondite learn- ing, for under the veil of the old legend of the temptation of Saint Antony in the Thebaid, a frequent subject of medieval art, he has undertaken to exhibit to us, no longer the folly of provincial mediocrity as in Madame Bovary, or of the desires and ambitions of Parisian youth as in Senti- mental Education, or of a sordid commercial state and an ancient faith as in Sala?7imbd, but it is the folly and futility of thought itself and of the whole sentient world of which he has tried to put the quintessence in these three hundred pages of the most polished prose of our half-century. Ex- ternally the book has much the appearance of a drama, the speakers being indicated, and all description, whether of scene or action, relegated to smaller type, but yet in a style as studied and rhythmic as that of the speeches themselves. The book is nihilistic to the core, but its pessimism is romantic. Flaubert's heart is the victim of his mind. He suffers, like Antony and Salammbo and Fr6d(^ric and Emma, from the pale cast of a thought that is ever bruising itself against reality. They all are projections of the world-pain of his generation, that undercurrent of materialistic senti- ment that tells us in advance that all our ideals are dis- solving views. So Flaubert says life seemed to him, even when a boy, *' like the smell of a nauseating kitchen escaping through a ventilating hole. One had no need to taste to know that it was sickening," no need to study to learn that knowledge would but increase unsatisfied desire. Of this feeling the Temptation is the supreme expression in 17 258 A Century of French Fiction fiction. The ethics in such a case are a matter of tem- perament, or perhaps with Flaubert, of pathology. The art must be a subject of universal admiration. The book cannot appeal, however, to any but literary artists, and it has hindered rather than aided the appreciation of his genius, though Mr. Saintsbury has pronounced it the best example of dream literature in the world. llie Temptation of Saint Antony was followed three years later (1877) by three tales which represent in miniature the two sides of Flaubert's literary nature : the disgust at the sordidness of modern life, and the revels of imagination in the reconstitution of a grandiose past. The first of the tales, A Simple Heart (un Cceur simple) , has for its central figure a servant, taken as a young girl into the family of an average woman, leading an average life, suffering its usual deceptions, and dying unemancipated from its usual illu- sions. The story is told with a simplicity and restraint that is the height of art and pathos, so that it may be both read with pleasure and studied with advantage. Equal praise in another kind may be given to Julian the Hospitaller (Julian I'hospitalier), the medieval patron saint of hosts and hospitality. Flaubert finds the legend of this saint " in a series of glass paintings in a church in my country " and undertakes to tell with medieval naivete this story of the feudal noble, hunter, parricide, and penitent. The whole has something of the dim religious light of these ancient stained windows, something of their quaintness, of their sudden transitions, and of their atmosphere of miracle. It is as though the author would repay himself by this feat of the imagination for the restraint of the former story, and found in the feat such delight that, St. Julian finished, he turned to Herodias and the death of John Baptist. Gustave Flaubert 259 Here there is more historic realism. The local colour is studied in detail, though not without an element of the grandiosely romantic, but the wild discord of jarring fac- tions, the intensity of religious feeling in the seething brains of these Galileans, the haughty indifference of the materi- alised Romans, the morbid satiety of Antipas, the satanic passions of Herodias, the heartless, soulless grace of Salome, the fierce conviction of the prophet voicing itself in un- bridled denunciation, all this is as wine to Flaubert's genius, and it seems at moments as though the sun of Palestine had touched his brain also, so that the effect of the whole may be described as dazzling ; yet whether the climax is in the scene of the dungeon or in that of the dance, it might be hard to determine, so masterly are they, though so different. It is here and in Madame Bovary that Flaubert shows the least effort and attains the greatest success. But by a strange and sad perversity of a great mind already verging on mania he returned with saturnine humour to the harder and longer task, and in Bouvard and F/ciichet txtcitd a monument to human stupidity, '• the book of his revenge " he called it, with all the faults of the Sentimental Education^ and with none of the redeeming elements that might over- come the unpleasant nervous impression and persuade us to listen to his doleful lesson. Flaubert marks in fiction what Taine marks in criticism, the passage from idealism to realism, from the romantic to the naturalistic. He belongs to neither school and unites both, neither forgetting his youthful admiration for Hugo and Chateaubriand nor sanctioning Maupassant and Zola, who called him master. It was because he was romantic that he was a pessimist, and that not from reason but from sentiment. His manner, his dress, countless peculiarities 26o A Century of French Fiction recounted by friends or betrayed by letters, show how much of the romantic survived in him to the last to intensify his disillusion in a materialistic generation from which he drew his analytic temperament. With nature thus at strife within him he took refuge naturally in art, which he paradoxically regarded, not as a means, but as having its reason in itself, with " truths as useful and perhaps more precious for the public than those contained in the subject itself." From this he derived that studious objectivity that makes him see his environments in wonderful detail, but takes something from the Hfe of his characters, whom Bourget does not scruple to dismiss as " walking associations of ideas." And just as he tries to make the myriad little facts of environ- ment support character, so he systematically substitutes sensations for feehngs, the material image for the thought, and in thus making environment a link in the chain of asso- ciation to evoke the past he contributed materially to the art of novelistic development, though his own method first saw its full application in the novels of Daudet. The importance of Flaubert to the development of fiction for good or ill lies, not in his philosophy, but in his concep- tion of the novel itself as the " synthesis of romanticism and science." To take a plain, straightforward tale of common life such as that of the servant in A Simple Heart or of Fr^d^ric or of Emma Bovary or of Bovard and P^cuchet, to put it in an environment that should be minutely accu- rate, and to treat this " slice of crude life " in the most finished, polished style, a style that might win him the title of " the Beethoven of French prose," that is what Flaubert undertook to do, and it is what the whole naturalistic school have tried to do after him — first, the authors of Germinie Lacerteux, with art more meticulous than manful, then 2^1a, Gustave Flaubert 261 in the grandiose romantic pessimism of Germinal^ then Daudet with subtle delicacy, and Maupassant, the genial cynic, and Huysmans, and indeed all who follow or have ever followed the banner of naturalism. That he directed the development of the novel for a generation, and that he contributed essentially to maintain its place as a work of art, and keep it from the hands of the philistines of litera- ture, are his titles to lasting remembrance. CHAPTER XII THE GENERATION OF THE RESTORATION AFTER the battle of Waterloo and the collapse of the hopes of revolutionary dominion, republican and imperial, of the two preceding decades, there followed a notable pause in the gestation of Hterary genius. For five years the only person of literary imagination to be born was the insignificant Paul F^val. But when the romantic move- ment begins to stir the adult population of educated France, genius comes " not single file but in battalions." Fromentin opens the way in 1820. Champfleury, Feydeau, and Flau- bert follow in 1821 ; the next year Feuillet, Erckmann, Murger, Edmond de Goncourt, Ulbach saw the light, to be followed by Banville in 1823, Dumas the Younger and Enault in 1824, Chatrain in 1826, About in 1828, and as a sort of aftermath Ponson du Terrail and Cherbuliez in 1829, with Jules de Goncourt, Malot, and Fabre to mark the year of Hernani and the victory of romanticism. This decade, then, furnishes nineteen more or less distinguished names, while the preceding one counted but six and the succeed- ing years to the birth of Zola but nine, and all of these distinctly of the second rank, to be succeeded in 1840 by another outburst of genius that gives its character to the generation of Louis Philippe. Of the novelists born during the Restoration, the most significant in the evolution of fiction is surely Flaubert, whose work and place have just been considered. After The Generation of the Restoration 263 him the most important, though far from the most popular, writers are the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who show the same delight in minute observation as Flau- bert, while they force the elaboration of his style into an artificiality that presages the painful strivings of the symbo- lists to translate feelings and emotions into words. The Goncourt Brothers have been called the Chopins of litera- ture, as brilliant, as sensitive, and as incorrectly elegant. They had, as all their studies show, an excessively acute perception of the psychic impression conveyed by inanimate objects. They were, as some one has said, " magicians of letters," who gave colour to sound and melody to colour in a "plastic psychology " that made all their contemporaries in fiction in some degree their debtors. They attained this by a thoroughly individual and intensely modern style, often bizarre, sometimes faulty, but always supple and clear and quick. They were artists of such exquisite sensitive- ness that their work seems often brought forth in pain and cherished with redoubled love because of long public neg- lect. Indeed the tardy recognition accorded to their fiction found Jules already dead, and Edmond an invalid broken in health and hope. Their work was by no means confined to novels. By their discovery for France of the art of Japan and by careful studies of their favourite eighteenth century, whose social life they treated in many volumes, they won the regard of connoisseurs and of a wider public. They essayed the drama also. Indeed their first novel of note, Charles Demailly, was elaborated from an unsuccessful play. But their writing began with fiction, and it is by their fiction that they exercised the deepest influence on the literature of the naturalistic generation. 264 A Century of French Fiction Both the Goncourts were born in Paris. The younger died just before the outbreak of the Prussian war. The elder lived till 1895. They were of distinguished family, and educated in the best Parisian schools. Deep affection united them from childhood. Their instinctive movements, sympathies, antipathies were always in accord, their ideas seemed born in common. Their mother died in 1848, and the brothers, having a small competence, resolved to devote their lives wholly to art and letters. They travelled leisurely in France and Algeria, in Belgium and Switzerland, and on their return to Paris in 1850 began to write unactable vaudevilles and a novel, /7 18- (En 18-, 185 1) which had the ill fate to be ready for issue on the very day of the coup d'etat. But sixty copies of this book were ever sold, and the story, though since reprinted in Belgium (1884), is interesting chiefly as an extreme example of the affectations of dying romanticism. It is unintelligible and uninteresting in mat- ter, and in manner disjointed, rococco, and strange. Ed- mond himself, writing in 1884, says : " It is an exasperating search for wit, a dialogue whose spoken language is made out of bookish phrases," in a style compounded of Gautier and Janin. Yet the watchful critic may find in it passages of admirable description, showing the line of future de- velopment, so that it is "an interesting embryo of the later romances," as Edmond remarks, and a curious antici- pation of the later modes of thought of the authors, of their Japanese taste, their determinism and pessimism. It was a strange presentiment, too, that the heroine of this tale should be a Prussian spy. Nine years later, in i860, the Goncourts returned to fic- tion and sought in Charles Demailly to do for the journal- The Generation of the Restoration 265 ism of i860 what Balzac had done for that of 1839 in Lost Illusions. The book errs from exaggeration and repetition, and still more from indiscretion, a fault of which Edmond was guilty to the last. It cost the authors five hundred francs, and it cost them also many friendships, for most of the literary men of the day figure in it, and if Gautier, Flau- bert, and Saint- Victor are treated with kindness, Banville, Champfleury, Houssaye, and Villemessant are handled with scant respect. The morbid, nervous, eloquent, and extreme Demailly is more interesting than any of these, for he is a composite of the authors themselves, a victim of his sensi- tive nature and of an ill-assorted marriage. The book was, however, quite inferior to their next novel. Sister Philomene (Soeur Philomene), by which they first began to influence the thoughtful writers of the new school. Sister Philomene (1861) is a reahstic story of a sister of charity and of hospital life, founded on the experience of a medical friend at Rouen, who had seen a nun reveal in a flash her love for a dead patient, and never again betray any trace of the sorrow that was eating her heart. The youth and gradually maturing vocation of this sister is handled with great psychologic insight. It is delicate and subtle, with greater reserve than the later naturalists are wont to show, and with a little inclination to mysticism. The story is also far bet- ter constructed than Demailly, but what attracted and held attention was the minute description of hospital and amphi- theatre, with their tortured, quivering life, which, however, marked a dangerous step toward that topsy-turvy ideal- ism that was to make the fancy delve where the romanti- cists had let it soar. The novel becomes painful at times to almost every reader, though it is significant of the tendencies of that day that Flaubert should say that to his taste there 266 A Century of French Fiction were not in it horrors enough. This novel was dramatised with some success in 1887. Renee Maupeririy of 1864, had for its original title "The Young Bourgeoisie," and so marked a return to a conven- tional respectability. Here they say they undertake " to paint the modern girl as the artistic and boyish education of the last thirty years have made her," and to show the effect on young men of the success of the parliamentary regime. We can trace the beginnings of this social study in t\iQ Journal (i. 146) of the brothers as early as 1856. The heroine and many of the circumstances and minor characters of the tragic story were real, and in Denoisel we have another composite of the authors as they conceived themselves. Rende, after unwittingly causing the death of her brother, that "perfect model of official banality," is frightened at herself, lets fall " the ironical mask that covered her virgin face," and becomes before her death a timid girl again. This close is of great artistic power, but, as Saint-Victor said at the time, " the art of the story is effaced beneath the emotions that it excites, and we are touched before we admire." Critics think this the best of the Goncourts* novels, and Daudet certainly learned from it much of his art, but it has never won popularity and an attempt to dramatise it in 1886 was an utter failure. The Goncourts were now about to produce the most epoch-making of all their novels, Germinie Lacerteux, which was, as they justly said, " the model of all that has since been constructed under the name of realism or naturalism," and so made 1865 a cardinal date in the evolution of French fiction. In their Preface they formulated their purpose and that may speak for them. "We asked ourselves," they say, *' if what are called the lower classes have no right to The Generation of the Restoration 267 novelistic treatment; if this world beneath a world, the people, is to remain under a literary interdict, ... if there are any classes too unworthy, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too ill-sounding, catastrophes too ignoble in their terror; we were curious to know if, in a country without caste or legal aristocracy, the miseries of the humble and poor would appeal to interest, emotion, and pity as much as the miseries of the great and rich." Now all this was to claim for the novel a new function and a wider scope as a realis- tic study of contemporary moral psychology and social investigation. The Goncourts were first to make the novel a pulpit for the religion of humanity, an idea eagerly em- braced by Zola and his school, so that Germinie is histori- cally hardly less significant than Madame Bovary. Here first the morbid pathology of one vulgar in her virtues as in her vices is made the subject of minute scientific study, not by way of romantic contrast, as it might have been in Hugo, but as the centre and mainspring of all, as it was to be in r Assomnioir and in Germinal. From the QoxizoyxxX.'^' Journal for July and August, 1862, we learn that persons and events in the novel were almost all within the authors' own immediate experience. Germinie was their own servant ; Mile, de Varandeuil, that curious survival of pre-revolutionary aristocracy, was their relative ; Jupillon, the base minister to Germinie's disease, and his mother who ministered to his vice, lived across the street. But though all might be true, all was certainly sordid, and the critics of good society either protested with upturned eyes or shielded themselves in silence. None but Claretie and Zola then recognised the book's significance. For Germinie Lacerteux is the real origin of PAssommoir, of Nana and of all her swarming progeny. It proclaimed the 268 A Century of French Fiction divorce between fiction and respectability. It made the novel the most effective means of claiming justice for those outcasts of society who " could find on earth no more place for their bodies than for their hearts." Manette Salomon, which followed Germinie Lacerteux in 1867, marks the beginning of a further development in their literary method. Sure that art could not mend nature, they sought to approach more nearly to the appar- ent lack of continuity that the observation of real life pre- sented to them. Nature for them should be not only unadorned but unarranged. They would discard all con- ventions of structure. Their book should neither have nor seek artistic unity. Its heroine should not appear till the one hundred seventy-ninth page of what is less a story than a series of scenes, masterly in their verbal precision, ad- mirable in their picturesque detail of Parisian artist life, making, as a contemporary critic said, " the work of the human brain as visible, as palpable, and as real as life." Coriolis, the painter, is shown us on each step of the descent into the inferno of union with the reckless and heartless Manette, " to whom sex was only form," and who sapped his soul till he sank to imbecility, as Demailly had been harassed to mania. For to these hyper-sensitive brothers woman seemed less an aid than a fetter to genius. They thought of her as the men of their favourite eighteenth century thought, not at all with the mind of the generation nursed on the milk of Rousseau. Manette Salomon attracted but little attention, for the times were out of joint and men's minds more set on politics than on literature. And this was still more the case with Madame Gervaisats, the last novel of their fraternal co- operation, containing some of the greatest feats in all im- The Generation of the Restoration 269 pressionist prose, but adhering so relentlessly to their theory as to " sterilise their human documents," to borrow a phrase from Zola. Daudet, to whom this story served as model for The Evangelist^ pronounced Madame Gervaisais " the most complete, the most incontestably beautiful, but also the most disdainful and haughtily personal of their books." It is, once more, a series of pictures of stages in the corrosion, by morbid mysticism, of a mind burdened with culture, till at last it succumbs wholly to the spell of Roman Catholicism, hypnotised by its pomps, its incense and its chants. Of course, therefore, it called down the interdict of the Church, while the chaste censors of the Empire pronounced it " a dangerous, immoral, and anti- religious book." It is in fact a psychologic study, coldly dispassionate, of the religious spirit, to be enjoyed only by the judicious few. The coldness of the public to their art might have been anticipated, for it had been invited j but the brothers felt it keenly, and it seems to have hastened Jules's death, while for a time Edmond was lamed in mind by his disappoint- ment and his loss. It was not till 1877 that he published his next novel, Eliza (la Fille Elisa), of which the subject was calculated neither to disarm opposition nor to widen the circle of his readers; for here he descends beneath the social stratum of Germinie to the brothel and the prison, championing the naturalistic theory of fiction to the utter- ance and raising a decided storm, which raged long enough to give the author his first commercial success. The double purpose of the book is to study the psychology of prosti- tution, and to raise an indignant protest against the iniquity of solitary confinement recently introduced in French prisons. 270 A Century of French Fiction In The Brothers Zemganno (les Freres Zemganno, 1879) he continued still on the outskirts of society, giving what many regard as the choicest work of his fancy to a study of fraternal love in two circus acrobats. In a preface he says he chooses such subjects as these because the life of the cultured is more complex. There is in the book, as might be expected, a good deal of psychic autobiography, but it is most remarkable for its vivid descriptions of a tinsel existence and the undulating or darting movements of the life of the hippodrome. In La Faustin Goncourt passes in 1882 from the circus to the stage, and " grazes the boundary of truth in his search for strongly poetic situations " in an endeavour to show, as Bourget puts it, " how an actress's nervous system assimilates its environment." The novel is of peculiar critical interest because it seems to anticipate by several years the next stage in the evolution of fiction, the de- naturalization of the novel by the introduction of the mysterious, the weird, and even the satanic, as we see it now especially in Huysmans. In like manner it might be claimed that The Brothers Zemganno had in it the germs of the symbolist movement, and Madame Gervaisais of the psychism of Bourget. This is the meaning of Edmond de Goncourt's claim that he was not only the first to state " the complete formula of naturalism " in Germinie Lacer- teuxy but also the first to modify it in anticipation of the later schools of fiction. (^Journal^ viii. 242.) These studies of low life and of bohemianism had pre- pared him for Darling (Ch^rie), which he describes as "a psychologic and physiologic study of young girlhood grow- ing up in the hot-house of the capital," "a monograph of the young lady in official circles under the Second Empire." The Generation of the Restoration 271 For this book he sought the co-operation of his feminine readers, begging them to send him anonymously their recollections of youth and first communion, of coming out, of the " perversions of music " and the unveiling of " the delicate emotions and refined modesties " of the first sen- sations of love. Thus he thought to produce a book that should be almost unique in its refined realism, "an approxi- mation to pure analysis," that "last evolution of fiction," whose realisation he left to his successors. From his feminine collaborators he seems to have got very little, as was natural, since the French miss hardly understands herself. The Journal of Maria Bashkirtsefif was a greater stimulus to his divination of the awakening of girlish imagination by the sight of social life, by music and sentimental reading, under the stimulus of Roman Catholi- cism in catechism and communion, then by dress, and the development of sex, under conditions so artificial as to tend to nervous prostration, that with Ch^rie terminates in anemia and death. The work is done with acute delicacy, and in a style whose nervous originality is the quintessence of Goncourt's last method. In Darling, as in the two preceding novels, a generalisa- tion is followed by minute psychic descriptions of acts with- out logical continuity, but all leading to the catastrophe. In Elizay on the other hand, the generalisation follows the acts, and for minor characters Goncourt is content to tell what people do, and leaves readers to determine what they are, in which he follows Taine and points the way to the " scientific sociologic " novel of Zola. His characters are thus less individual than composite, and as he is always intent on rendering action, his style is sensationalist; it seeks to render first impressions in supple, delicate, subtly 272 A Century of French Fiction suggestive abstractions, bearing us on through novel effects of syntax, and nervous repetitions, to an acuteness of sense that responds to the quivering and dazzling of the ultimate epithet. It is a style that errs most often by the intoxica- tion of its own virtuosity. Of course this is morbid, but it has a very delicate poetic charm. All the Goncourts* characters are neuropathic, but they are drawn with great vividness, and endowed with almost an excess of wit, though the Goncourts can touch, when they will, chords of the deepest pathos and the most poignant despair. They endeavour to be the realistic '* his- torians of the present." " Write what you see " was their guiding principle. To them fiction was " the serious, pas- sionate living form of literary study and social investiga- tion, . . . the history of contemporary morals." It lay in their nature that their realism should be external rather than psychologic, that they should merge individuality in fatalism, and so be first, here as in so much else, to mark the weakness of will that characterises modern French literature ; for their pessimism was less rational than emotional, more an artistic convention than a living conviction. In their style, however, they were idealists, seeking the prose poem, the cadenced period, the picturesque image, the rare epithet, even the new word and the sole- cism, if only they could compel the language to say what it would not. They were the dilettantes of emotion, the artists of realism, or, as they said themselves, " the St. John Baptists of neurosity," eager to " pin the adjective " to each significant little fact, having in them, as a French critic has observed, something of Mile, de Lespinasse and Diderot, something too of Poe, of De Quincey, and of Heine. In- The Generation of the Restoration 273 tensely sensitive, intensely modern, their novels are to fiction what impressionism is to painting, and symbolism to poetry. But all who subordinate substance to form, statement to suggestion, health to morbidity, exception to rule, are in so far romanticists, and so, in a sense, the Goncourts were false to a cause of which they imagined themselves the martyrs, and the study of their disciples will show that this perversion of naturalism may become little else than romanticism in disguise. Among the writers of their own generation the Goncourts stand apart with Flaubert. Slight though essential contribu- tions to the development of the naturalistic movement were made by Champfleury, by Fromentin, and by Erckmann- Chatrain. Champfleury, the pseudonym of Jules Fleury- Husson, is a novelist whom it is easy to place in the second rank, but difficult to classify there. Most of his work is romantic, some of it bohemian, but his best novel The TowrC s-people of Molinchart (les Bourgeois de Molinchart, 1854), and his essentially realistic Chien-Caillou (1847), make a connecting link between Balzac's Scenes of Provin- cial Life and Flaubert's Madame Bovary^ and so earn him a place among the precursors of the naturalistic school, whom, however, he did not follow in its later development, being a quiet observer of the foibles of mankind rather than a satirist of its vices. Fromentin wrote but a single novel, Dofnenique (1863), which belongs to no class but that of masterpieces. The author was himself an artist, and analyses with profound feeling and keen perception the state of mind of the artist whose creative powers lag behind his ideals. That self- doubt, disappointment, renunciation, do not involve loss of faith in the ideal is the tonic moral of DonieniquCy but 274 ^ Century of French Fiction the sternness of its fundamental conception is irradiated by the fresh glow of exquisite description, and by a striking psychic realism. Fromentin is the last important link in the chain that connects Saint-Pierre with Loti. More popular but less significant than either of these were Erckmann and Chatrain, who began by being, what at bottom they remained, romantic story-tellers after the manner of Hoffmann, or of Auerbach, but they attained to external realism in their so-called " national novels," deal- ing with the Revolution and the two Napoleons in the spirit of smug bourgeois egoism that was sure to rouse a wide response in the last decade of the Empire, when men were more willing than since to listen to what Sainte-Beuve called " an Iliad of Fear." Of their very numerous novels, the best, which will quite dispense one from reading the others, are Madame Th^rese (1863), dealing with the national up- rising of 1792, and The Conscript 0/ 181 J (le Conscrit de 1813, 1864). Some connection with realism may be claimed also for Feuillet, who is, however, like the novelists whom it remains to mention in this chapter, essentially a survival of romanticism, "the family-Musset," as Jules de Goncourt called him, with some affiliations to George Sand, and still more to Madeleine de Scud^ry. Like Flaubert and Mau- passant he was a Norman, of talented but nervously organ- ised parentage. Until 1857 domestic troubles compelled him to live, with brief holidays, in his country home. It was here that he wrote, besides trifles that it is quite un- necessary to name. The Little Countess (la Petite comtesse, 1856) and The Story of a Poor Young Man (le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre, 1858). Then his father's death released him from this country captivity, and in Paris he The Generation of the Restoration 275 developed a second and far stronger manner, that found its best expression in Monsieur de Camors {iZd']) , Julia de Trecxur (1872), The Diary of a Lady (le Journal d'une femme, 1878), and The Dead Wife (la Morte, 1886), to be silent of his dramas which do not concern us here. The most pervading characteristic of all this work is an aristocratic optimism. What heroes and what heroines 1 All handsome, all witty, all rich, even the " Poor Young Man," all fine riders and endowed with the proper accom- plishments of idle wealth, capable of enthusiasms and faith, that contact with practical life has not blunted, and of loves that in the women become the chief excuse for life and occasionally for death, — in short, exactly the fiction to attract the pinchbeck aristocracy of the Empire and of the women who aspired to enter it, especially since Feuillet had the art to season his moralities with suave sugges- tions of vice, making thus a strange compound, as one of his critics says, of vitriol and opoponax, yet suiting deftly the people of whom he wrote to those by whom he was read. But the evolution of society left him behind, and he could rightly say, as he was nearing his end in 1890 : " I should write no more even were I to live. I should not be understood. Realism cares no longer for my ideal." But though this was for the moment true, it is not likely to remain so. Bacon assures us that " the mixture of a lie doth always add pleasure," and when the pendulum swings again toward the romantic, Feuillet's novels, or at least four or five of them, will probably survive as the best represen- tatives of that class in our half-century, though it is doubt- ful if that generation will be such dupes as to select them, with Lemaitre, "to cradle young souls and enchant inno- cent minds," or to think with Bruneti^re that none since 276 A Century of French Fiction Provost, "has made the novel serve more noble ends." The morality of Feuillet, like that of his characters and readers, was the thinnest kind of varnish, a sentimental compound of propriety and impropriety. As one looks back over his twelve significant novels, one finds the men shadowy puppets, with the single exception of Monsieur de Camors, the melodramatic exploiter of mankind, who is an interesting though painful mixture of a coxcomb and a prig, till he is made a subject on whom to demonstrate the superiority of Catholicity to Honour. It is impossible to take interest in the others, hard even to recall their names without a wearied contempt and a won- der how the society they characterised could hold together. But the women, the martyrs to love and passion, crowd before the eyes of fancy. There is the dainty *' Little Countess," who loves, like Chateaubriand's Am^lie, a mel- ancholy Ren^, throws herself at this austere Joseph in vain, and then at another for pique, to die of unrequited passion at last ; there is Marguerite, beloved of the truly " Poor Young Man," a prudish coquette, compound of Breton and Creole, and victim of such hypersensitive aristocratic pro- priety that when she marries the " poor young man " at the close we feel more pity for him than ever. Then there is Sibylle, the child who wanted to ride a swan, and the young lady who, rather than marry an infidel whom she loved, preferred to die for his conversion, and so set an example to her schoolmate, the vulgar vixen Clotilde. There is the vicious and fascinating Madame de Camp- vallon, the evil genius of Camors, and the feverishly hysteri- cal, heroically infamous suicide, Julia de Tr^cceur, perhaps his most pathetic and artistic creation. There is Madame de Rias, of A Marriage in Society (un Mariage dans le The Generation of the Restoration 277 monde) , somewhat exceptionally weak, morbid, and ill-bred, to be sure, but appealing to us as a victim of French edu- cation and society rather than as an evil nature, as does C^cile in The Diary of a Lady^ a rather ineffectual story of a group of rich, frivolous, and lazy liars. A like victim of French marriage customs is the Baroness de Maures- camp, in The Story of a Parisian Lady, who, when her husband has killed her lover in a duel, tries to arrange for his death in a similar manner and is respected by him ever after. Then there is the satanic temptress, Marianne, whose just married husband seeks honour in suicide and leaves her " The Widow " (la Veuve) ; and there is the blue-stocking poisoner, Sabine, to point an orthodox moral in a novel (la Morte), that Jules de Goncourt said "was fit to corrupt a monkey ; " and lastly there is Beatrice, who, having wearied of adultery, finally begins to love her hus- band, when he, in surprised delight, kills himself for fear she would not keep on, and so illustrates "An Artist's Honour " (Honneur d'artiste) . These women are all interesting, though, as a rule, they lack principle and true culture. Most of them are tempters, who make the first advances, sybarites with idle hands and empty hearts ; in short, the typical wife of Feuillet is a type that one hopes is not the wife of anybody else. There is a monotony in these tragic battles of passion in women whom Pellessier has described as ill- balanced, eccentric, bizarre, incoherent, wholly abandoned to instinct, capable of heroism and of crime, restless, agitated, astray, strangely disturbing, and already a prey to that famous neurosity of which Feuillet painted the effects in high society with the perfect propriety of his aristocratic pen, as Zola painted them in the lower classes with the massive power of his 278 A Century of French Fiction brutal genius. Feuillet's own idea of woman may be seen in these lines on the Parisian Lady : " In this strange hot- house of Paris the child is already a girl, the girl a woman, the woman, a monster. She behaves, sometimes well, sometimes ill, with no great taste for one or the other, for she dreams of something better than Good and worse than Evil. This innocence is parted often from debauch by caprice alone, and from crime only by occasion." " Wo- men are as much at ease in perfidy as a snake in shrubbery, and they wind in it with a supple tranquillity that man- hood never attains." No doubt this seemed flattery to the ladies of the Empire, but it jars strangely with the conven- tional accompaniment of pseudo-Christian spiritualism, that in such connections seems either ludicrously naive or hypo- critically repulsive. There is something snobbish in this perfumed orthodoxy. But after all reserves have been made, Feuillet remains, not surely a great moralist or a great creator of character, but a very skilful story-teller, with a supple, light, lively style, excellent, especially in dialogue, with sufficient humour and art of sustaining inter- est, who, as the accredited painter of the aristocratic life of neuropathic women unintelligible to themselves or to others, contributed an essential element to the development of realism in fiction. His successors in this field are Rabus- son and Ohnet, of whom the former serves up aristocracy to itself, while the latter feasts the gaping admiration of the socially ambitious multitude. Another novelist who stands somewhat aloof from the prevailing current of the fiction of his generation is Cherbu- liez, a born story-teller, whose Genevan origin and wide foreign travel set him somewhat apart from the French ten- dencies of his time. His novels are usually of cosmopolitan The Generation of the Restoration 279 tourist life, such as Geneva might show. His best charac- ters are foreign, Russians, Poles, English, Germans, or Jews, as the names of his best novels. Count Kostia, Ladislas Bolskif Miss Rovelf Meta Holdenis, or Samuel Brohl and Co. sufficiently indicate. They are the condottieri of mod- ern life, independent and somewhat exaggerated, and the plots, like the characters, abound in incoherencies and im- probabilities. As some one has said, they are " novels of agitation and delirium told by a man of sober sense." The descriptions are good and varied, but Cherbuliez sees the world from outside ; there is little of poetry or mysti- cism, the psychology is weak and conventional, and,, though the story is always interesting, the denouements are some- times infantile, and seem to belong to an earlier age than our nervous and tense generation. Cherbuliez, then, is the representative of the old-fashioned story-teller, cheerful, varied, without a trace of snobbery, but with a sharp and rather narrow irony. He is a good literary journeyman, with a felicitous, direct style, and an admirable aptitude for set- ting his novelistic sails to catch the popular breeze, grazing burning questions of science or sociology, but always with a finger on the public pulse. Among novelists of minor significance we note in passing, that we may not seem to have forgotten, About, a brilliant, witty, but very uneven writer, who reflects some of the shal- lower parts of Voltaire's scepticism. He was wise enough not to take himself seriously, and ceased writing fiction with the fall of the Empire, whose frivolity he echoed. Of the novels of the younger Dumas it is necessary to say very little. They are the first essays of a man who was to win laurels in quite another field, coloured almost all by the 28 o A Century of French Fiction sombre reflection of cruel school-days that form the subject of the best of them, the crude, bold, realistic, epigrammatic and doctrinaire Clemenceau Case (I'Affaire Clemenceau, 1866). The earlier novels are, by turns, humouristic, med- ieval, sensational, sentimental, philosophical, fantastic, and realistically autobiographic. The last group. The Lady with the Camellias (la Dame aux Camillas, 1848), The Lady of the Pearls^ (la Dame aux perles, 1853), Diane de lys (185 1), and Life at Twenty (la Vie a vingt ans, 1854) alone have interest to-day. Another writer who soon abandoned the prose tale for other fields was the poet Theodore de Banville, whose style has a mellow warmth and delicate grace, but who is too apt to deck in fairy gauze the vices of the French capi- tal, so that his stories have an incongruous air and a false ring. The same in even greater degree must be said of Murger's Life in Bohemia (Vie de Boheme, 185 1), and other stories that treat of the peculiar society of the student quarter of Paris in the romantic spirit of Gautier's Young France, Murger's book, to which we owe the words and the conception of " Bohemia," and " Latin Quarter," has been accepted as the best expression of student and grisette life in the second romantic generation, a sort of classic of liter- ary thriftlessness and dissolute impecuniosity, that has per- suaded generations of men to look back with dreamy ten- derness on the sordid follies of youth, and sigh that Mimi and Musette and Rose Pompon are no more. But in truth they never were. No vice is ever quite so heartless as the sentimental. It is impossible to know Murger's life and to read his book without impatience, and even nausea, at its whining sentiment and whimsical hysteria of merriment that The Generation of the Restoration 281 masks so base a reality. The Bohemia of Murger, unlike that of Gautier, lived from day to day with no touch of exalted enthusiasm, of scorn for the commonplace, of the ardour and fervour of renascence. It was not calmly disdainful of politics, but naively indifferent. Yet, after all reserves have been made, there is a verve and a touch of nature in some of the scenes of Life in Bohemia that will long keep its memory green. In closing our account of this generation a word must be said of Feydeau, an archeologist of repute, who leaped into novelistic notoriety by Fa7iny (1857), a daringly realistic psychologic study of jealousy, to be associated with Con- stant's Adolphe, while the later novels of Feydeau de- serve only to be forgotten. One should note, too, as con- tributing to emancipate and stimulate imagination in the naturalistic epoch that was to follow, the very talented translation of Poe's Tales (1868) by the poet Baudelaire. Meantime the appetite of \h% feuilleton-itdi^mg public was being satisfied by the voluminous outpourings of novelists of criminal adventure, such as Belot, by the exotic sugar- and-pomatum sentiment of Enault, by the mild sensation- alism of Ulbach, who may serve as types of the novelist invertebrata, who produce, like polyps, without travail and without individuality, for a public as amorphous as them- selves. But the lowest ebb of the roman-feuilleton is at- tained by Ponson du Terrail, whose fiction flows in a weak, washy, everlasting flood of childish impossibilities, the like of which has not afflicted the world since Cervantes laughed the ghosts of chivalrous romance out of it. The antics in which his hero, Rocambole, who has become a byword of criticism, regaled the readers of the Petit Jou7'nal shall be 282 A Century of French Fiction nameless here. Finally, a worthy place apart surely belongs to Jules Verne, who, in tales familiar to every schoolboy, has successfully inoculated science with romanticism, and replaces for us, with tales of submarine ships and flying ma- chines, the interest that our fathers found in the romances of Monte Cristo and of Artagnan. CHAPTER XIII i;MILE ZOLA PROBABLY no Frenchman of letters has been so promi- nently before the world during the past quarter-cen- tury as Emile Zola. The literature that has gathered about him is exceeded in mass by that only that has been evoked by Renan and Hugo, and yet it is doubtful if justice has been done to the artist, still less to the man, at home or abroad, until very recent political events revealed to all the magnanimous character that a too conscientious devotion to a theory of art had masked from those who saw that the theory was abused, and did not know that the artist and the moralist were abused also. That his art was a refraction of our beautiful, and his morals a deviation from our true, should not blind us to the greatness of the one or the sincerity of the other. In art the work suffices to praise the master, but that we may judge Zola aright there where he has been most hastily condemned, it is necessary to know more of his life and methods of literary labour than has been necessary with his predecessors. Balzac somewhere says that constant work is a law of art as it is of life, for art is only creation idealised. No one since he died has given such an example of earnest- ness and indefatigable industry as Zola, the most intense and sombre of those who have set the mirror before the baser side of modern French life. But to this earnestness 284 A Century of French Fiction and industry there was added an imagination hyperbolic, idealistic, and essentially romantic. The key to the man and to his work lies in his heredity. He was born in Paris, but he is in no sense a Parisian. His mother, a beautiful, sweet, simple woman, was from Dourdan in northern France. At nineteen she had married for love the engineer Francois Zola, whose father had been a Venetian, and his mother a Greek from Corfu. Thus three nations mingled their blood in him, and his birth- place was a matter of chance, for the Zolas, were then living at Aix, the Plassans of his novels. The father was a man of intense energy and vast conceptions, of which the Canal Zola at Aix still bears witness. He was a man of ideals, somewhat visionary, who had left Italy to avoid the Aus- trians, and had travelled widely in Germany, Holland, and England. He was of romantic disposition and himself something of an author. From him, then, the son might inherit a taste for letters, a tendency to vast conceptions, energy, industry, and idealism. But Frangois Zola was as unpractical as his wife was prudent, and when he died (1846) he left his wife with the boy of six and little else but claims that she could not aiford to prosecute. The child grew up under the influence of his Northern French mother and grandmother, and they with Dame Care tempered the heritage of the father into the iron will of the son. The grandmother, a typical native of Beauce, full of courage and common-sense, witty and canny, quickly assumed the direction of the distracted family affairs. Till her death (1857) they lived at Aix, where the child's health and imagination were fortified by sportive freedom in the verdant wilderness of an abandoned garden, the luxuriant Paradou of Abbe Moure fs Fault. At school the boy won Emile Zola 285 some distinction in French and the sciences and showed small taste for the classics, but he had already learned to do the thing he did not like. Even the boy took duty for his watchword. With the death of the grandmother the family fortunes collapsed, and, after a brief and not very successful experi- ence in a Paris school, the youth of twenty thrown wholly on his own resources obtained a wretched clerkship, and passed two years of shifty and squalid bohemianism, in which it is hard to see how he existed at all. It was then that he learned to know " how good it is and how sad to eat when one is starving," as he makes wretched Gervaise sob, with tears of hungry joy, in the last pages of P Assommoir, At last, in 1862, he entered as bundle-clerk the great publishing house of Hachette, and was presently promoted to the advertising department. During all these years of squalor the literary instinct had been strong in him always. When he could afford it he bought candles, for light and a pen were more to him than tobacco and wine. Obliged by poverty to live in the lowest company, amid the noise of carousing and de- bauchery, he passed hours in bed for warmth, writing poetry with chilly fingers, and two prose stories, also The Fairy in Love and The Dancing Card^ now to be read in the Stories for Ninon (Contes a Ninon, 1864), both romantic fancies as different as possible from all that we now connect with his name. Gradually the stress of life brings its lesson, the spirit of the mother asserts itself; he grows more practical, aban- dons poetry, and by the beginning of 1864 has written a volume of tales, the Stories for Ninon, all correct and pre- cise in style and all romantic in sentiment. This volume 286 A Century of French Fiction cost him nothing to publish, but it brought him nothing, and only My Lady- Love (Celle qui m'aime) showed anything of his future power. It opened the newspapers to him, however, made him friends in literary circles, and thus he was enabled to move to reputable surroundings from the Bohemia that his sturdy nature despised. Journalism and his clerkship supplied a scanty livelihood, and he satisfied the demands of his artistic nature by writ- ing a novel, Claude's Confession (la Confession de Claude, 1865), a failure that we disturb in its limbo only to recall that it troubled the squeamish censors of the Empire and indirectly caused his withdrawal from the Hachettes in January, 1866. From this moment he was wholly dependent on his pen. His fiction was still weak ; indeed his Dead Woman^s Vow (le Voeu d'une morte, 1866) was not suffered to run to its journalistic conclusion. But his art criticism gave him great notoriety by its trenchant and unconventional origi- nality. It cost him his post and the favour of the all-power- ful editor Villemessant, but from that year he was a per- sonality to be reckoned with in the world of letters and art, a man with the courage of his convictions and with strength to defend them at any cost. Once more reduced to hack-writing at a penny a line, such as The Mysteries of Marseilles (les Myst^res de Marseille, 1867), he managed still to steal from his bodily needs time for his art and to produce Therese Raquin, a novel that all regard among his best, and some as his masterpiece. The hack-work was the better paid and he must eat, but he was as true to his art as necessity would suffer him to be. Up to this time his fiction bad been ultra-romantic, and Emile Zola 287 the idea of Therhe Raquin was derived from the very romantic V^nus de Gordes, a commonplace story of a mur- der by a wife and lover and their trial for the crime. Zola transformed the situation by a touch of genius. He let the criminals escape all earthly justice, but let them be ever bound yet ever repelled by the haunting memory of their crime ; he let their love turn to hate, and let them perish the moral victims of a divine vengeance. The intensity and minute vision of this terrible analysis of remorse are hardly surpassed in literature, but it is a fierce and sombre art, a morose pessimism that first reveals what Zola means by " naturalism," a word that he first uses in the preface to this remarkable volume, which, however, was long in finding a public to comprehend its excellence. Madeleine Ferat^ his next novel (1868), is wholly inferior to Therese Raquin^ but it adds the one element needed to complete his novelistic apprenticeship, the thread that was to bind together his labours for the next twenty-five years, an interest in the mysterious problems of heredity, by which he maintained, nursed, and fortified the fatalistic determinism that pulses through the Rougon- Mac quart, the most monu- mental achievement of French fiction since Balzac. It was a daring conception, worthy of Francois Zola's son. This author of six obscure volumes of fiction, who, in making his mark in criticism had won more enemies than friends, pro- posed, in twelve volumes linked together by an hypothesis of heredity, to tell " the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire," and so to be " the secre- tary of French society " during that epoch as Balzac had undertaken to be for his. The general plan was thought out and a genealogy devised to his purpose in 1869, and it was necessary only to extend and complete this original 288 A Century of French Fiction design when twenty-four years later the twelve volumes, now become twenty, were closed with Dr, Pascal (1893). The dates have interest. When the plan was conceived the Empire promised a long life, but before the first volume was published it became necessary to condense into nine- teen years what had been devised for many more. Hence insuperable chronological difficulties will beset the too curious reader, though they need not disturb a critical equanimity. If in this gigantic scheme Zola was the true son of his father, he was also the schoolboy of Aix with the marked predilection for material knowledge, and he was also the grandson of the shrewd lady of Beauce. Having secured a sure market for uncertain production he married on the strength of it, accepted advances from his publisher, and barely escaped being caught in the toils that beset Balzac. For war came, in three years he could issue but two volumes where he had promised six, and it was only after the bankruptcy of his patron and by the far-sighted gene- rosity of Charpentier, his new publisher, that he became once more a free man in 1875, and was able to develop his talent in years before success had brought encouragement or reward. On the twenty volumes of the Ron gon- Mac quart and the trio of The Three Cities, Zola's reputation rests so entirely that we may dismiss very briefly the short stories with which he relieved from time to time the strain of that methodical and exacting labour. All are good and one of them, The Attack on the Mill in The Soirees of Medan, is a masterpiece, but they are not necessary to Zola's fame or to our critical appreciation of him. In a preface to the Rougon-Macquart^ dated July, 187 1, ^ Emile Zola 289 though written in part in 1868, Zola states his purpose. He will show how in a family superficial dissimilarity may mask fundamental similarity, how " heredity has its laws like gravity," how various minglings of blood and environ- ment may reveal the inner workings of humanity, so that, as he said in bringing his work to a close, " It is a world, a society, a civilization. The whole life is there, ... for our family have spread through all contemporary society, invaded all situations, borne along by overweening appe- tite, that general modern impulse that snatches at enjoy- ment and interpenetrates our whole social body." This is what he attempted, but it is not altogether what he attained, and it as well that it should not be so. It is a theory amalgamated from Flaubert and Taine. Its weak points have been repeatedly and unsparingly exposed, and it has done much to divert appreciation from merits that lie elsewhere. Fiction can perhaps be made to reflect the last light of physio-psychology, but Zola's self-styled " scien- tific experiments carried on in the free flight of the imagi- nation " do not do it, and his aspiration to be " a new Lucretius*' remains a dream. He has indeed always held fast to the idea that " truth alone can instruct and fortify generous souls," and that therefore "to tell the truth is to teach morals, though it be by a Madame Bovary or a Germinie Lacerteux.^^ But his power and fascination lie in this, that it is given him to see truth with an epic imagi- nation, gloomy and pessimistic perhaps but grand and masterful, in its painting of the animal instincts in human nature, of the bete humaine that possesses and tortures him like a nightmare, drags him through vaults of human ordure, and forces him to fix his eyes on the bestial in man till his fancy differentiates it into grandiose hyperbolical types of 19 290 A Century of French Fiction relentless forces working out the sum of human folly and misery. He wishes to give us slices of crude life, to tell the truth, the whole truth, as he sees it ; what he does give is not a photograph of nature, but a poet's vision. That he might speak of what he knew, he laid the scene of his first novel in Aix, the town of his childhood, which he calls Plassans. Here, as we learn from The Fo7'iune of the Eougons (la Fortune des Rougons, 1871), was born in 1787 Pierre Rougon, whose mother, Adelaide Fouque, after his father's death, had another son, Antoine Macquart, and a daughter, Ursule Macquart, and afterward developed a nervous disease that had been congenital, though dormant, and so appeared in various forms in her descendants in the second and third generation, with whom we have in the main to do. The children of Antoine sink to the prole- tariat of labour or of vice, showing themselves at their best in the Jean Macquart of Earth (la Terre, 1887) and The Downfall (la Debacle, 1892), with a poised sensuality in the Lisa oi Parisian Digestion (le Ventre de Paris, 1873), and with a resigned courage in her daughter Pauline (The Joy of Life, la Joie de vivre, 1884). Meantime the third child of Antoine, Gervaise, has developed the alcoholism of her grandfather and father, and after serving as type of the self-degraded working class of Paris in P Assommoir (1887), bequeaths her tendencies to children who develop them, — Claude into an artist's sterile but ever travailing genius (fThe Worky I'CEuvre, 1886), Etienne into the passionate revolt of a socialistic miner {Germinal^ 1885), Jacques into the murderous mania of a locomotive engineer {The Beast in Man, la Bete humaine, 1890), and Nana (1880) into a poison-flower of vice avenging itself on the society that fostered it, a gaudy fly incubated in the heat of a Emile Zola 291 social dunghill, and bearing on its wings a contagion of pestilence. Thus nine novels of the score deal with the lower social classes in the city, the country, and the camp, or with vice. The bourgeoisie is represented by the de- scendants of Ursule Macquart, in whom Adelaide's "or- ganic lesion " manifests itself either in a mysticism that evaporates at the touch of earthly love {The Dreaniy le Reve, 1888), or is intensified to a cataleptic jealousy {A Page of Love i una Page d'amour, 1878). The intermar- riage of a son of Ursule Macquart with a daughter of Pierre Rougon will furnish us a type of the commercial bour- geoisie, restless and forceful in the Octave Mouret of Pot- Bouille and The Ladies' Delight (Au bonheur des dames, 1883), while in the celibate priest. Serge Mouret, this rest- lessness turns to religious mania {Abbe Mouret^ s Faulty la Faute de I'abb^ Mouret, 1875). In the Rougons, finally, neurosity takes the form of poUtical ambition {The Con- quest of PlassanSy la Conquete de Plassans, 1874, and His Excellency ^ Son Excellence Eugene Rougon, 1876), or of speculative mania {Booty ^ la Curee, 18 71) and the plutoc- racy {Money f 1' Argent, 1891), or finally shows itself in the scientific aspirations of Dr. Pascal (1893). As these persons come in touch with all sections of so- ciety, they give opportunity for a panoramic picture of the epoch, the gross materialism of the urban multitude whose god is their belly, the sordid monotony of the lives of farmer and fisherman relieved by hours of morose bestiality and dreams of social equality and avenging jealousy, the life of the studio and the workshop, of petty tradesmen and the great stores, of clergy, bankers, demagogues, officers, and aristocrats, of those on whose folly they batten, and of those who batten on their vices. 292 A Century of French Fiction And as Zola took his scenes from observation, so also he took his characters and many incidents from contemporary history, always striving for truth, though often attaining only a refraction of it. The progress of the work is more interesting to us than a detailed description of the indi- vidual narratives. The introductory volume and also Booty, were written before the war, though published after it. The latter gave him much trouble. How could he treat realis- tically the life of wealthy parvenus of which he could learn nothing directly? As a springboard for his imagination he took the house of the chocolate millionaire M^nier in the Pare Monceau, but his hungry fancy could not paint the magnificence of its real interior, as in prosperous days he learned to know it. Carriage builders furnished him de- tails for his equipages, and the vertiginous picture of Rente's conservatory was made from hours spent note- book in hand, in the hot-houses of the public Botanic Garden. His facts and figures he got from real accounts, and also from partisan pamphlets. He worked with me- thodical seriousness and neither sought nor excited scandal. For strong as is Booty, it fell on evil times, and two years later an hundred and sixty dollars sufficed to buy the pub- lisher's rights of a book that has since sold forty thousand copies. Zola's ideas of fiction had not yet made his talent profitable, but with the stubborn confidence of an artist, he persevered in deserving success until he attained it. Parisian Digestion, his next volume, is perhaps the most extreme expression of his theory, and, therefore, one of the least artistic of his works. It is, as some one has said, " the symphony of eating," the full-fed epic of digestion, an Iliad of the immortal war between fat and lean, where the sleek bourgeois triumphs over the lank bohemian, very Emile Zola 293 typical in treatment of character, and quite too doctrinaire to be enjoyed save in its critical relations. Zola's talent has not yet mastered his theory. He is riding his natural- istic hobby-horse, and Pegasus is waiting. And he will con- tinue to wait while the author returns to Aix and to quasi good society to write of the political Conquest of Plassans with as little enthusiasm as success. Criticism will accord a much higher place to Abbe Mou- ret^s Faulty for it will discern, what contemporaries failed to see, the beginning of his literary emancipation from compilation and documents. The Roman ritual, Liguori, and a Kempis gave him much, but only the poet's fancy sporting with childhood's memories could create the swell- ing life of that wild southern Paradou, whose exuberant and heavy odours give a fit atmosphere to the morbid passion of the tale. He had already written fine studies of intense and morbid character, but in this poet's dream lay the con- secration of his genius and it is this that gives to Abbe Moure t 's Fault its exceptional interest, while its successor, His Excellency, owed its immediate success to its supposed picture of Napoleon's prime minister, Rouher, and has interest to-day, not as a story or as a work of art, but for supposed traces of psychic autobiography. For Zola, like his Rougon, loves power because it glorifies the force that is in him and is virtuous for no divine reward, but because virtue is an element of strength. We are brought thus to the eve of Zola's first great success. He had written twelve volumes of fiction in as many years. No doubt he seemed to others one of those novelists by the dozen who can always sell 2000 copies but never 20,000. Perhaps he seemed so to himself. Daudet, whom he knew well at this time, suggests as much. 11 294 ^ Century of French Fiction He had more reason to be discouraged than ten years before. And he was about to achieve an immediate and immense success by a book constructed like its prede- cessors from experience, from observation, and from books. What was the spark in fAssomnioir that set the Hterary world afire? It was that he brought the poetic glow of Abbe Mouret ^s Fault from the far-off country presbytery to the heart of Parisian popular life. He had seen these tenements, these festivals and funerals, he knew in his own body that hunger, cold, and squalor, that " slow dying of the poor, empty bellies crying for hunger, the necessities of beasts snuffling with chattering teeth at unclean things in this great Paris so gilded and so gay." He knew these things, as the authors of Germinie Lacerteux did not know them, and he treated them with an epic sweep that was his alone. He supplemented his experience by special studies, and threw an atmosphere of sordid reality about the whole by choosing the language of his characters for that of his narration also. Then he took his great mass of linguistic and social notes to the seashore and methodically elaborated this story of pity and of terror with a mathematical precision of which the Italian critic Amicis has given a minute and curious description. The persons were first enumerated and characterised as in a police register, then the action was sketched and each scene, even in its sub-divisions, assigned appropriate space, so that the whole might have an architectural harmony and proportion. It is only after two or three months of this preliminary study, and he made such for all his novels, that he becomes, as he has said, " master of this kind of life, feels it, lives it in imagination, as Balzac used to do, and is sure that he can give to it its special colour and Emile Zola 295 odour and language," aiming at scientific psychology and logical continuity but realising always that the virus of romanticism is strong in him still. A natural result of this method is that, as his talent develops with success, he comes to describe temperaments rather than characters, types rather than individuals, masses rather than men ; and that is why the method of Abbe Mouret first realises its possibilities in l Assoinmoir, to pass from strength to strength through Germinal to The Downfall. The central figure in VAssommoir is not Gervaise, the wretched washerwoman who gropes her way in sordid misery and wrecks herself on brutal vice, but rather the Dram-Shop, that manufactory of sin and crime, with its panting distillery whose snaky coils ooze their alcoholic sweat like a slow, persistent spring. The whole is an apocalyptic epic of social putrefaction, star- vation, delirium, in which all figures are typical of the fearful struggle of the submerged for a life that stifles ideals, inevitably involves its own disappointment, and is not only of the earth earthy, but of the dirt dirty, a grandi- ose evocation of topsy-turvy idealism. This is the fittest place to speak of a quality in Zola's work that more than any other has injured it and its author in the esteem of the literary public at home and abroad. I mean his voluntary crudity of language and persistent mention of the unmentionable. This attained its extreme expression in Earth, ten years later. It had found ample expression before, especially in Booty, but first in V Assommoir it attracted general notice and very general denunciation. Base men think, speak, and act basely in life, and they do so in VAssommoir. Many men not base have moments of baseness or of bestiality, and Zola attributes such to men in 296 A Century of French Fiction whom virtue, or at least respectability, predominates. If he did not, he would seem to himself to be writing a lie, deluding his public into a false social security. He believes, for instance, that the social condition of workmen in the faubourgs of Paris cries out for reform, that it is a pes- tiferous environment, in which drunkenness and laziness relax family ties till all honest feeling is submerged in promiscuity, shamelessness, and death. What he sees is indeed not typical or normal, but rather his vision of whither society is tending. He thinks it true, however, and means it so well that he is willing to endure the de- nunciation that his picture of it invites. V Assommoiry he says, *'is morality in action, the most chaste of my books, ... the first story of the people that has the true scent of the people." " I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true book," a story of men not bad by nature but made bad by an environment of ignorance, poverty, and toil. In all this Zola was absolutely sincere, filled with pro- found sympathy for society's victims and bent on serious diagnosis of social ills. He knew that he invited, and probably expected, misrepresentation. It is a sad truth that many men derive an unavowable and morose satis- faction from reading the unutterable and seeing the obscene. Doubtless this motive impelled some of the eighty thou- sand who in three years bought V Assommoir after their attention had been called to it by the efforts of critical Mrs. Grundys to warn a smug and confiding public to beware this man of sin. But Zola is writing for neither the smug nor the prurient. He is trying to tell thoughtful men what bourgeois democracy and the Second Empire have made of the French people. Emile Zola 297 Yet in absolving the man we do not acquit the artist, ^he nastiness, the blasphemy of some melancholy pages in the Rougon-Marquart may be true in the sense that each detail is true, but they are not true as a whole and they are not artistic. Zola mars his effects by overload- ing his colours and falls on the side to which he inclines. Truth is beautiful only when it is normal, natural. The naturalists, so-called, are ever giving us the ^jiormal, the ideally base. L'Assommoir, Nana, Earthy and The Beast in Man are to nature what an anatomical museum is to the palestra. Both have their value. But the strength of Zola is not here. We deplore these excesses of a mistaken esthetic, but they must not blind us to his moral sincerity or to his rare artistic power. Had there been aught of the pander in his nature it would have been easy to follow PAssommoir with another story of the gutter, or to turn from squalid to venal vice. He followed rather his artist's instinct that led him from the Place de la revolution to the Trocad^ro, from broad popular frescos to A Page of Love, a miniature of a child's morbid jealousy and a mother's passion, worked out in five symmetrical parts, each closing with a picture of Paris in sunshine,darkness, or tempest, that makes the city a material symbol of psychic crisis or calm. When he had thus satisfied his poetic nature and sought the seclusion of country life at M^dan, he turned resolutely to do the thing he did not like, the most difficult and dis- tasteful thing, but the thing that he must do if in his moral and social picture of the Second Empire he would not mask the foreground with a fig-tree. Corrupt and venal women had been among the most prominent figures of that epoch, and Zola has sought to give us epic types of them in his Nana, 298 A Century of French Fiction Himself of eminently correct private life, and having been in youth an unwilling witness of the baser side only of vice, he sought help, with a seriousness that is not without its humour, in the garrulous memory of old beaux and in the morose fancies of Otway. The result, as a whole, is un- pleasant, though not perhaps unedifying ; but the book has passages of wonderful power, and the close is, as he said, the most weird and successful thing that he had ever writ- ten. Even now it would be hard to match that death scene in the upper room of the great hotel, where Nana lies dis- solving in small-pox while frantic crowds below are shouting ; "To Berlin! To Berlin!" As after PAssommoir, so now Zola turned from the Paris- ian cesspool to a country scene and had begun to write The Joy of Living (la Joie de vivre) when the death of his mother, October, 1880, led him to seek relief from the painful story of Pauline Quenu's unselfish suffering in a satire of the smugly corrupt Parisian bourgeoisie, that seemed to his poetic vision a sort of soup-stock kettle, where scraps and refuse of good food were ever simmering and sending up their scum. Therefore he called his story Pot-bouille. He made great efforts to be accurate, even in minute details, and sought realistic effects in technic by restricting descriptions, blending several actions, and exhibiting them in disconnected scenes, as an observer in real life might see them, — a device that he borrowed from the Goncourts. But his avowed model was Flaubert's Sentimental Education, He sought to be anti-romantic, clear, condensed, to put, as he said, a drag on himself and to " finish flatly." And it is because Pot~botcille aspires to the faults of Flaubert's novel that it fails to please critics or readers. Zola's imagination struggles here with the pettiness of his subject and method, Emile Zola 299 and creates at last a gloomy, unreal world, where, as some one has said, the porters talk Hke poets and other people like porters, and where society, like the children, is sick or ill-bred. That his talent was not reahstic he had never shown so clearly as here. But the commercial side of his subject attracted him, and he followed Pot-bouille with The Ladies' Delight (Au bonheur des dames), a study of the great de- partment store, with its socialistic or coUectivist tendencies, in all aspects of which he took a very keen interest, striving to enter into the material and mental life of clerks and petty shop-keepers, delving in the mysteries of kleptomania and the temptations of show-windows and bargain-days, and producing an economic study of some interest, but a novel of very little. This was not the field for his triumphs, nor did he find it in his next essay. The Joy of Livings a sombre, pathetic study of silent, gentle, magnanimous girl- hood falling victim to egoism, hke Balzac's Pierrette, in her fortune and in her love. Zola could not have expected commercial success for a story like this. Pathos, to be popular, must be sentimental. His appeal was to the few who see hfe steadily and whole. His epic breadth finds some scope here in the multitudinous sea, but it was to appeal more effectively both to the judi- cious and to the multitude when its subject was human nature ; and so Germinaly that great prose poem of the strike and mine, is a masterpiece in which all his talents find their full development, more even than in V Assommoir. Ideal it was, but real, too, in the higher sense. Every " coron " of miners in France and Belgium has its well- thumbed copy to attest the book's broad truth to nature. It is, as Zola said, a great fresco, so filled with figures that all must be simplified, some only suggested, and the whole 300 A Century of French Fiction composition foreshortened. The treatment is typical. Etienne is any workman into whose brain socialism has percolated and become a fixed idea ; Maheude, any woman whom slow exasperation of suffering goads from resignation to revolt ; Catherine, society's victim, crowded step by step to the last verge of pain and suffering. And so, too, the millionaire Gr^goire is but a type of serene egoism, of the incapacity of the rich to understand why workmen should be discontented to labour for their luxury; and superin- tendent Jeanlin is typical of the masterful fidelity of an officer in the army of labour. The magnificent descriptive scenes are treated in the same spirit. The strikers as they march past, haggard men and ragged hags, shrieking the Marseillaise and keeping a rude time to it with the clatter- ing of their wooden shoes, brandishing tools for weapons, and shouting the monotonous menace. Bread, Bread, Bread, are a symbol of the revolt of brutaHsed labour. What if their cry be silenced with bullets? We feel that it has marked another hour in labour's night and brought one step nearer the dawn of a new social day. Of course the action and reaction of mass and individual demands a magnifying of details, but here, at least, Zola has avoided distortion, for these colliers force themselves on the mind with a vivid, nightmare life that makes their very filthiness and squalor seem as natural to us as their hopeless, socialistic yearnings. And over all there dominates the pumping engine, a symbol of soulless, restless, panting life, vague, yet ever-present, till it is swallowed up at last in the collapsing pit, as though it were incarnate society that had undermined its own base, struggling with futile des- peration against an inexorable fate, and leaving behind for our sole consolation an eternal hope in the "germinal" ^ Emile Zola 301 forces of nature, from which a new and better order may arise. To maintain such a height as this is given to no novehst, and in The Work Zola has done Httle more than expand the idea of Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece into a volume. In this "pure psychology of art and passion," where an illusive ideal drives an artist to mania, there are interesting bits of autobiography, but the book is insignificant in com- parison either to Germinal or to Earthy that immediately followed ; for this last is a picture of human bestiahty that would be unique in literature were it not for the morose fancies of Swift. It is false, but it is grandly false. We cannot but marvel at the atmosphere of fecundity that breathes, pollen-laden, through the whole. No book of Zola was received with such angry indigna- tion and patriotic protest. But even before its pubHcation he had cleansed his wings for a flight into the blue, and was meditating that precious mystic Dream^ an exquisite idyl, yet based like all his work on minute and careful studies. But, though he called his book "a scientific experiment carried on in the free flight of imagination," it is but one more evidence of the fundamental romanticism of Zola's genius. And the same romanticism, though topsy-turvy now, riots in The Beast in Man, which has homicide for its theme and the locomotive for its symbol ; a sad failure as a scientific novel, but very remarkable as a grandiose vision of the Railway. The description, at the close, of the runa- way train dashing by, filled with howling soldiers, rushing to disaster and disappearing in a cloud of steam and smoke and fire, is such as no other novelist of our century could have written. Wealth had thus far had small place in Zola's fiction. 302 A Century of French Fiction In Money we live in a world of speculation and of intan- gible values, a theme apparently well suited to Zola's talent, so that it is difficult to understand why this novel of the Stock- Exchange is comparatively ineffectual. But it is clear that for one whose greatest triumph had been in Germinal ihtvQ remained, as the subject of all others, War. Here he was sure to be at his best and sure of an audience as wide as the French republic. Zola had not served in the war of 1870, but all confirm the essential faithfulness of The Downfall. We need not follow him as, foot by foot, he examines his scene and gathers facts from peasants and citizens. The characters, as in Genninal, are types, each representing one of the states of soul that the Empire had tended to produce. But its power and its glory are not in individuals but in masses, in armies concentrating with fatal precision around Sedan, in regiments on the march, or herded in cattle-cars or prison-pens, or surging through bloody Bazeilles or blazing Paris, or lying under fire, or charging to destruction, while the rhythmic recurrence of Napoleon's baggage train punctuates with scathing irony the imperial downfall. It remained for Zola to sum up for us the lesson of his theory of atavism. He has essayed his vindication and justification in Dr. Pascal^ a book with some fine passages, others extremely disagreeable, and little interest save as it gathers together the threads of the preceding volumes with the ultimate moral that men should have faith in nature, should stake their hopes on work and on science, and so become at last masters of destiny. Such is the lesson also of the triad that has followed the Rougon- Mac quart The central thought in Lourdes, Rome, and Paris is, first, that emotional mysticism is a morbid Emile Zola 303 compound of passion and pettiness, pity and bathos, sure to be exploited by the spirit of ecclesiastical commercial- ism. Then when his hero is repelled by the actual church he takes refuge in the ideal of the neo-Christian socialists ; and when that too fails he " makes haste to bury a dying religion lest its ruins should infect the nations," and in Paris proclaims that human happiness "can spring only from the furnace of the scientist." But throughout the reader is attracted less by the doctrine than by the art, in Lourdes by the processions and pilgrimages, in Rome by the contrasts of antique, old, and new, symbolized in the Palatine, the Vatican, and the Quirinal, in Paris by the long conflict between delusions that flatter and truth that frees, a struggle to end only with a Twilight of the old Gods and a full faith in Nature. This philosophy of life is a revolt against Roman Cathol- icism as France knows it. It is not necessarily anti-Chris- tian. Its ultimate base, as we see from Dr. Pascal^ is instinct rather than science. He sees that the character of most men is determined by heredity and circumstance, but even in the unfree he recognises the potentiality of freedom as a strict determinist could not do, and so these struggles between religion and science, between heart and brain, that from first to last give these twenty-three volumes unity of aim in their mass of detail, are but one more witness to the human craving for rest, one more failure to penetrate the ultimate meaning of hfe. But where genius is so fertile and so courageous the effort is its own reward. If he has pitilessly laid bare the pretentious, mockery and hypocriti- cal morality in much of what passes for religion and good- breeding he has been as merciless to confident materialism and that hedonistic fatalism that weakens the will by which 304 A Century of French Fiction alone happiness in self-control is won. His work has grown more virile with the years. It has discarded the excesses of a mistaken esthetic and gained in tonic earnestness. He was always a force to be reckoned with. He has become a force with which we are glad to reckon. CHAPTER XIV ALPHONSE DAUDET THE most graceful of modern French humourists, their most sympathetic satirist, and their most charming, if not their deftest story-teller, is Alphonse Daudet, who was born by a curious coincidence in the year and province of the birth of Zola. Both, then, were natives of Provence, both heirs of its warm sun, that gave to the genius of the one its vertiginous imagination, and ripened in the other a literary wine of most exquisite flavour. Daudet has left us in Little Thingumy (le Petit Chose) one of the most de- lightful bits of child autobiography in literature. Born in a well-to-do manufacturer's family, a reverse of fortune compelled him in youth to seek the wretched post of usher in a school at Alais, after having nursed literary dreams in a novel never published, and now lost beyond hope of recovery. After a year of slavery he left in desperation that " Dotheboys Hall " and joined his almost equally penniless brother^ Ernest, who has since become a worthy, though mediocre novelist and historian, at Paris in November of 1857. Here he tried to support himself by literature, at first as a poet, then by prose contributions to the Figaro, which paid better, though ill. <* We existed, and that was all," he says. He was too conscientious an artist that his work should be immediately remunerative. No wonder, then, 20 306 A Century of French Fiction that his verses were sometimes pessimistic, though of sound morale at the core, and ahvays of polished workmanship, for, as his brother says, " his literary conscience awoke in him at the same moment as his literary talent." " It is style that perfumes a book," he wrote, and he would sit for hours sifting, kneading, and molding words to fit his fancy. His first prose piece. The Story of Red Ridinghood (le Roman du Chaperon-Rouge), was characteristic of his whole work before the war of 1870. It personifies the happy insouciance of the artist temperament as a sprite that leads children to truancy, and genius to idleness, and yet, after being devoured at last by the wolf of necessity, is loved by those she injured, and blamed only by the sage Polonius, for whom she had no charm. Like the other prose work of this time. Red Ridinghood is essentially poetic, and a poet Daudet remained to the last, seeing, as Zola says, all things in the half-dream of vivid imaginings that magnifies all, and gives it colour and intensity, distil- ling from nature its elements of pathos, humour, and happi- ness. Realist as he came to be in after years, he never chose to see the sordid side of naturalism, he instinctively avoided the pettiness that delighted the old Flaubert and the young Huysmans. The romantic fancy of these early tales broods over the later Parisian dramas, and so mingles emotion with exact description that he makes a dainty fancy spring up, rare and delicate, out of reality itself. Zola describes him during these years as " living on the outskirts of the city with other poets, a whole band of joy- ous bohemians. He had the delicate nervous beauty of an ab horse, with flowing hair, silky divided beard, large eyes, narrow nose, an amorous mouth, and over it all a Alphonse Daudet 307 sort of illumination, a breath of tender light that indi- vidualised the whole face with a smile full at once of in- tellect and of the joy of life. There was something in him of the French street-urchin, something too of the Oriental woman." It was then that he made those bohemian ac- quaintances, the rates of his Jack^ and it is simply mar- vellous, as his brother has remarked, that he could have lived with them without losing aught of his talent, or leaving behind the bloom of his youth, the freshness of his mind, and the straightforwardness of his character. "He shared their miseries often; their disordered in- stincts never." Fortune was soon to smile on him, however. There was a gradually increasing demand for his work in the press, and in 1861 the Empress Eugenie, fascinated by his poem on " The Plums," changed his precarious freedom to an official sinecure, that this rare talent might develop undis- turbed by daily care. She induced the Duke of Morny, the Emperor's half-brother and minister of state, to give the poet a nominal secretaryship, a post that he held till Morny's death in 1865, and turned to excellent literary account in The Nabab and elsewhere. Privation had, however, already undermined his health, and to recover this he was now encouraged by Government to travel to Algeria, to Corsica, Sardinia, and the south of France, and thus not only developed his always deficient sense of colour, but collected the material for the Arab and Corsican stories m Letters from my J//// and Monday Tales ^ for The Nabab, for Numa Roumesian, and for the immortal Tartaririy whose original was for a time his travelling com- panion. It was now that Daudet made the acquaintance of Mistral, the Proven9al poet, of Gambetta, of Rochefort, 308 A Century of French Fiction and of Th^rion, from all of whom he learned secrets of art or of character. From dingy bohemianism he had passed, he said, to a butterfly life. From twenty-one he knew only happiness till shattered nerves brought him their melancholy reckoning. He now began to attempt play-writing, but with such indifferent success that our present purpose invites us to pass in silence these efforts, continued through many years. Still, on Morny's death in 1865, Daudet felt sufficient con- fidence in his talent to resign his post and seek the seclu- sion of his native Provence, where he wrote a first draft of Little Thingumy (le Petit Chose), which was not finished, however, till the autumn of 1867. This is a very fascinating and yet an unsatisfactory book. The autobiographical portion is pathetic and charming, the rest is extravagant and fantastically romantic, though Little Thingumy is so good-hearted and charming through- out that we pardon his inconsequence and his weakness. Daudet thought the book written too soon, and wished he had waited, remarking thoughtfully that " something very good might have been made of my youth." It was while writing this book that his second and great- est good fortune came to him, — his marriage with an almost ideal helpmeet, herself a woman of letters both by birth and training, whose cool, Northern common-sense supple- mented his Southern ardour with a harmony of soul that he has transposed with infinite art into a discord in his Numa Roumestan, It is true that for three years he attempted no great work, surrendering himself to the joy of his new life, and working up old impressions in the Letters from my Mill (1869), now one of his most popular books, though it met at first with but small success ; which is the more strange as Alphonse Daudet 309 it contains that nearly perfect gem of a story, The Elixir of Father Gaucher, and other work hardly inferior and most characteristic. But when the Terrible Year came and passed it found him transformed in spirit, fitted for serious work, largely, as it seems, by this most admirable woman, with her well-balanced, healthy mind, though her own fic- tion. Children and Mothers and the Childhood of a Parisian Girl, shows touches of the morbid art of Marivaux. Of their collaboration we have four estimates, his, hers, their son Leon's, and that of their closest friend, Edmond de Goncourt. They talked over all the situations and at every step she revised his work, " scattering over it," he says, " a little of her beautiful azure and gold powder," while she compares their joint work to the decoration of a Jap- anese fan : " on one side the subject, the characters, and the atmosphere in which they move ; on the other, sprays of verdure, petals of flowers, the slender prolongation of a little branch, what remains of colour or of gold-leaf on the painter's brush." With talent thus aided and supplemented Daudet began in 1868 his Tartarin of Tarascon (1872), less a novel than a long satirical tale, a playful bantering of that mirage of gasconade and insincerity that affects the vision of most Southern Frenchmen. The caricature is, perhaps, too subtle for our taste, and indeed it took the French public some years to realise that they were the richer by a master- piece of most admirable fooling. But once convinced, they have remained faithful, and it is said that the discovery of Tartarin and his exploitation On the Alps (1886), and at Port- Tarascon (1890), brought to the author of his being ^80,000. Of this profitable hero Daudet says that '^judged freely 3IO A Century of French Fiction after many years it seems to me that Tartarin has qualities of youth, of vitahty, of truth, a truth from over- Loire, that may swell and exaggerate facts, but never lies." As that other Provencal Zola, says, " it is truth seen from its hu- mourous side." Daudet found vent here for the ardour of his Southern nature, and thus attained a more sustained realism in the Parisian dramas that were to follow. No one has ever caught, with such delicately keen perception and such sympathy as he, the effervescent imagination of Pro- vence that creates its own environment and yet charms in spite of persistent self-deception. He has himself described it in Nuffia Roumestan as ** pompous, classical, theatrical ; loving parade, costume, the platform, banners, flags, trum- pets ; clannish, traditional, caressing, feline, of an eloquence brilliant, excited yet colourless, quick to anger, and yet giv- ing anger a sham expression even when it is sincere." Such was Numa, and such is Tartarin, a cinemetograph of the Midi. But between his marriage and the war, and indeed till 1873, Daudet was occupied chiefly with short stories that were to win him, even before his first true novel was written, a place among the best of modern raconteurs, and some claim to be regarded as the inventor of the newspaper story in France. The Letters f7-om my Mill is, perhaps, Daudet's one book before 1874 that the critic can regard as of pri- mary import, for though the prevailing tone is still roman- tic, his pathos and humour strike often more realistic notes, and reveal the student of Balzac. Nowhere was he to ren- der external impressions of Provengal Hfe with such delicate intimacy as here, where he seems at times, as he said, " hyp- notised by reality," whether it be of medieval Avignon, as in The Pope's Mule^ of the irony of village pettiness, as in Alphonse Daudet 3 1 1 Old Folks (les Vieux), or of pastoral life in The Stars, There is a medieval verve in The Elixir and IVie Curate of Cucignaii, there is a fantasy like that of Hoffmann in The Man with the Golden Brain, the mirage of grotesque exag- geration in The Beaucaire Stage, and unsuspected power of realistic description of nature in In Camargue, His gen- tlest pathos is in Bixiou's Poi'tfolio, his deepest in The Two Inns, and there is a hint at least in Barrack Homesickness of the psychological analysis that was to dominate his last years. Thus in these exquisitely polished cameos of literary art we have the pledge of all that he was to accomplish, not only in the Monday Tales, the Letters to an Absentee, and Artists^ Wives, but in the Tartarin books and the novels also. It was natural that his Southern imagination should find its first expression in these little jewels, for the faculty of sustained application came only with the tempering of war; but there is no need to dwell on them here save to note the gradual subsidence of romanticism, a growth of the Parisian element, a stronger and fuller social nature, rarely with a touch of bitterness, as in Arthur or The Bookkeeper, more often with the humour of perennial youth, and the growth of genial sympathy with human foibles that lends a grateful aroma to stories that might easily be given a pessi- mistic turn, such as Little Stenn, Belisaire's Prussian and Mr. Bonnicar's Patties. But most of all one is struck in the latter tales with the glowing patriotism as it appears in the superb Game of Billiards, The Ferry, the universally known Siege of Berlin and The Last Class. It found also a much more chauvinistic expression in some now omitted Letters to an Absentee, and in parts of a series of sketches in war time published in 1874 as Robert Helmont, in which are also preliminary studies for his Jack and The Nabab, 312 A Century of French Fiction But while these books were slowly bringing fame they were not bringing fortune. That he was to attain at a stroke by Fromont Jr. and Risler Sr.y his first " Parisian Drama," better known to English readers under the name of its femi- nine incarnation of evil, " Sidonie." It would seem that to achieve popular success it was needful for him to plant the seed of his genius in the muck-beds of Parisian domes- tic infelicities, but he certainly treated that unfortunate con- vention of literary taste, or perhaps it were juster to say that inevitable nemesis of French marriage customs, with com- mendable restraint here and always. Throughout the " Parisian Dramas " Daudet is a most anxious student of life. Wherever he was he was taking mental notes, and often literal ones. Piles of such memo- randa are among his literary remains. All his novels have their roots in things seen, in a love of truth, from which he would at times break away for sudden incursions into the realms of fantasy, never without an artistic purpose, but always with loss of power, that he regained, like Antaeus, on touching earth again. So when he plans to write a serious novel of Parisian life he chooses a scene that he could observe from his own windows in the ancient Hdtel Lamoignon in the Marais. A commercial experience of his father furnished the mainspring of the action, " mutual interest coupling together in unremitting labour for years beings different in temperament and in education." His novel is the story of an honest and talented man whose abilities raise him socially into a society against whose cor- ruption he has no hereditary defence, and from which he escapes only by suicide. Beside old Risler, the soul of honour, he places the young and base Fromont, and then he bestows on the base man a noble wife, and on the good man Alphonse Daudet 313 a base one who shall be jealous of the social position of Mme. Fromont, as she will be at the seductiveness of the other. These are the four pillars of the story. Around them he grouped figures no less real because drawn, they too, from daily observation. There is the decayed actor Delobelle, "blooming and sonorous," and his hunchback daughter D^sir^e, who seems to have stepped from a novel of Dickens, and there is Planus with his sturdy Alsacian honest loyalty. But because these figures are based on observation, they are portraits rather than characters, and our interest is more in plot than in evolution of soul. The principal personages are weak, even Sidonie, that " mush- room of the Parisian gutter," who, because she has been humiliated all her childhood with the prospect before her of becoming a dried up mansard-flower of vanity and envy at last, finds in prosperity her only joy in malice and in the humiliation of others. The story toward the last grows somewhat stagey, and the close seems a regrettable conces- sion to sentimentality, such as was to deface parts of Jack and The Nababy before the romantic virus was finally neu- tralised, though it was never expelled. Still no one can read Frojnont Jr. and Risler Sr. to-day and wonder that the reader of 1873, nursed perhaps on Feuillet and Cher- buliez, should have hailed it with delight, for as yet there was none in France who could have been regarded as a rival, actual or prospective, of its author. But Daudet was to do better things than this. He had found himself conscious of a new power and discovered the joy of sustained creative eifort. ^\tn Jack^ his next novel (1876), is better, though the critic will hardly accord it the pre-eminent place that it was said to hold in the mind of its author. He called it a work of " pity, anger, and irony," 314 A Century of French Fiction and here he unconsciously lays his finger on its weakness. It is self-concious and self- revealing, and what it reveals is a hyper-sensitive softness and an abuse of his pathetic power greater than we shall find in his work elsewhere. The central figure is an illegitimate child, by turns petted and neglected by a frivolous 'and whimsical mother, and forced at last to struggle for existence in a world for which he had been studiously unfitted, to fall the victim of his virtues and of the meanness or thoughtlessness of others. This Jack, wrecked by natural though misdirected affection, was taken from life, and so, alas for human nature, was his mother. Most of the other characters were taken from Daudet's associates, especially those of his bohemian years in the Latin Quarter ; and so frank was the procedure that he did not always trouble himself to change even the names of those failures in literature and art, who formed a sort of mutual-admiration club, envious only of recognised talent. These rates furnish the humour of the story, for here Daudet's good nature is constantly getting the better of his contempt. It is not, however, the part that is most interest- ing in the evolution of the author's genius or of the fiction of our generation, for here Jack holds a very significant place. In bringing his hero into direct touch with the sombre realities of the foundry and the stoke-hole, Daudet was the first in France to make an honest study of the great artisan class, — a very different matter from the study of pathology in low life in Germinie Lacerteux, There is a touch of Dutch realism in the wedding-feast at Saint-Mande and in the lives of Dr. Rivals and Belisaire, the peddler. And there is an innovation also in its stylistic technic, for here, in the description of the marine engine at Indre, are the first traces of that personification of material objects Alphonse Daudet 315 that he was to apply so effectively in The Little Parish (la Petite paroisse, 1895), and that has become one of the most effective devices of his friendly rival Zola. There is some- what more development of character here than in Fromont Jr. and Risler Sr., but it is not always consistent, and the plot certainly does not hold the reader and compel attention to the close as did that of the earlier novel. Better character drawing and better fabulation than in either of the preceding novels distinguish The Nabab^ whose characters in the main are men who were or had been in the public eye. The central figure, Jansoulet, was obviously Francois Bravay, who had returned to France from Egypt as the Nabab from Tunis, with wealth acquired even more dubiously, and by lavish use of money had got himself thrice elected to the French parliament from the district of Gard, as the Nabab did once from Corsica, only to find his elec- tion thrice annulled, as a useless and inopportune scandal, by the votes of men no whit better than he. This had happened in 1864, and Bravay survived in poverty and contempt the fall of the Empire, whose corruption he had understood without realising its hypocrisy. But this use of a discredited adventurer, in whose fate he discerned one of the most cruel injustices that Paris had ever commit- ted, was not Daudet's most daring blending of history and fiction. The novel owes much of adventitious interest and no small part of its artistic strength to the skill with which he turned to account his years as secretary to Morny in his picture of Mora, whom he has surrounded with a group of easily recognisable adventurers from the strange social scum of the Second Empire. In the main he has been faithful to the spirit of history, though not of course to its letter. In Mora mercy has seasoned what would be 3i6 A Century of French Fiction justice to the cynical Morny. *' I have painted him," said Daudet, " as he loved to show himself, in his Richelieu- Brummel attitude. ... I have exhibited the man of the world that he was and wished to be ; assured that were he living he would not be displeased to be presented thus." And as Mora was in the very letters but a thin disguise for Morny, so the men of 1877 instantly recognised Bois- Landry, Monpavon, Cardailhac, Moessard, Le Merquier, Hemerlingue, and even the servants of the original Nabab, and there were those who said that Felicia Ruys was none other than Sarah Bernhardt. Dr. Jenkins was Dr. Olliffe, though the arsenic pills belonged to another, and the account of the orphanage of Bethlehem, for which the sympathies of the Nabab were so cynically engaged, was copied almost literally from the report of a real institution founded by as philanthropic men with similar purpose and like results. In contrast to these scenes of high life, of extravagance, frivolity, and luxury, Daudet introduces the family of Pere Joyeuse, personifications of idyllic simplicity of heart and mind. But these characters also had a kernel of truth, for Daudet had met P^re Joyeuse as a Communist in 18 71. These scenes are not without pathos, yet they injure the book as a work of art. The grotesque has been success- fully mingled with the tragic by Shakspere and by Hugo, but sentimental pathos, however skilful, puts the reader out of touch with the impressive dignity of Mora's deathbed and funeral, with the broad fresco-strokes of the Bey's Festival, and the stern satire of Jansoulet's end. This was an artistic device brought over ixom Jack, and Daudet con- tinued to employ it later as a prudent concession, so he told Zola, to popular taste, but his contrasts grew less glaring Alphonse Daudet 317 as he grew surer of his naturalism. Yet perhaps after all The Nababf for its humour and its satire, its idyl and its pathos, its exuberant picturesqueness and tragic power, is the most characteristic, if not the best, of Daudet's work in fiction. Kings in Exile ^ of 1879, was a more daring venture, for it was of necessity less a product of personal observation than of current rumour and constructive imagination, such as had guided Zola in Booty, Hence he found it, as he says, " that one of my books that gave me most trouble to put together, the one that I carried longest in my mind, after it had appeared to me as a title and dim design one evening on the Place du Carrousel through the tragic rent in the Parisian sky made by the ruins of the Tuileries. It should be a drama of princes exiled to the gay capital by fortune or by choice, a book of modern history from the pulsing heart of Hfe as it is, not from the dust of archives." Again all the characters were patent to every reader. The King of Westphalia was George of Hannover, his daughter was Friederike, the Queen of Asturia was Isabella of Spain, Christian was the ex-King of Naples, Axel the Prince of Orange, and Palma Don Carlos. The minor characters also, L^vis, S^phora, and others, were recognisable ; the elder Meraut was Daudet's own father, and Elis6e a com- posite of the author and an old friend. Many of the inci- dents also had their counterparts in the common gossip of the time, though of course all was treated with the license of poetic idealisation. Kings in Exile marks a decided advance in the power of developing character. He had never yet shown such clairvoyant vision as in the noble tragedy of Queen Fr^- derique, and it is surely remarkable that a book dealing with 3i8 A Century of French Fiction such a subject as the crumbling of an old regime should have had such sympathetic charm as to win the praise alike of royalist and republican. Yet the book was evidently of slow and reluctant production. We feel that this is a realm of thought and interest foreign alike to the author and to us. The fabulation is perhaps closer than in The Nabab ox Jack ^ but we miss the broad sweep of picturesque description that glorified certain pages of The Nabab and make chap- ters of Nunia Roumestan quiver beneath the Southern sun. But in Meraut and Fr^d^rique, in subtle psychology and development of motive, where Daudet most needed to grow and where he was still destined to make the greatest prog- ress, this novel shows a distinct advance, that was further accentuated in Numa Roumestati two years later (1881). Daudet regarded Numa Roumestan as " the least incom- plete of all his works." It is a " Parisian drama," but its central figure is a typical son of Provence, whom men have persisted in identifying with Gambetta, probably because that statesman was as typical of the country of his nativity as Numa himself, in whom there is also a great deal of Daudet's self, though every politician of the south of France might have seen some of his features reflected there. Most of the other characters were, like Numa, " bundles of diverse sticks," the only acknowledged individual portrait being that of the tambourinist Valmajour. The Provence of this novel contrasts curiously with that of Tartarin thirteen years before. It seems to have grown, as Sherard cleverly says, " naturally and morally dusty." Certainly it was not so intelligible, but possibly this was because it was more subtly profound, because he had more completely and successfully fluxed the multitude of obser- vations that crowded his note.books and his mind. In Alphonse Daudet 319 any case the critic perceives immediately that we have no longer here a series of episodes as in The Nabab and Kings in Exik, but a closely articulated narration, in which the central interest is always the change wrought in char- acter by the clash of Northern and Southern temperaments. From the chime of his own marriage his artist mind seems to have evolved this story of sweet bells jangled out of tune. Because of this closer articulation there is less breadth in narration, but there is equal humour and closer analysis in the tragedy of an effervescent optimism bruising itself against the realities of life. By his facile promises, by his light-hearted thoughtlessness, Numa wrecks all who trust in him, while he rises buoyant over the sea of troubles that he has caused. It is the tragic counterpart of the comedy of Tartarin, and in Henriette we are shown the idyllic side of the same temperament, tragic-comic in Valmajour and wholly comic in Bompard, a figure borrowed from Tartarin for the occasion. Opposed to all these is Rosalie, Numa's wife and Daudet's, who sees the world with Parisian clair- voyance, but is not the happier for the vision. In its closely knit structure, in its relentless irony, this book marks the third phase in Daudet's development, from romanticism through external realism to the psychic realism of the interplay of character and environment. If there were any doubt that this cardinal place belongs to Numa Roumestan^ The Evangelist (1883) would remove it, for here the closer structure and the psychic preoccupa- tion leap to the eye. The general title is now changed. This is no longer a " Parisian drama," it is an " observa- tion ; " that is, it purports to be a psychic study, not a novel of action, though indeed the story pulses with vigorous move- ment, and seems written, as we know that it was written, 320 A Century of French Fiction under the pressure of indignation and moral revolt, realising to a wonderful degree the rare combination of " intensity of feeling and a sage simplicity of execution." Its pathetic heroine was a teacher of Daudet's son L^on, and in a letter to the London Times, published just after the appear- ance of the novel (February, 1883), we shall find that his Eline was not the only victim of the lust for spiritual domi- nation deliberately exploiting the morbid pathology of religious enthusiasm. Never has Daudet been so pessimis- tic as here. No form of Christian idealism escapes his satire. The love of God becomes in Madame Autheman the cloak of a domineering ambition, in Mile, de Beuil it masks a morose joy in cruelty, in Eline it demands a deliberate sacrifice of human affections for a morbid ideal, in Henriette it involves a sapping of character. Force rules in this spiritual world as relentlessly as in the material one. Weak and simple natures yield or are crushed. All who have won sympathy end by claiming pity. There is no novel of our day in France where cant and hypocrisy have been so cauterised. Sapho, which followed The Evangelist in 1884, is the last novel that Daudet wrote before disease laid its racking hand on him and caused some natural flagging in his in- tellectual powers. Edmond de Goncourt regarded it as the author's " most complete, most human and beautiful story," and most French critics agree with him that it is at least the work of greatest power and that most likely to survive. It certainly has had the largest sale, but, though it is writ- ten with great and sustained strength and a realism that is often almost pathologic, it is not agreeable reading. Sapho is the femme coUante (Anglo-Saxons will not need the word while they can avoid the social abuse that it repre- Alphonse Daudet 321 sents), who clings with the desperation of a last love to the rather weak-willed Gaussin. She loves him after her kind, in an animal way, and he is tortured in spirit by jealousy of her more than dubious past, by the fascination of her presence, and by the impending wreck of his fortunes and his career. " To his sons when they are twenty," Daudet commends this story of facile love that saps the forces of heart and mind. His passion past, Gaussin tolerates Fanny Legrand, then clings to her, then shrinks from her, repudiates her, marries another, yet only to find old custom stronger than new duty. But when he returns to her after this supreme sacrifice the ghastly truth is at last forced on him that for such as she there is no moral obligation but the pursuit of a whimsical fancy, capable only of social dis- integration and evil. Critics call this narrative "eternally true." For the sake of French manhood one hopes it is not. In any case Daudet has treated his subject with the relentless seriousness of a demonstrator and has relieved his satirical analysis with no touches of hghter humour, such as sparkled the next year in Tartarin on the Alps (1885). Of the novels of Daudet's decadence from Tlie Acade- mician (I'lmmortel, 1888) to the posthumous Head of the Family (Soutien de famille, 1898), we are content to speak more briefly. The former is primarily a satire on the French Academy and on myopic scholarship, obviously forced but with a lightness of humour and occasional pieces of epic breadth in narration that dispose the reader to con- done an action as inexplicable as it is cruel, and a satirical imputation as improbable as it is unjust. Rose and Ninette (1891) invites attention to the eifects of divorce, especially on parents and children, and The Little Parish (la Petite 322 A Century of French Fiction paroisse, 1895) is a study of various phases of jealousy, in which Daudet adopts the symbolic method of Zola and Ibsen, making the rhythmic recurrence of the parish church mark each stage of an action over which it seems to pre- side, and, what is perhaps more significant, paying his tribute to the evangelical ethics of Tolstoi, before which the stern, pessimistic retribution of the older naturalists degene- rates into sentimental pity and pardon, marking thus the anemia of the will that is a characteristic note of the present waning of naturalism, and so seriously marring the psychology of the story. This was the last novel published during Daudet's life. Since 1885 he had been an intense nervous sufferer and a victim of an insomnia that yielded only to chloral and mor- phine, so that he often passed months without touching a pen, with alternating periods of mental activity and dead calm, the latter increasing in length till death brought sudden relief at last. This fact will explain the comparatively in- significant production of these later years. He left, how- ever, two posthumous volumes. La Fedor and other stories, which, when they are not trivial are saturnine, and The Head of the Family (Soutien de famille), decidedly his best story since The Evangelist. It is in part, not the best part, the story of a modern Hamlet, whose mind is lamed by responsibilities greater than he feels himself able to bear, and lamed also by the acquiescence of mother and brother in his assumed superiority. In part, and the best part, the book is a bitterly sarcastic picture of French polit- ical hfe, in which characters are taken frankly from reality, even to the President of the Republic, in whom he sees the final flowering of the modern political temperament, an unctuous sentimentality and false fellowship, masking heart- Alphonse Daudet 323 less and unscrupulous ambition. This study of " contem- porary manners " bears no marks of incompleteness or of failing strength. It is Daudet's literary testament, a Par- thian shaft at political hypocrisy, sent true and strong from the grave. Daudet was a literary artist by instinct rather than by reflection. A beautiful talent, a little superficial in its subtlety, without the forceful virility of Balzac or Flaubert or Zola. He charms, not by ordered masses, but by his variety and suppleness. Even in the novels there is a con- stant shifting of scene, and the single volume of Letters from my Mill, regarded from this point of view, shows an astonishing variety of legend and revery, of symbolism and farce, of sentiment and dramatic intensity. His work pro- > ceeds less from thought than from impressions that he re- ceived with a definiteness and guarded with a permanence' that are ahke remarkable. Hence he succeeds best with superficial natures, and where the character cannot be per- ceived but must be thought out in its complexity, he will exhibit but a single side of it. His Nabab could never make a fortune, his Mora could never govern an empire, nor his Numa a republic. We are more satisfied with Tar- tarin, Risler, M^raut than with these, and in general more content with the women than with the men. The mascu- line Mme. Autheman may elude him, but Sidonie and Fanny, D^sir^e and Aline and many another, even to the posthumous F^dor, are not likely to slip from the memory. Perhaps it is not unjust to say of him, with Doumic, that he lacked wide experience, deep insight or keen interpre- tation of life, but yet made the best possible use of an acute sensitiveness, of a nervous temperament and delicate imagination, as well as of a very beautiful artistic nature, 324 A Century of French Fiction and so gave of the society in which he lived the broad- est, most varied, and most faithful image, while he left be- hind him the fragrant memory of a noble and sympathetic character. The young Daudet possessed by nature grace, charm, and pathos, qualities natural to that sunny South around which his humour plays so kindly in Tartarin, so sternly in Numa. The war added seriousness to these qualities and turned playful wit to bitter satire. But he brought to this naturalistic temper the mind of an idyllic poet, so that, as Zola says, " his mind gallops in the midst of the real, and now and again makes sudden leaps into the realm of fancy, for nature put him in that border land where poetry ends and reality begins." On this poet's vision in Daudet it is well to insist, for it gives his work the appearance of a kindly optimism. Even in evil he prefers to see the ridiculous than the base, and hence it is that his profoundly earnest satire still retains much of the irony that charac- terised his gentler moods. This irony is one of the most evanescent of literary forms, it is hard to define it or its charm, but it is clear that it leads Daudet to greater sub- jectivity, to more expression of personal sympathy for his characters than strict naturalism admits. Daudet's style is that of an impressionist. In his earliest work there is conscientious elaboration in structure and phraseology ; later, and in longer works, his care is rather for the single episode than for the whole, and he allows himself liberties in syntax and vocabulary if by these arti- fices he can fix a passing shade of thought. His work, at least up to 'TJie Academician^ shows increasing hmpidity and firmness in diction, and wise restraint in the use of the sources of emotion. While refusing " to consume himself Alphonse Daudet 325 sterilely for years over one work," like Flaubert, lest by elaboration he should lose sympathy with his theme and a straightforward natural diction, yet he was never hasty, but wrote every manuscript thrice over, and would have written it as many more had he been able. Thus he attained, at Ohis best, a style that is at once classic and modern, artistic ^ without artificiality. His slight, rapid, subtle, lively, sug- gestive phrases form a curious contrast to the methodical up-piling of details that marks the vast architecture of Zola's fiction. He is more spontaneous, delicate, personal, idyllic ; Zola is a more conscious objective artist, and so more epic. Both have a vein of romanticism, but in Daudet the idealisation is toward good, in Zola toward evil. Both have a noble earnestness, but Zola's indignation has more tonic virility, Daudet's a more persuasive warmth, making him, as even captious critics admit, the most lov- able writer of his generation. CHAPTER XV THE GENERATION OF LOUIS PHILIPPE THE rise and culmination of the romantic movement from 1 82 1 to 1830 had been peculiarly favoura- ble to the birth of literary talent. That of the bourgeois monarchy was much less so, counting no names of the first rank save Daudet and Zola. The romantic move- ment was gradually spending its force during the thirties, and the novelists born during that time, with the sole exception of Fabre, belong to the class of mildly romantic story-tellers, such as Malot and Theuriet, or of idyllists like Glouvet or sensationalists like Gaboriau. This class is always with us and appears also in the early forties with Claretie and Gr^ville, to be continued and indeed to reach its typical expression in Ohnet, born at the very close of our period. Meantime, however, with 1840 the new gen- eration who were to take up the work of Flaubert and the Goncourts come on the stage and forerunners of the psychologist school begin to appear, as well as some repre- sentatives of Renanism in fiction. We shall do weU to consider first the belated offsprings of romanticism, and then to turn to the heralds of change. Among mere story-tellers a high place belongs to Hector Malot, whose first novel. Victims of Love (Victimes d'amour, 1864) promised more strength than his rapid production has since realised, though his No Relatiom The Generation of Louis Philippe 327 (Sans famille, 1878) has had sufficient force and pathos, joined to a delicate grace of description, to carry this story of R^mi, the foundling and juvenile Gil Bias, into nearly every language of Europe. Malot's central characteristics are his serious probity, his opposition to a false religiosity, and a sympathy with vague humanitarian ideals, all of which endear him to the middle class. He is rude and severe at times, but he is always clean and resolutely optimistic. Typical of his sixty-five volumes are Romain Kalbris (1869), Baccara (1886), Conscience (1888), and Justice (1889). Take the characters of Feuillet without their tragic in- tensity and treat them with a frivolity akin to their own and the result will be the novels of Gustav Droz, who in his Papa, Mama, and the Baby (Monsieur, Madame, et B^b^, 1866) has caught the tone of society in the Second Em- pire — that society which, as Zola says, played with amiable vices, as the eighteenth century did with pastoral life — perhaps better than any other. His best work is Around a Spring (Autour d'une source, 1869), but here, as always, his psychology is weak and his gay irony is stronger than his daintily artificial sentiment. Closely allied to Droz, at least in his fiction, is Ludovic Hal^vy, of whom the universally read Abbk Constantin (1882) is less characteristic than the three volumes in which he pursues the fortunes of the Cardinal family (Monsieur et Madame Cardinal, 1873, ^^s Petites Cardi- nal, 1880, la Famille Cardinal, 1883), whose head, that " corrupt puritan Prudhomme of vice," is the incarnation of the dry rot that Sedan revealed. In the early part of Criquette (1883), the story of a fair, bright, and impulsive gamine of Belleville, there is an admirable picture of life 328 A Century of French Fiction behind the scenes in a small theatre, but the close of the novel is commonplace and unworthy of the beginning, and the rest of Halevy's fiction does not rise above mediocrity. The years of the apogee of the romantic drama, 1830- 1836, saw also the birth of two men who infused its spirit into the romantic novel long after it had ceased to haunt the stage. Richebourg, who was born in 1833 and died early in 1898, has probably had more readers than any other novelist of France. He was for years the favourite feuilletonist of the penny papers, furnishing by the yard fiction of manifold mediocrity, from the sensationalism of Ponson du Terrail to the sentimentally pathetic narrative whose argument, though it run through four volumes, may be infallibly summed up in the lines, — " Marion pleure, Marion crie, Marion veut qu'on la marie." Against this perpetual " weeping of Margery " a stand was made for a time by Emile Gaboriau (i 835-1 874), whose novels of crime and its detection have given him a European reputation as the reviver, if not the inaugurator, of a widely popular though inferior genre. He has no knowledge of character, no grace of style, and there is spinning of " copy " even in the best of his novels, The Widow Lerouge (1' Affaire Lerouge, 1866) or File 113 (Dossier 113, 1867) ; but his popularity is perennial, and even the best of his imitators, such as Boisgobey, have quite failed to catch his secret. Meantime a new note, pleasing and prolonged though never strong, had been struck by Andre Theuriet, who sings the provincial idyl, usually of the middle class, with a The Generation of Louis Philippe 329 smiling melancholy and dainty naturalism, never intense, but always amiable, amusing, clean, and sweet, with much facile sentiment and an occasional tragic note. Born at Marly (1833) he passed the first thirty- two years of his life in the country. His voluminous work in fiction dates from middle life and 1870. Here he holds a place quite apart, on the frontier of realism and idealism. All that is graceful, gentle, childlike in country life he reproduces admirably, but he ignores the commonplace and shrinks from crass realities and ugliness. Love is his constant theme, the sensuous instinct rather than the tender and artificial passion. It is only gradually that he has brought city and country into effective contrast, as first in Gerard's Mar- riage (1875), ^^^^ t)est in Autumn Love (1888) ; and thus by giving humour a place beside poetry he has avoided monotony in his sixty volumes to a degree that could hardly have been hoped. Throughout, Theuriet shows an emotional temperament. His heroes are phases of himself, his heroines results of his experience. Hence they have psychic reaUty, though with no minute dissection or motive, just as there is no- accurate description of environment. Throughout he writes as much for the ear as for the eye, in a singularly harmonious style that recalls at times Bernardin and even Rousseau, though taken as a whole his work most nearly resembles the third manner of George Sand. Those rustic novels of the Scheherazade of Nohant. were also the inspiration of Jules de Glouvet, and Paul Ar^ne, who do for Maine and Provence what she did for Berry, Theuriet for Lorraine, Balzac for Touraine, Maupassant for Normandy, and Fabre for the C^vennes. There is no rea- son to dwell on either save to note that their books show a 330 A Century of French Fiction growing interest among the reading public in picturesque moral geography, and that to an increasing number of novelists Paris is no longer France. With Theuriet one may associate the facile raconteur Claretie, whose best novel, The Assassin, dates from 1866, while his more recent work has fallen to a dreary monotony of mediocrity. On the borderland of oblivion stand also the swarming multitude of volumes by Henri Gr^ville, (Mme. Durand), whose sentimental sensationalism has met with much popular success, especially in her novels of Russian life, as for instance Dosia (1876). Nor can a materially higher rank be accorded to the fiction of Theodore Bentzon (Madame Blanc), whose interest in America has evoked perhaps an undue interest in her books among us. A much greater art with the same mild geniality charac- terises the fiction of Frangois Copp^e, who is most felicitous in the half-tones of prose and knows how to be magnani- mous with a delightfully naive suavity. He is at his best in short stories of the lower middle class and of humble Parisian life, as when in Henriette (1889) he tells the story of the wreck of a simple heart on the rocks of social con- vention, or the pathetic suicide of the Daughter of Sorrow (Fille de tristesse), the artist's model, whose social fall had not quenched the pure flame of her love. Occasionally the pathetic sinks to the morbidly sentimental ; more often it rises to pessimism or irony. He is excellent in such sketches as Maman Nunu or The Substitute (le Rempla- ^ant) or in such impressionist descriptions as The Silver Thimble (le D^ d'argent) or Sunset (le Coucher de soleil) or The Medal, He has himself well described his outlook on life as that of " a man of refinement who enjoys simple The Generation of Louis Philippe 331 people, an aristocrat who loves the masses," and so has given a sympathetic and somewhat idealised expression of democratic realism. In 1848, just at the close of the period we are consider- ing, there was born a novelist whose chief interest to the critic is not in his novels, but in their phenomenal popular- ity. The Iron Founder (le Maitre des forges, 1882) has sold in France more than a third of a million copies, and in its translations as many more. Several other novels by the same author, though they lag behind this, surpass all but the most successful efforts of the greatest masters of French fiction. Yet it is obvious that, for men who think, George Ohnet has no claim to be regarded as a thinker, an analyst, an artist, or even as a good story-teller, and for such read- ers the royal acid of Lemaitre's wit long ago dissolved whatever tinsel glamour might have come from a commercial success, which shows at least that the great public knows what it wants, in France as with us, and does not wait to be instructed nor suffer itself to be guided even by a una- nimity of criticism. He was created, as Lemaitre says, " for the ilUterate who aspire to literature." They understand him, as they do not understand in their higher purposes and art, either Daudet or Zola, who are not read by the multitude for the qualities that the critics admire, but often for those which they deplore, while the more delicate art- ists of fiction are not read by the multitude at all. Ohnet's method is simple, so simple that any description of it will seem a reflection of Lemaitre's masterly essay. He takes a situation consecrated by the approval of gener- ations. He leads bourgeois virtue to a facile triumph, and lets aristocratic barriers sink before the master of modern commerce or industry. His heroes are all self-made men, 332 A Century of French Fiction and proud of their maker. His aristocracy is worm-eaten, but still worthy of the respect and ambition of snobs who are careful to acquire millions before advertising their con- tempt for sordid wealth in eloquent apostrophes that never materialise otherwise than in the purchase of aristocratic connections. Those who read without thought desire a conventional story and conventional characters. Ohnet's characters, therefore, are not characters but puppets, and his denoue- ments are of a monotonous optimism. We have the proud, virtuous, unselfish man, usually an engineer, always a roman- tic hero, a sort of " archangel of democracy." Then there is the heroine, also a straw figure, noble of course, proud, haughty, " incomparably beautiful," who begins by hating and ends by marrying the wealthy and heroic snob. Then of course there is the idle gentleman, seductive and imper- tinent, and the rich bourgeoise of amiable vulgarity, and by way of spice there is the dime-novel heroine, the gipsy- countess Sarah. The minor characters are equally con- ventional, and so is the society in which they move. There is no trace of psychological continuity in their outbursts of passion or magnanimity. Given this vulgarity of situation, of character, and of style, it may be admitted that Ohnet manages his materials with a good deal of melodramatic skill and with an appear- ance of Hterary quality that might well have deceived those who were seeking to raise themselves above the level of Richebourg. Of these there are many, and to supply their wants is a legitimate commercial enterprise in which Ohnet has achieved a flattering success. His work has been the pastime of millions, but it has contributed nothing to fiction as a mode of thought or of artistic expression. The Generation of Louis Philippe 333 This last was the chief care of Flaubert and the Gon- courts, with whom in aim, though by no means in method or result, one might class Cladel, whose fiction begins with picturesque sketches of life in Quercy, but who in his later work made himself an eccentric pupil of the eccentric Bau- delaire, endeavouring to impose on prose fetters as galling as those that had maimed the classic alexandrine verse, so that his best novel. My Countrymen (Mes paysans, 1869- 1872), has been described as "a literary jewel, curiously wrought, that one examines with more surprise than interest." Somewhat similar is the case of Armand Silvestre, in so far as that poetic genius has not sold itself to scatology and pornography. And with him it is natural to associate Catulle Mendes, whose frivolous stories have a curious arti- fice of style that gives them, as some critic has said, the charm of lace, frail, light, yet exquisite in its delicate pueril- ity. There are moments when he suggests Gautier both in his feeling for art and in his complete lack of any percep- tion of its relation to morals, passing lightly from such toying trifles as The Nightcap (le Bonnet de la marine) to what might be the deepest pathos, as Old Bias (le Vieux Bias, 1882), or the bitterest satire, as The Child- Woman (la Femme-enfant, 1891), treating all with equal care and equal ethical indifference. Among artists, rather than story-tellers, one may class the mobile poet, Richepin, who began his work in fiction with Strange Deaths (les Morts bizarres, 1876), fantastic tales in the manner of Poe, and followed these, while still in the fervour of young romanticism, with Madame Andr/ (1878). Then in the gipsy story Miarka (1883) he showed some- what of the naturalistic influence, as later on, for instance 334 ^ Century of French Fiction in The Beloved (I'Aim^, 1893), he suggests the psychologi- cal school. But throughout he is drawn naturally to ex- treme, bizarre situations, preferring the strange in sentiment and the euphuistic in style, seductive but irritating in its would-be subtlety, most pleasing, perhaps, when the artist in him renders for us the mute poetry of landscape or the picturesque gipsy bands of Miarka, With these artists of fiction Anatole France might claim the highest place, were it not that he seems even more bent on his philosophy than on his art, having in him, as Ler maitre observes, something of Racine, of Voltaire, of Flau- bert, of Renan, yet always himself, the perfection of grace, the ultimate flowering of the Latin genius. This son of a Jewish bookseller spent his childhood in suburban rambling and among the bookstalls on the Paris quais, and was asso- ciated at school with Copp^e and Bourget in admiration for Aurevilly. The literary result, in fiction as in poetry and criticism, is a curious combination of folklore, hagiology, and paganism, of spiritism, mysticism, and materialism, of hedonism and kindliness, domesticity and pyrrhonism. He is a satirist and a fantasist. His fiction is only a mode of expressing his doubts or his ideas. The sole exception to this is The Red Lily (le Lys rouge, 1894), an imitation of Bourget and his worst and least characteristic production, if we except the youthful Jocasia and the Gaunt Cat ( Jocaste et le chat maigre, 1879), which, in spite of outcroppings of irony and humour, is feeble, incomplete, and sensational. But already his second novel. The Crime ofSylvestre Bonnard (1881), showed a most gentle and large-hearted irony in its story of the rescue of a young girl from abusive guardian- ship and the hypocrisy of " prunes and prisms " ; and the The Generation of Louis Philippe 335 same graceful irony and sympathy with childhood pervades with its dainty morahsing The Book of Fiiefidship (le Livre de mon ami, 1885), recollections of the author's own youth. In Balthasar (1890) one notes a growing tendency to the medieval and to mysticism, that finds its most striking expression in the prayer of the soulless and immortal Lilith, who desires " death that I may enjoy life, remorse that I may taste pleasure," and this preoccupation with med- ieval Christian thought finds further expression in Thais (1890), the story of a hermit of the Thebaid, an epicurean philosopher, and an Alexandrian courtesan, a sceptical dis- play of Christian scenery, or as it were, a page of the Golden Legend topsy-turvy, "piety of imagination with impiety of thought," a piece of Parisian platonism, truth wrapped in paradox. The stories collected under the title Tlie Mother-of-Pearl Casket (1892), and those in St Clara's Well (1895), call for no special notice, but with The Cook Shop " Queen Pedauque '* (la Rotisserie de la reine Pedauque, 1893), continued that same year in The Opinions of Jerdme Coignard^ he makes the novel more than ever a chat, a vehicle for his open or veiled scepticism. An English critic pronounces The Cook Shop " a tangled medley of marvels and mysticisms, of religion and obscenity," while the characters are eighteenth-century reproductions of the ascetic, epicurean, and courtesan of Thais. Jerome Coignard is called by Leraaitre " the most radical breviary of scepticism since Montaigne." In the first there is little plot, in the second none at all, but both scintillate with wit and irony that play around every aspect of public and private life in a chain of sparkling epi- grams. Very much the same description would apply also 336 A Century of French Fiction to the last two volumes of this smiling philosopher's fiction : The Elm on the Mall (I'Orme du Mail, 1896) and The Osier Mannikin (le Mannequin d'osier, 1897), grouped under the title " contemporary history," that is, a reflection of the thoughts of typical cultured Frenchmen on matters of general interest, with an impartial smile of ironical indul- gence for each, that make these volumes marvels of grace- ful perversity. The hedonistic element in Anatole France suggests the robuster materialism of Juliette Adam, who boasts a pagan- ism that " distinguishes her from other women " and has made almost her whole work a vigorous plea that, to those who know how to live, life for its own sake is well worth liv- ing. Each faculty of enjoyment is made the subject of a "moral tale." Pa'ienne (1883), the most bold, deals with material love ; Grecque (1879) ^^ a materialistic explanation of patriotism; Laide (1878), also a Greek tale, is a hymn to physical beauty. But, to her, Greece and Hellenism are only a mask for a passionate protest against Christian super- or anti-naturalism, as she would say, and so, as Lemaitre has observed, it is really a protest of the Aryan against the Semite, an endeavour to overcome the virus of idealism with which Christianity has inoculated the Western world. Thus her stories form a curious prelude to the anti-Semitic agita- tion that has recently taken such deep hold on the French masses, while in literature she has found a most artistic though dilettant successor in Pierre Louys, the author of Aphrodite (1896) and of The Songs of Bill lis (1897). This anti-spiritualism is on its artistic side intimately con- nected with the naturalistic movement that we associate with the name of Zola, and also with the keen, though kindly criticism of French Catholicism in the novels of Ferdinand The Generation of Louis Philippe 337 Fabre, which give us the most realistic pictures that we have of peasant hfe in the C^vennes. Fabre, who was born in 1830 and died in 1898, studied in his youth for the priesthood, but presently abandoned this vocation for law and letters. He had already pub- lished a volume of verse, the usual preliminary libation to the French Muses, when failing health obliged him to leave Paris for the south of France and so turned the cur- rent of his whole literary life ; for here he began to study with literary intent the clergy among whom he had passed his youth, to such good purpose that at thirty-two he had written The Courbezons^ a minute analytic study that earned him from Sainte-Beuve the title of " a strong pupil of Bal- zac." Many novels followed, either rustic sketches, or in- spired by close observation of the manners and mind of the clergy. Of these, perhaps the most noteworthy are Abbe Tigrane (1873), written on the eve of the death of Pius IX., and My Uncle Celestine (Mon oncle C^lestin, 1881). The former exhibits the struggle between the secular and regular clergy in a little mountain diocese, the passionate ambition of men whom celibacy has made hard and dry, the apparent entire transformation of character when the ambition is finally crowned or crushed, and the blazing, at the close, of the fire of this same ambition in the aged arch- bishop at the whispered thought of the papacy. All this is admirably brought out, as well as the way in which the clergy move the laity as pawns in their game. But the full significance of the story appears first at its close, when the Italian Cardinal explains to his young pupil, who had strayed into the paths of rectitude, how though the Church cannot lie, its governors do and ought to do so, and how those traits in the character of Abb6 Tigrane that had 338 A Century of French Fiction seemed to those simple country souls a bar to his elevation had been discerned by the shrewd men at Rome as so many reasons for it. My Uncle Celestine, which in many ways resembles The Courbezons^ shows a stronger, but a more sombre art. A fine effect of irony is secured by putting the story into the mouth of a boy who narrates with an instinct of good, but without quite understanding the purport of what he tells. The scene is once more in southern France, the date 1846, the central figure a good but simply naive priest, who dies in an unsuccessful effort to cope with the soured envy of his fellows in the minor clergy, with the selfish materialistic jealousy of the petty bourgeoisie, with the animal brutality and stupidity of the lower classes, and with the vice of the parasites of the Church, the Free Brothers, and the ped- dlers of religious objects. He is too weak to struggle with this environment, and the few unselfish men about him are too simple. The work as a whole is depressing, but the character of Marie Galtier is certainly a very delicate bit of the psychology of the humble, and some of the country scenes of fairs and festivals, with their strange mixture of chaffering, gluttony, and religion, are executed with really admirable picturesqueness, without minute detail, but with a free hand and broad effects. But of course the chief inter- est of the author and his greatest success is in the character of Celestine, — so good, so unselfish, so unworldly, and therefore, as the author seems to say, so unfit for the world he lived in. Many stories followed, some of them excellent and with passages of magnificent description, such as The Beggars' New Year in Sylviane (1891), but all directed, in one way or another, against the pride and self-deception of asceti- The Generation of Louis Philippe 339 cism, so that the novels named may serve as typical, if not of all, at least of what is best in him. Fabre's place is quite apart in our generation. His robust, healthy sympathy, his somewhat heavy playfulness, his sub- jects, and his scenes, are all his own. None has painted the clergy as he. None perhaps could have painted them as he has done, save only the author of The Curate of Tours, The priest in France lives a segregated life, he is different from other men, and we feel that it was the thought of an artist to give this foreign life a foreign setting. We move in a new world in his novels, a world of which we tire if we read too many of them together, but which leaves so lasting and clear-cut an impression that one finds it hard to believe that these stories of the clergy are not by a clergyman. Virtues and vices alike of that vocation seem, as it were, re- vealed to him. As Lemaitre well says. The Vicar of Wake- field was a very worthy man ; Abb6 Courbezon is a priest and a saint. There is in his imprudent charity a note of Christian sanctity that separates it wholly from philan- thropy ; the simplicity of Abb^ Celestine is that of the fool- ish that God has chosen to confound the wise, the direct result of education in a provincial seminary ; and so, too, the pride of Abb^ Tigrane is peculiar to those who think they can evoke the real presence of God and turn the keys of heaven. The ambition of the clergy, too, that all-ab- sorbing passion of power, sharpened and intensified by celi- bacy, is clearly seen by Fabre, though here he yields to the transcendent insight of Balzac ; and, finally, he has suc- ceeded in showing us the result of the normal mind, un- transformed by the grace of orders, in Lucifer (1884), whose Abb6 Jourfier, a Galilean liberal, repeats, or rather anticipates, the experiences of Zola's Abb6 Fromont, and 340 A Century of French Fiction learns at Rome that there is no place for him there, that there is no possible peace between the lay and the ecclesi- astical mind, because religion is not nature and faith is not reason. But while Fromont takes to mechanics, Jourfier, when he sees that the merely human virtues that he pos- sesses are insufficient for his vocation, and that the Church demands the sacrifice of his whole nature, finds submission impossible and prefers suicide to revolt. As some one has said, " Fabre never showed better what a Catholic priest is than in this picture of a priest who is not one." The minor clerical personages, too, are of great interest. His peasants are striking figures, and if they seem exaggerated, it is per- haps because this rude mountainside breeds intense and violent natures, such as the Rabelaisian hermit Barnabe, or diaphanous saints like Marie Galtier. Therefore it is that in his rare attempts at Parisian life, for instance, in The Marquis of Pierrerue, Fabre labours so ineffectually. His is a genius that will not bear trans- planting. The very style is of the sod. It labours with superfluous strength ; it is heavy, but it is full of an earthy richness and healthy vigour, falling now and then to earth but rising always from it with renewed force, for he, too, like Antaeus, is a child of nature. Among the pioneers in this generation of what came to be known in the next as naturalism, was Duranty, who abetted in the early fifties the brief efforts of the elder Champfleury before Madame Bovary had given respecta- bility to the movement, and in three novels published between i860 and 1862 anticipated by instinct the manner of 1880, though at the time it might have seemed that his stories sprang directly from Diderot, as though the romantic movement had for him no existence. His novels were The Generation of Louis Philippe 341 never popular, for the style is bad and there is as little fabulation as in Diderot himself, but, as '* slices of common- place life " coming from the early sixties, they form an anachronism too curious to pass unnoticed. The other novelists born under the bourgeois king who anticipated the manner of the imperial generation that was to follow are, so far at least as they need concern us here, the Bex brothers, who write under the name of J-H. Rosny, Ricard, C^ard, and, far the most important of them all, Karl-Joris Huysmans. Henri C^ard was one of the five who joined with Zola in the naturalistic proclamation of The Soirees of Medan, the others being the quite insignificant Hennique and Alexis, with Maupassant and Huysmans, who were of too strong and independent mind to be disciples of any master. C^ard is the most scholarly of the naturaUsts, a man of very refined literary taste, and of a mind too critical to admit of rapid production. His criticism, however, acted both as a spur and a restraint on Daudet and Zola, of whom he was a con- stant friend, and it is worth while to read his One Fine Day (une Belle journ^e), and Hennique's Accide?if of M. Hebert (1883), if only to see how far the pursuit of " reality in its nauseous platitude " can lead those doctri- naires who are not inoculated, as Zola admits that he was, with the virus of romanticism. The early novels of Huysmans are also illustrations of the theory that fiction should be a slice of crude life, and yet from the very first the unique quality of his talent set him apart, and through whatever changes he has since passed, his isolation has been more complete than that of any other novelist of his time. His is a restless spirit, of insa- tiable curiosity and subtle nervous susceptibility, sincere 342 A Century of French Fiction but not always coherent, with artistic melancholy, as though he were homesick for the days of the Latin deca- dence. His novels picture the evolution of his soul from sensual materialism and aggressive naturalism through spiritism and satanism to a Christian mysticism and spirit- ualism that has in it still a curious strain of the sensual and material. His novels lose half their significance, or rather they acquire a wholly false significance, if we regard them apart from their sequence. His work in fiction begins with Marthe in 1877, the year of Goncourt's Eliza and of Zola's Asso77imoir. His subject is of the same class as Eliza and the treatment as painfully realistic and perhaps even more sordid, so that Zola might justly claim that Huysmans was a pupil of Edmond de Goncourt rather than of himself. In The Vatard Sisters (les Soeurs Vatard, 1879) the resemblance to the Goncourts is even more marked in the strained, excessively coloured style, and in a Dutch minuteness and acuteness of vision that suggest the descendant of the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Huysmans de Malines, whose name he bears. He does not see types, but individuals ; he does not paint life, but only a corner of it ; his bindery girls, the Vatard sisters, are not typical of their class ; and what is more they are not agreeable individuals to the reader. Indeed the author seems often a (Jilettant of moral anguish, sordid wretchedness, and contemptible vice, who sneers with a hollow laugh at his own creations. Or was he a victim of his pessimism, possessed as by a nightmare with the baseness of life ? Such at least might seem to be the state of mind that produced the abdominal preoccupations of Knapsacks (Sac au dos, 1880) and Housekeeping (En manage, 1881), The Generation of Louis Philippe 343 a cynical commendation of marriage. So, too, the volume of stories under the title Down Stream (A vau I'eau, 1882) has earned an unenviable eminence for the nauseating minuteness of its description of the dishes displayed in the windows of cheap restaurants, side by side with Zola's simi- lar stylistic feat, the "symphony in cheeses" oi Parisian Digestio7i. It is with Topsy-Turvy (A rebours, 1884), that Huysmans first turns from description of cross-sections of life under a Dutch microscope to introspection, and awakens in the reader a strong curiosity, if not interested sympathy, in the psychic condition of the author. In this prose poem of neurosity, that has been called a " complete course in in- tellectual voluptuousness," we see him turning in fierce desperation from materialism to a kind of frenzied spiritism. Goethe shrewdly remarked the inconsistency of real natural- ism with pessimism, and this is what Esseintes, who doubt- less is Huysmans himself, is here experiencing. His pessimism is driving him, as it did Baudelaire, " to the bot- tom of the unknown to find the new." He tells us how " all that transfigured or deformed reality enchanted him," how in eager search for unreal pleasures he sought elaborate artificiality of sensations, till he became at the close "an unbeliever who would fain believe," the influences of the Jesuit education of. his youth voicing themselves in the sceptic's prayer : " Lord, have pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who wills to believe, on the crim- inal who embarks alone at night under a sky no longer lighted by the consoling torches of the old hope." Surely here is a most radical and interesting experience in psychical development, and every novel that follows marks a new step in this evolution and adds new interest to 344 ^ Century of French Fiction our study of Huysmans. It is interesting to note also that Topsy-Tzirvy coincides in date with the first novel of Bourget, so that 1884 may mark for us the advent of the so-called psychologic school, or better, the transformation of an external into a psychic naturalism, though Huysmans is with rather than of this new company. His place is as much apart here as it had been with the followers of Zola. For a time the effect of the state of soul indicated in Topsy-Tumy was to slacken production. At Anchor (En rade), that followed in 1887, may well have been written before Topsy-TuTiy^ or in a moment of reaction, for it is nearer his old position. But both this and the short stories collected under the title A Dilemma (un Dilemme, 1887) are insignificant, and it is m Beyond (La-bas, 1891) that we first note an obvious advance, though by a spiral that carried him downward ; for here a dilettant pessimism has led him through morbid brooding on the diabolical monstrosities of the medieval Gilles de Rais into an endeavour to decide the contest within him between lust and dyspepsia by experiments with astrology and satanism. Beyond opens with a literary profession of faith. He forswears naturalism in literature and life, for he finds that Zola is incarnate materialism glorifying democracy and having for his followers the bourgeois offspring of Homais {Madame Bovary) and Lisa (^Parisian Digestion) . His new hero Durtal is still Huysmans' self, and his point of view is described as "spiritualistic naturalism." "This age of positivists and atheists," he says, " has overturned all except satanism; that it has not forced back a step," for "the greatest power of Satan lies in this, that he gets men to deny him." The book, then, marks a recrudescence of the occult, a reassertion of the extra-natural, a fascinated hover- The Generation of Louis Philippe 345 ing about a mystic Catholicism, sure to lead to such Chris- tianity as is consistent with a discouraged pessimism in regard to society and the world. The book itself, however, is a distinctly disagreeable medley of medieval and modern nastiness, into which the author has emptied a barrel of notes on Rosicrusianism and demonology, forming a wel- tering mass fit to be the habitation of " a seraglio of hystero- epileptics and erotomaniacs." But this book is, as it were, the hell into which Huysmans must needs descend that he might climb the hill of purga- tory in On the Road (En route, 1896), and enter his paradise in The Cathedi'al (1897). On the Road v^ in- deed, as an American critic has said, "one of the most characteristic novels of our quarter-century," and shows how much more ready the France of our decade is than that of the eighties to listen for a voice from the Beyond. It introduces Durtal in the crisis of his conversion, of his struggle of doubt for faith. It is the drama of a soul sick of sense, tired of self, with no wish to pray, yet drawn by the beauty of holiness, by the magnet of Christian art, to the Church, that " only hospital for souls." Constantly falling he stumbles on, admirably directed by Abb6 Grevesin, till at last the leaven of pity ferments to a passion of sacrifice, and so brings Durtal to a dawning instinct of divine love. This plea for the contemplative Hfe will seem morbid and perverse to many who will admire its scholarship and its artistic appreciation. Durtal seems throughout still a fas- tidious eclectic hedonist, trying to reconcile faith with con- tempt for the faithful. There is deep converse on the "law of substitution," on sanctity and detachment from the world ; there are striking passages on the emotional effect of plain-song; yet nowhere do we see clear and full the 346 A Century of French Fiction finger of duty, but only the reaction of an excessive and effeminate culture into a petty artistic mysticism, that last infirmity of esthetic minds who never get beyond those ** brightest transports, choicest prayers that bloom an hour and fade." There is in On the Road a great deal of sharp criticism of the Church, old and new, in France, and this often finds expression in words of shocking crudity that we feel to be of deliberate intention. Huysmans did not come into the Church like other men by the common door, but, as a good abbess said, " he entered it through the roof," repelled by a clergy whose ignorant obtuseness took from them "all influence over the patriarchate of souls," but attracted by the symbolic obscurities of medieval art and ritual. Durtal is still a misanthropic impressionist, who loves to despise and to hate. A long retreat among the Trappists does not restore virility to his faith, though it affords Huysmans occa- sion for a most living picture of aTrappist monastery, of which he had been for some time an inmate, so that it is said that all his monks, even the swineherd saint, Simeon, a modem Junipero, stepping as it were fresh out of the Little Flowers of St. Francis f were his friends at Notre- Dame d'lgny. Durtal's struggles here are told in a glowing style, with an almost fierce enthusiasm for the medieval thesis that faith is contagious, and that sensuous natures have the profound- est spiritual potentialities. Yet the lame conclusion of all is that Durtal leaves the Trappists " his mind undone, his heart in shreds . . . too much a man of letters to be a monk, too much a monk to stay among men of letters." From the purgatory of On the Road Durtal is carried to the door of a benedictine paradise in The Cathedral, What he found there will form the subject of The Oblate, but it is The Generation of Louis Philippe 347 reasonably certain that this " fingering of spiritual muscles to see if they are growing" will not bring a healthy growth, though it may procure a hypnotised peace for those proud and delicate spirits who claim, with Huysmans, to need a refuge in the cloister, for the soul and for art, from the moral and physical hideousness of the world. Tlie Cathe- dral contains descriptions of wonderful beauty ; but it is not for this that we dwell upon it here, but because it is a sign of the times, of an age weary of material progress, weary of all except of searching those problems of the soul that defy solution. These last novels of Huysmans are the supreme products of a morbid state of soul, of which the novelists of the next generation will give us many illustrations, as indeed, Huysmans' contemporaries in birth Ricard and "J-H. Rosny " do also, of whom it has been happily said that they throw the dry salts of Stendhal into the juleps of Feuillet, and produce pastilles, half salt, half sugar, the literature of Vichy-water, a morbid and laboured jargon of science and psychology. Of them we need speak no further, but of Huysmans it is only just to say that what- ever his faults of taste, and they are many, however recon- dite his vocabulary, however invertebrate the structure of his narrations, yet no novelist since Bunyan has given us such a study as he, so frank and yet so subtle, of the progress of a pilgrim soul. CHAPTER XVI GUY DE MAUPASSANT GUY DE MAUPASSANT deserves a place apart, though a minor one, among the novelists of the imperial gen- eration, first, because he was, at least in his earlier years, the most completely naturalistic of modern French writers, in the accurate sense of naturalism, and, secondly, because he is the greatest modern master of a minor genre that is peculiarly French, the short story, which in his hands, as in that of its former masters, is not a condensed novel nor a novelette, but rather the exhibition of character through a single episode, or of the episode itself as a commentary on life. A third characteristic of Maupassant is his style, and as this remains almost unaltered throughout his work, and is the quality in which his early training is most apparent, it naturally claims first attention. It shows the Norman, born in Lower Seine, educated at Rouen, and for ten years the favourite and almost constant disciple of Flaubert, whose hard mechanical perfection he was to carry to even higher reaches of verbal photography. The man of these early years seemed the counterpart of the style of his first story, Suet-Ball (Boule de suif, 1878), robust, sane,, material, but with a canny, keen, and vivid vision. Flaubert had given his pupil his exact brevity, his sharp concision, some- thing, too, of his malicious joy in the pettiness of man- Guy de Maupassant 349 kind, but he had not transmitted to him anything of his own heritage from romanticism, that ** splendid subdued richness and harmonious movement " of which Mr. Sy- monds speaks. Maupassant's style is a combination of veracity and vigour, of strength and terseness, but it lacks undertones. Whole ranges of emotion are foreign to him. His humour is often boisterous. Rabelaisian, rarely tender, and he never descends with Bourget into the " pottering and peddling of psychology." Indeed, we may go further and say that though his fiction is never without its moral bearing, he begins by looking at life wholly from the animal side, and quite leaves the soul out of his reckoning, being even at his worst less immoral than unmoral, that is, natu- ralistic. So Zola, speaking at the unveiling of his monu- ment, recognised in him " one of our own, a Latin of good, clear, solid head, a maker of beautiful sentences shining like gold, pure as the diamond, ... a child of the great writers of France, a ray from the good sun that fecundates our soil, ripens our vines and our corn. He was loved because he was of our family and was not ashamed of it, and because he showed pride in having the good sense, logic, balance, power, and clearness of the old French blood." Allied to classic tradition in mode of thought, he is so even more in language. His vocabulary is very restricted, and he seems bent rather on making fuller use of old words than on discovering new ones. Yet his words and sen- tences have not only a lapidarian simplicity and clearness, they carry remarkable effects of colour and plastic in de- scription of city and country, of mountain and sea, and in the shock of simple characters, for he avoids psychic as he does stylistic complexity. Neither is normal, and so neither is naturalistic. 350 A Century of French Fiction But, while from first to last there is no development in technic in Maupassant, there is change in his ethics, and here first it becomes necessary to consider his work in its chronology. He began, as most French literary men have done, with a volume of verses (Des vers, 1880), printing in the. same year his first and one of his best tales, a tragi- comedy in miniature, Suet- Ball (Boule de suif) in The Soirees of Me dan (1880). The poems, while prevaihngly sensualistic, suggesting the gambols of a lusty young bull, show here and there a tendency to analysis, and also an inclination to brooding visions of horror, that seemed at the time the sport of a sceptical dilettant of emotion, but came later to have a terrible pathologic significance. In Suet-Ball one notes what seems to be a similar moral dilet- tantism, a sympathy with outcasts and scapegoats as such, because they are the victims of a social morality that seems to this pupil of Flaubert purely artificial and adventitious. He is constantly dwelling with pleasure on what he calls " the capacity for sudden innocent delights latent in natures that have lost their innocence." This story proved him a master-workman, sure of his processes and of his tools, and during the next ten years he produced an average of more than two volumes annually, embracing six novels and some two hundred and twelve short stories of most varied interest and value, though this difference is due more to their subjects than to their art. The moral change to which allusion has been made is more obvious in the novels than in the tales, and to them, there- fore, it is best first to direct attention. The ethical position of the author of A Life (une Vie, 1883) is nihilism. The purpose of this novel, which Tol- stoi thought the best in France since Hugo's MiserableSy is Guy de Maupassant 351 to bear witness to the purposelessness of suffering. With astonishing power and crudity he paints the hard, naked, sordid reality of shallow joys and bottomless sadness. Nowhere has novelist stripped and scourged so cruelly the bestial lubricity that, according to Gaston Deschamps, " hides itself, cruel and avid, under silk hats and dress- coats." He has here at the outset a disdain of humanity as strong as Flaubert's, a disdain resulting in his generation from the repeated deceptions of 1848, of 185 1, and of 1870, and fostered by the scientific habit of thought, the materialistic determinism of Taine. " He came into the world," says a French critic, "just at the time when most of the dreams and mirages were being extinguished that till then had embellished human life ; he underwent the oppression of so many experiments, of so many acquired notions, of such prodigious labour ending in the eclipse of the ideal and a tyrannous nightmare of reality. He felt the mental fatigue that followed so many generous efforts to know the nature of things, and suffered from it, more per- haps than the robust workers of our disillusions." The futility of a life of sacrifice, as daughter, wife, and mother, of one who tries to be a little noble in an ignoble world, is unable to respect those to whom she is united, father, mother, foster-sister, husband, and son, and finds the pathetic consolation of her old age in the care of an orphan grandchild born to an inheritance of vice, — such is life's mocking irony as Maupassant sees it in A Life ; and there is the same moral nihilism in Bel- Ami (1885), a novel that recalls Marivaux's Parvenu Countryman and the Perverted Countryman of La Bretonne. All these are stories of men who use sex as a means of social advance- ment. If A Life was the defeat of virtue, this is the 352 A Century of French Fiction triumph of vice, and, since both are fatal products of pre- existing conditions, the author is as morally indifferent to one as to the other. He still paints life as he sees it, with the frank, bustling indelicacy of Smollett, with a robust animalism to which the individual life has no sense apart from the life of the cosmos, the sense of which is so obviously in- comprehensible that he makes no effort to comprehend it. This pessimism, even at the outset, is radically different from Flaubert's sterile contempt or from Zola's tireless social discontent. Maupassant's world-pain is mortal ear- nest, and during these years of literary triumph he is living as he believes, as though life were a succession of fatalities. It was not enough for him to know that the world was senseless and bad. There was in him, in spite of all and from the very first, a terror of annihilation for which he could find no anodyne. In Bel- Ami we have a description of the slow deterioration of a brain by a fixed idea of death. Lemaitre tells us that at this time Maupassant would with- draw for months to the solitude of some country retreat or of the sea, that he would desperately attempt a return to a purely physical animal life and then seek escape from self in feverish amusements, orgies of luxury or infantile sports, " but save for the minutes when he was busy in them never did one see such impassivity in mid-festival, nor face more absent." A Life and Bel- Ami were biographies treated with ironic fatalism. Mont-Oriol (1887) marks a change from biog- raphy to drama. It is not a complete life, but an episode in the life of a Don Juan leading to crises in the lives of two women. There are a number of good minor charac- ters, however, and more action and bustling humour than in A Life or Bel-Ami. It shows a transition in method, and. Guy de Maupassant 353 when compared with some short stories of the same year and with the novel that immediately followed, it suggests that from now on we have to deal with two Maupassants : the one a victim of mental disease springing from morbid speculation on the essential misery of man, and nursed by the scientific investigations by which he assisted in the cor- rosion of his brain ; and then, beside this noble, unstrung soul, the Maupassant of intervals of lucid calm reaching out toward a moral ideal that still eludes his comprehension. So there is in Mont-Oriol a. beginning of sympathy and therefore of ethical confusion, and this moral uncertainty is continued and intensified in Fe/er and John (Pierre et Jean, 1888), which artistically is his best novel and shows an almost unique power of isolating and projecting a scene, though that is a quality that belongs rather to the short story. Here the fixed idea that had been an episode in Bel-Ami becomes the mainspring of the narrative. John receives an unexpected inheritance. Peter broods in mor- bid jealousy till he becomes the inquisitor, the judge, and tormentor of his mother, whom he forces at last, without a spoken word, to confess to John the shame of his origin, and of domestic hfe built upon a lie. Here more than in Motit Oriol the author betrays his own emotion, a reaching out for a moral basis of life. There is here, and in general in these years, less preoccupation with sex. Love tends to become less material, and the author's horror of lonehness gives it sometimes, as between John and his mother, the form of a league against the evil of Hfe. In her " tender shop-cashier's soul " he has drawn with sympathetic deli- cacy the struggle of a great sentiment in a petty nature. He is still moving here, as in Mont Oriol^ toward a spiritual conception of life. 23 354 ^ Century of French Fiction In Strong as Death (Fort comme la mort, 1889) and Our Heaf't (Notre Coeur, 1890) there is perhaps further accentuation of this moral unrest, while the dread of the unknowable beyond broods over both stories and points the way to haunting hallucination and madness. Strong as Death is a book of great but uncanny power. An artist, Olivier, has in the flush of young genius loved Countess Anne. He is now fifty and her daughter has grown to the age and image of the mother he had once loved. Uncon- sciously the new illusion of youth replaces the old love. Countess Anne sees sooner than Olivier what is passing in his heart, and tries with pathetic desperation to renew her youth. He, when he perceives his true self, is as tortured as she. Powerless to aid, they witness one another's tor- ture, till Olivier seeks in death escape from the curse of age. The novel is highly romantic in subject, intensely realistic in execution. These are every-day people, who do what many do, yet perish in despair of life and love. The book is a power, but for ill, because Maupassant has infused in it the contagion of his own perturbed spirit. He was struggling to light but sinking into darkness. In Our Heart the struggle and the submerging is nearly completed. The mind from which the ideal had been driven, the swept and garnished house of his nihilism is now possessed by evil spirits. Nature is herself no longer true. His hero feels, like the heroine of his Useless Beauty (ITnutile beauts, 1890), "suddenly by a sort of intuition, that that being (the lady of his choice) was not merely a woman destined to perpetuate the race, but the bizarre and mysterious product of all our complex desires amassed in us by centuries, turned from their primitive and divine end, erring toward a beauty half- seen, mystic, and incompre- Guy de Maupassant 355 hensible." There are in Our Heart as beautiful pages of natural description as Maupassant ever wrote, but we feel that, for his sake and ours, it was time that the curtain should fall. This work is no longer un- moral, it is, like Baudelaire's Floivers of Evil^ immoral, monstrous. He is haunted by evil in all that he tries to depict as good. Un- certain ideals have replaced a solid and sufficing material- ism with its confident proclamation of Art for Art, and this cannot but be fatal to any wholeness of literary impression. That moral disintegration would naturally be much less marked in the short stories, which in the nature of the case may represent only a phase or passing mood of the author's mind. Here we shall find at the outset work that might have been done at the end, and in the last volume tales that would not have surprised in the first, though, if we take the general impression, Le Horla^ of 1887, and all the col- lections that follow it, will be found to differ materially from all that precede. Knowing what the novels have taught us, it is possible to corroborate it from the tales, but it is not necessary to do so and more is gained by considering them without regard to their chronology. It is these short stories that made his fame, and it is they perhaps that will longest preserve it. Men who read Suet- Ball in 1880, or Tellier House (la Maison Tellier, 188 1), or Miss Fiji (Mademoiselle Fifi, 1883), and the stories bound with them, felt here in a form thoroughly modern the renascence of a spirit as old as French literature. Mau- passant offered, says a French critic, "the singular phe- nomenon of a sort of primitive classic in a period of aging, decrepit, artificial literature. Ignorant ahke of the artistic transpositions of the Goncourts and the nervous trepida- tion of Daudet, Maupassant gushed out like a spring of 356 A Century of French Fiction clear, sparkling water." His early training and his theory of fiction, as developed in a preface to Peter and John, pre- disposed him to this form of composition, which has been peculiarly French since the days when fabliaus amused the people, while the nobles nursed their chivalry on the aris- tocratic epics. From the outset this genre had been realistic, eminently unspiritual, sometimes coarse, often bru- tal, and such remain the characteristics of the short story as we find it in the prose of La Salle, of Des P^riers, of Noel de Fail, and Margaret of Navarre, and in the verses of La Fontaine, with whom Maupassant has more in common than with the artificial raconteurs of the eighteenth century, or with any of his immediate predecessors, Daudet, Banville, Copp^e, HaMvy, Gyp, and the rest. There is, indeed, more convention in La Fontaine, both in character and environ- ment, for he has the classic desire to be universal, while Maupassant wishes to be realistic. The scene of a tale of La Fontaine might be in France, Italy, or Utopia; with Maupassant we know always that we are in Normandy, or in the Riviera, or at Paris, and that, were the scene changed, the story must change also. And so with the characters. La Fontaine has hardly more than eight stock figures : the peasant, the well-to-do middle-class man, mer- chant or judge, the enterprising youth, the curate and the monk, the lusty servant girl, the amorous nun, the silly country lass, the burgher's wife. In Maupassant, on the other hand, all are individualised. Suet-Ball is herself and none other. All the sheep of Madame Tellier's flock are individuals. We should feel a jar at any moment if the acts of one were attributed to another. But in general the subjects are the same, and the point of view is the absence of any moral law whatsoever. Guy de Maupassant 357 Of course an immediate result of this naturalism is a frankness of speech regarding things that Anglo-Saxons are agreed had better not be mentioned. No doubt, too, there are people who read Maupassant as pigs root for truffles ; and they will find what they look for, though he did not put it there for them, but simply that he might paint a bit of life as he saw it, with a sensuous preoccupation that, as moralists long ago observed, implies always a certain moroseness, which in him finds vent usually in tales of Norman brutaUty, bestial- ity, and egoism, while he pours his contempt on the conven- tional morality of society in tales of Paris, and chooses the war of 1870 to show, not the virtues of racial solidarity, but the unchaining of the beast that seems to him to lurk even in the most peaceful natures. The humour of the stories in lighter vein is dry, ironical, based on a grotesque contrast between human nature and its ideals. Very rarely at the outset we get a breath of airy cheerfulness, as in Simon^s Papa, and occasionally there is already the note of despair and suicide, as in Madame Paul. Maupassant's first year of publication will thus illustrate all the tendencies that we shall find in his later volumes, ex- cept the story of psychological analysis that shows itself first in Monsieur Parent, of 1884, and the rare elegiac notes as in Menuet, of 1883. Any effort to classify Mau- passant's tales is sure to satisfy no one, least of all the clas- sifier. Yet if we bear in mind the dates of the several volumes and classify less by the externals of situation — dis- tinguishing, for instance, tales of Normandy, of Parisian aris- tocracy or clerks, and of travel — than by the outlook on life that the tales show, we may reach some suggestive results, though within these limits it is possible to allude only to the best. 358 A Century of French Fiction Of the tales thus classified, the smallest group is that of hearty, bluif, good-humoured cheer. There are not more than a dozen of these in all, none of them written after 1886. Typical of this tone is Simon's Papa (le Papa de Simon) or The Ideas of the Colonel (les Id^es du colonel). The stories of this type are sound and healthy, and nearly as much may be claimed for the more numerous narratives of pathos and elegy, which are rare before 1884 and found chiefly between 1886 and 1889. Miss Harriet and The Baptism in the same volume (there is another story with a like title) illustrate this division. There is a dainty elegiac note in Mademoiselle Perle^ an infinite sadness in Clochette^ and a strange exotic languor in Chdli. In this direction his first attempts, and indeed the only ones before Miss Harriet, were two efforts to catch the tone of eighteenth- century sentiment, Menuet and The Bedstead (le Lit) . Many times more frequent than either of these modes of feeling is irony, taking on protean forms, among which it is convenient to distinguish the whimsical, the satirical, and the cynical. The Umbrella (le Parapluie), or Denis, or Andrews Illness (le Mai d' Andre), will suggest these at their best, but they are capable of descending easily to the vulgarities of the smoking-room through such dubious tales as Decorated (Decor^) or Qa Ira to the far from dubious Bolt (le Verrou). Occasionally, as in In the Woods (Aux bois), or Regrets, this group verges on the preceding, but there is always here a morbid pessimism, a contempt of human nature, that was absent from the former group. The stories of this type are distributed about equally through the decade of Maupassant's activity, and amount to about a seventh of his entire production. This irony passes easily into satire, bitter, as in Tlie Heri- Guy de Maupassant 359 tage or Abandoned (I'Abandonn^), recklessly contemptuous of social conventions in hnprudence or The Picnic (la Partie de campagne), or mocking them with a sardonic smile in Suet-Ball (Boule de suif), Tellier House (la Maison Tellier), and The Unblessed Feast (Pain maudit), or with rollicking humour, as in The Rondoli Sisters (which, by the way, was founded on the personal experience of a novelist whose work we have still to consider), or with Rabelaisian gaiety in Madame Luneau's Lawsuit (le Cas de Mme. Luneau), or with what we must call cynical immor- ality in Joseph and Saved (Sauv^e), or with socialistic sym- pathies in The Vagabond, or with cynical lack of patriotism in A Coup d^Etat, or with sad discouragement mHautotpere eifils and in the longest and one of the most exquisite of all the stories, Yvette. This group counts rather more than a seventh of the whole, with more masterpieces than any other, and they are distributed quite evenly through the decade. We come now to a long series of tales intended to illus- trate the almost incredible egoism and miserly meanness of the French, especially the Norman peasant, or even of the bourgeoisie. These stories are so painful in their sordid- ness that it may suffice to name /// the Fields (Aux champs) or At Sea (En mer) , Reveillo7i or Uncle Julius to sug- gest the tone. But this sordidness readily passes into brutality or wanton cruelty, as in such unforgetable pieces of detestable art as The Devil (le Diable) or Coco or Madame Lefebvre or The Donkey (I'Ane). It finds its most thoughtful and cynical expression in Pere Amable and The Little Cask (le Petit fut), its most pathetic in A Farmer's Girl (une Fille de ferme), and its crudest in The Sabots and the Algerian Mahommed-Fripouilk, 360 A Century of French Fiction Closely allied to these tales, which count perhaps a fifth of the whole, are the stories of the Prussian war, mainly, as is natural, in the earlier volumes. In The Prisoners (les Prisonniers) and Twelfth-Night (les Rois) humour tempers horror, but in Mother Sauvage (la Mere Sauvage) and Saint- Antoine the beast in man seems utterly unchained. There is a mordant irony and scepticism of French patriot- ism in Walter Schnaffs, which is surprising when one con- siders the really noble note struck in Two Friends (Deux amis). But the great story of this group is unquestionably Mile. Fiji, whose heroine, Pvachel, the courtesan redeemed by patriotism, is a decidedly agreeable variation on The Lady with the Caviellias. We come now to that portion of Maupassant's fiction that is at once most painful and most interesting, the forty or more stories in which pessimism reaches an intensity that was the foreboding of haunting nightmares, by which his mind was gradually shrouded in madness, to fiiid re- lease only in death. Already in Madame Paul (la Femme de Paul), in his first volume, he had exhibited sensualism leading to fatalistic despair and self-destruction, and the second volume, Miss Fiji contains in Mad? (Fou?) distinct premonitions of the author's insanity. There is nothing else of the kind in these books, however, and neither A Son (un Fils) nor Fear (la Peur) of the next are as morbid. Indeed, save for the Dantesque Promenade {in la Main gauche, 1884), it is not until we come to his sixth collec- tion of tales {Monsieur Parent, 1884) that the fatalistic tone becomes strongly marked, in The Pin (I'Epingle) and Little Soldier (Petit Soldat), while there is distinct trace of mental alienation in Solitude and in A Maniac (un Fou). Then with each succeeding volume the number of such tales Guy de Maupassant 361 increases. Deepening gloom, preoccupation with death, Satanism, and ghostly hallucination are all to be found in Yvette and most of them in Miss Harriety and from The Rondoli Sisters ^ of 1886, nausea at the monotony of life and haunting terror of death becomes periodic in its recurrence, so that we pass in chronological ascension from He (Lui) to Little Roque (la Petite Roque) , then through the terrible and ghastly Horla to the obvious insanity of Who Knows ? (Qui Salt?), both in collections of tales to which they give the dominant note. To all these tales Maupassant brings the same careful elaboration, for in them all he was desperately seeking a means of emancipation from self, though it is probable that his writing hastened the progress of the disease to which he finally succumbed. A sensuality so profound, so earnest and complete as that of this pupil of Flaubert impHed the dissolution of moral faith, the paralysis of will. Many have written in this spirit, but few have also lived in it. None may deny the ideal with impunity. Others have toyed with pessimism, Maupassant was its victim. CHAPTER XVII THE GENERATION OF THE SECOND EMPIRE IT is curious to note that of the writers whom we may classify as belonging by birth to the Second Empire, the two most distinguished, Maupassant and Loti, were born, as were Gyp and Rabusson, before the coup d'etat and Bourget very shortly after, while the remaining eighteen years of the empire count but seven names worthy of mention as novelists, and of these none of primary im- portance, unless perhaps we accept for performance the promise of Margueritte. Of all these, Maupassant is far the greatest genius, but Pierre Loti has qualities of his own that place him much above the commonplace, though aside from the main line of novelistic development. This recently retired naval lieutenant, whose real name is Pierre Viaud, was born in the seaport of Rochelle, of Huguenot ancestry, entered the marine service in 1867 when but seventeen, and in twelve years' cruising had absorbed into his receptive nature so much of the inner spirit of exotic life that he was able with his very first venture to strike a chord that charmed the cultured public and gave him a place unchallenged and apart in his generation. The two elements of this unique chord were his power of description and his vague melan- choly. Both were of peculiar quality. He had an ex- quisitely keen observation, but it is no photographic The Generation of the Second Empire 363 description of strange horizons that gives charm to the Constantinople of his Aziyade (1879), the Tahiti of his Marriage of Loti (1880), the Senegal of his SpahVs Ro- mance (1881), the Brittany and the ocean of My Brother Ives (1883), the fishing smacks and northern seas of The Iceland Fisherman (1886), the Algeria of The Kasbah (1884), the Japan of Madame Chtjsantheme (1887), or to the later impressions of Morocco (1890), the Syrian Desert (1894), and Galilee (1895), or to the Basque coxmixy oi Ramuntcho (1897). The unique touch lies in this, that to every landscape he gives an individuality and as it were a soul. Environment seems not only to explain but to condition character. It casts its spell around us and gives in each case its own refraction to our ethics of civilisation. And this fascination is increased and per- petuated by the witchery of his vague melancholy, suggest- ing Chateaubriand and his Ren6, but more sincere, more frank and honest in its self-revelation. There are times when, as in The Story of a Child (le Roman d'un enfant, 1890), he seems almost eager to show us all the steps by which his soul was brought out of the Protestant severity of his infancy, through the beauty of Catholic ritual and the soothing of Catholic dogma, to the cold heights of pessimistic doubt, to *' the horrible consciousness of the vanity of vanities and the dust of dusts." So his stories tend more and more to become " log-books of sentiments and feelings " interpenetrated with a hate of hyper-culture and a longing for simplicity. "Who will save us," he some- where exclaims, <'from modern sham, false luxury, uni- formity, and imbeciles?" Thus it happens that he is drawn naturally to the primi- tive races. He is not cosmopoUtan, but exotic. The 364 A Century of French Fiction interaction of races would but tend, he thinks, to recipro- cal deformation. He is a decadent yet a primitive, and as the natural element of primitive natures is the picturesque, he is far more artist than psychologist, drawn to the prim- itive not alone in landscape but in character, either to the stubborn, resisting African nature and barbarism or to the immobilized Far-East, whose wars remind him of the days of Jengiz and Attila. In his earlier books it is primitive types of love that interest him : Aziyad^, in the tragic fatality of her devour- ing passion ; Rarahu, that sweetest of moral infants cradled in a sensuous Eden; or the fierce sensualist Fatou-gaye; or the enigmatic and naively immoral Madame Chrysan- th^me ; or Gaud, the pathetic betrothed of the Iceland fish- erman. Gradually, however, love yields in his mind the first place to death. A shrinking from the thought of anni- hilation had possessed him from childhood, as we may see from The Story of a Child, The more he loves, the more he dreads in his discouraged pessimism; in the Book oj Pity and Death (189 1 ) his feelings escape in a cry of intense though subdued sadness, and at last in Faces and Tilings that Pass (Figures et choses qui passent, 1897) he has reached the point where " the need of struggling against death is the only immaterial reason that one has for writing," and love is banished not only from his Annam, but from his whole mental horizon. Resignation, pity, intensity of feeling and of sympathy are the permanent moral characteristics of his work. All this work bears in it an element of morbidity, of hyperesthesia, that makes every sensation a pain, vague and far off perhaps, yet never absent. There is perver- sity even in his exotic affections, never a union of hearts. The Generation of the Second Empire 365 as how should there be ? For Loti has brought with him from our Western world not only the burden but the dignity of a hfe of struggle with nature and her forces. There can be for him no peace in Fatou-gaye's bestiality, in Madame Chrysanth^me's toying with existence, nor even in the dreamful ease of Rarahu. It is as though life and nature brought to him only suggestions of sadness, as though a rational, normal happiness were contrary to some law of his nature, which in An Old Man (un Vieux, 1893) and Sailor (Matelot, 1893) utters itself in tones as plain- tive and penetrating as the sighing notes of a violin. For the instrument on which he plays contributes essen- tially to the charm of his art. He has made prose the vehicle of sensations that one might have thought belonged solely to music, surpassing in this the efforts of Flaubert and the Goncourts. He has, in Bruneti^re's words, "a singular faculty of impregnating the senses with the form, colour, even the very odour of things," and thus gives to his descriptions a vivid intensity attained by none other in modern France. And he attains this by marvellously simple means, by a direct style and a small vocabulary with never a sense of effort or of strain. Language to him is an instru- ment on which he plays at will. He can make it convey the most precise impression beneath which shall play the most dimly delicate suggestion, attained perhaps by some unfamiliar combination of the familiar. His is an impression- ism whose virtuosity lies in its simplicity ; it produces on the reader a sort of hallucination, less of a land than of a life, a mode of thought and sensation unlike any we have known. We do not so much see the Tahiti of the Mar- riage of Loti as feel its languor of gratified desires and the beneficence of its exuberant nature, " where the abundance 366 A Century of French Fiction and continuity of agreeable sensations cradles you in an endless dream." We carry away no defined pictures, yet we have a very intense impression. And so to the last in Ramuntcho and in Faces and Things that Pass we feel, much more than we see, the smugglers' perils and the con- vent's peace and the corpse-strewn fields of Annam. The critic who would define or describe Loti's qualities or his charm is sure to find himself at last, like Lemaitre, so much the more incapable of rising beyond the sphere of feeling, as he yields himself willing captive to the charm of this mind, perhaps the most delicate sensation -machine that we shall ever meet. He gives us a pleasure too great and too acute, too penetrating that we should judge him, or say too confidently that his charm is that of decadence, or that there is in him, as he himself has said, citing lines from Hugo's Ondines^ something both of — " The sky that paints the scarcely creeping seas, And bottom ooze, in dark, dull, dread repose.'* Loti had no immediate literary ancestor, indeed except in a very superficial way he has no literary ancestor at all in France, and his art has found no imitators or pupils worthy of the name. To return to the normal categories of fiction, we shall find the feuilletonists best represented, perhaps, by Maizeroy, but tending to degenerate into witty and frivolous conteurs^ of whom Gyp is surely queen, and Lavedan perhaps her prime minister. His short stories, for instance The Upper Ten (la Haute), have a remarkable self- restraint of style that exactly befits his cynical morgue and this phosphorescent reflection of aristocratic degeneracy. They sparkle with dry wit, with a delicate yet mordant irony. There is a savour of the old Gallic salt in Lavedan's The Generation of the Second Empire 367 humour, but in the main he typifies those disintegrating forces in Hterature and society that found their philosophic expression in the aristocratic pessimism of Renan. Gyp is, perhaps, even more characteristic of this deli- quescent " end-of-the-century " society. Herself an aristo- crat and great-grandniece of the revolutionary Mirabeau, her books are the faithful mirror of the society in which she moves, the society of Feuillet's novels a generation further advanced in light-hearted insouciance, malicious idleness, and that cynical irreverence that the French call blagucy and that seems quite without ethical or artistic sin- cerity. It is literary absinthe, a charming poison, a " flower of evil," fit emblem of a social order that has outlived its usefulness, whose luxury is ever merging in corruption. Characteristic of her very numerous volumes are Petit Bob (1882), Marriage (Autour du Mariage, 1883), and Mile, Loulou (1888). She published forty others in the space of thirteen years. Dealing by preference with the same class and at first in a spirit hardly more noble, is Paul Bourget, the son of a professor, who began Hfe as a journalist and in 1883 won notice by a volume of critical essays in which he seemed to take himself so seriously that he induced others to take him so. He is the self-proclaimed herald of a new school in fiction, the psychologists, who undertook to analyse the complicated sensations of those who could afford to have them, and so delighted both them and those who aspired to be received in their charmed circle. " You cannot make psychology easy reading," said Cardinal Newman, and the masquerade of science, falsely so called, that Bourget obtrudes in his narratives is tedious reading for healthy minds. It has been happily described as *' a seductive if 368 A Century of French Fiction somewhat sickly product of the hot-house of an outworn civilisation," for it is in no sense a plant that has its roots deep in the national soil, while in the author himself there has still remained a little of what Augier called " the melan- choly pig." He brought to his fiction a studious mind, an analytic disposition, reflective rather than creative, supple rather than strong, subtle rather than profound, and somewhat morbidly interested in the mysteries of moral life. His style was like his mind, suave, graceful, elegant, but ex- tremely uneven, now simple as M^rim^e, now mannered as Marivaux, careless to the verge of a dandified solecism, but capable of rising on due occasion to a terse and nervous concision. He describes himself as a moralist of the deca- dence, a moralist not a reformer. The world to him was out of joint, introspective, analytic, lustful, faithless, shallow, and dilettant. It was as though his intellect and moral fibre had been blighted by the upas shadow of Renan's scepticism. His diagnosis of moral anemia might be bril- liant, but he had no tonic remedy. Such was the Bourget of the EssaySy in which he had sought to gather materials for the historian of the moral life of contemporary France, of which the dominant note seemed to him " the pessimism in the soul of contemporary youth." Thus disposed and thus qualified, Bourget published in 1884 The Irreparable, possibly the most pretentiously analytic and perversely morbid of his works, whose hero is a nasty Valmont, borrowed from Laclos, and the heroine a person incapable of either enjoying or bestowing hap- piness, who shoots herself at the close, as she sensibly remarks, " for nothing." The psychology of the tale is as unnatural as it is laboured, and its chief merit is its brevity. The Generation of the Second Empire 369 It came, however, at an opportune moment, just as the class to which he appealed were beginning to turn from natural- ism and to seek a new shibboleth. The people that he painted here, and to whom he continued to appeal for the next ten years, are not typically French at all, but a narrow segment of society that by inoculation with Jewish and cosmopolitan ideals has become denationalised. His scene shifts easily from Paris to England or to Italy, and indeed his characters are so utterly preoccupied with them- selves that they seem as much at home in one country as another. The morbid futility of The Irreparable pervades A Cruel Enigma (Cruelle ^nigme, 1885). The "enigma," is the perplexity of Herbert, whose love could not redeem a vicious mistress, on the discovery of which he " made an irremedi- able shipwreck of his soul," being a victim of idealistic anxiety, after the Ibsen-Tolstoi manner, for whom one feels more contempt than sympathy. A Lover's Crime (Crime d'amour, 1886), which a French critic says should be named " Died for Nothing," takes us into a hot- house atmosphere of sensual jealousy and topsy-turvy sentiment about the " supreme beneficence of pity " and " the religion of human suffering," whose god is the familiar unholy trinity. In its morbid kind, however, this study of "states of soul" is stronger than anything Bourget had yet done, and decidedly superior to the diagnosis of a similar case in Second Love (Deuxieme amour, 1884). Andri Cornells followed in 1887 and closes the first period of Bourget's development. Up to this point he subordi- nated inner nature to environment, let his personages express their natures by their tastes rather than by their feelings, and left us exasperated by their apparent inconsistency, 24 3/0 A Century of French Fiction while wearying us with details of luxury of upholstery and bric-a-brac, of silk stockings wonderful in their variety of weave and shade, and of spherical geometry applied to a corsage. He has never since repeated his former errors in this regard, and he more than once allows his spokesman, Claude Larcher, to mock his earlier self in The Psychology of Modern Love. W\\h Lies (Mensonges, 1889) Bourget seems to attain a clearer vision and stronger grasp of character, yet here, too, there is far too much patho- psycho- physiology, and we feel some debt of gratitude to the faithless Collette that she brought the putative author of The Psychology of Modern Love to an early grave. But while in this novel the men are little more than playthings, the women have a strong though disagreeable individuality. Collette is less frank, less good-humoured than Zola's Nana, her social sister. ** There was a cruelty in her greenish eyes, in the curl of her lip, and a sort of hatred. . . . She loved even while she de- ceived, tortured, and humiliated." Yet she is as gracious as she is malicious and perverse. Higher in the mental, lower in the moral scale than Nana, she drags her lover relentlessly down, and in The Psychology of Modern Love you may see him sink out of sight if you will. And beside her is Mme. Moraines, the society lady, with a Madonna face and a coquettish rosary of lies always at command ; as perfectly corrupted as she could be, but quite unconscious of the utter baseness into which she had insensibly drifted. "A complicated sort of animal," says Larcher, to whom Abb^ Taconet, the still small voice of common- sense in this psychological wilderness, replies : " Comi^licated ! She is just a wretch who lives at the mercy of her sensations. All that — it's just dirt." We breathe freer for the word, but The Generation of the Second Empire 371 the moral triumph of the book is with cynical selfishness. There is here something of the Mephistophelian spirit, a false note of flippant cynicism which is absent from the later novels. With The Disciple^ also of 1889, Bourget joins to his reaction from naturalism in fiction a reaction from mate- rialism in morals, allying himself to some extent with the neo-CathoHc movement, and in a preface making a formal attack on the scientific spirit and the philosophy of Taine, which he thinks, or affects to think, dangerous to the youth of France, whom he exhorts to be neither brutal pessimists nor disdainful sophists, nor yet cynics, who in pride of life juggle with ideas. What they are to be instead he does not yet say, and his novel, though founded on fact, is in- deed a minute and accurate analysis, but a morbid and un- interesting story, too dull to be unhealthy, disarmed by its own tediousness. And the same may be said of the ten Portraits of Women, written at intervals since 1884 and collected this same year. They demand great effort to follow an analysis of little interest. This is true also of WomarCs Heart (Coeur de femme, 1890), which is simply an experiment in dual affection of a lady whose affinity was " a Casal with the heart of a Poyanne," and who sought refuge from her self-tormenting folly in a convent, which to this dilettant neo-Catholic represents "the alcohol of romantic femininity." Ten Portraits of Men (Nouveaux pastels, 1891) has for its chief contents A Saint, a most genuine and wholly charm- ing story of an old monk whose other-worldliness is set off by the ferocity of a young man's precocious ambition. Bourget's touch has never been so exquisite as here, cer- tainly not in Cosmopolis (1892), that "romance of inter- 372 A Century of French Fiction national life," in which he proclaims his adhesion to a kind of Catholicism that is more curious than Christian, and savours of the sensuous mysticism of Huysmans. Yet Cosmopolis is the best told of all Bourget's novels. It is less morbidly analytic, a study of races rather than of indi- viduals, of French, English, American, Polish, Italian, and Creole-plus-negro traits, which in Bourget's theory persist in spite of environment, and are certainly drawn with great cleverness and insight, and share in an action of unusual interest and life. It is strange that while able to do this work Bourget should have been willing to write The Promised Land (Terre promise, 1892), a dreary piece of psychic vivi- section and self-torture that could interest only an alienist, and comes to a most lame conclusion. Yet in this painful narrative are imbedded some admirable • descriptions of scenes on the Riviera, and some traits of child life that are really charming. The novel marks, however, the beginning of Bourget's decline. He has never since attained the level of Lies, A Saint, and Cosmopolis, A Scruple is an artistic study of a subject quite unworthy of art, and the coarse Tragic Idyll, with its moral inanity and complacent pretence at rehgion, shows a still further de- scent toward moral nullity and senile cynicism, from which New Begin7iings (Recommencements, 1897) and Lady ^ Travellers (Voyageuses, 1897) show no disposition to rise, — and here therefore we will leave him. The transitory vogue and talented snobbery of Bourget naturally suggested imitation. Older men, such as Ricard and " J-H. Rosny," set their sails to the new breeze, and among the younger devotees of literary dandyism Rabusson has at least a curious interest for the diligence with which The Generation of the Second Empire 373 he treats the subjects of Feuillet with the methods of Bourget, and spices the ragout with Cr^billon fils. He has pubUshed more than a score of novels, of which perhaps the best is The Adventure of Mile, de Saint- Alais (1885). His most recent work, notably the Chimeras of Mark Lepraistre (1898), is beneath serious criticism. And one is tempted to say the same for the entire work of Paul Hervieu, who satirizes society in a dozen novels with what a decadent critic calls '^ happy cruelty," that is, with per- verse keenness and fundamental untruthfulness, of which The Armature (1897), is a recent and sufficient example. A more subtly delicate genius is that of the Swiss Rod, a critic of much sanity, whose fiction up to 1890 is distinctly naturalistic in tone, but passes in The Sacrifice (1892) under the influence of Russian mysticism, and maintains a strain of exquisite melancholy in Michel Tessier (1894), and The White Cliffs (les Rochers blancs, 1895), all studies of misunderstood feminine virtue struggling against narrow or brutal virility, and attaining the misery that, according to Rod, is the normal reward of virtue on earth. Very recently he seems to have shaken off this nightmare, and in Above (La-haut, 1897) has given us a fine picture of Alpine life, and an effective contrast of petty interests and vast environ- ment. He will always be analytic, but it is as though the Alpine air were clearing his brain from the taint of Bourget's dilettantism. A greater critic, but a much less successful novelist than Rod, is Jules Lemaitre, of whose Serenus (1886) it has been said that the hero is a saint whose tombstone is his great- est virtue. His Ten Tales (1889) are projections of the critic's spirit into the realm of imagination, and The Kings (les Rois, 1893) is a modernized Kings in Exile freshened 374 ^ Century of French Fiction up with dashes of recent scandal, and spiced with Luise Michel and Prince Krapotkine. Another novelist, to be named less for performance than for hereditary claim to genius, is L^on Daudet, son of the great novelist, and himself author of several novels re- markable for vigour and action, but bizarre in conception and uncertain in ethics. The most striking of them is probably The Ghouls (les Morticoles, 1894), an attack on experimental medicine with which his father, to judge from his posthumous At the Salpetriere, would have sympathised. Thinking with Rabelais that science without conscience is the ruin of the soul, he abhors Renan and all his works. Curious, too, is the extreme individualism and the Utopian or rather anarchistic politics of The Black Star (I'Astre noir, 1893). This plea for egoism leads us naturally to the self-pro- claimed apostle of that creed, Maurice Barres, whose first book appeared under the sponsorship of Bourget, on whom he has bestowed all flattery but that of imitation. For the early volumes of Barres, Under the Eye of the Barbarians (Sous I'oeil des barbares, 1888), Berenice's Garden (le Jardin de B^r^nice, 1891), 2iTidi A Free Man (un Homme libre, 1889), were so uneven in style and so obscure in substance that he affixed to the last of them an essay of fifty-six pages to explain his explanation of egoism as a working rule of life. And yet the observer of the signs of the times in letters will note in Barres one of the first conscious efforts in the generation that felt most strongly the influence of Renan to throw off that moral lethargy without returning to the outworn deter- minism of Taine or to the naturalism of Zola. , For if Barres is to be taken at all he must be taken serf- The Generation of the Second Empire 375 ously. The nickname Mademoiselle Renan given him by a Parisian jester is both shallow and false. Nor need we follow the critics in setting persistently the mark of irony on all his doings, literary or political. Perverse and over-subtle in his idealism he has ever been, but there is no fear that we shall be our own dupes if we hold him serious and earnest always. His early novels are hard reading. They have never been widely read, but they render better than anything else the state of soul of a large class of over-civil- ised French youth, repelled alike by the altruism of the neo-Catholics and by what they are pleased to call the bankruptcy of science, that can but grope where they would have it leap like Euphorion to meet Euphorion's fate. Barres's first three books are metaphysical autobiog- raphy. He compares them himself to Goethe's Truth and Fiction, "All in them is true, nothing exact;" "They are not psychology, but spiritual memoirs," he explains. Their purpose is to define the ego, to justify its cult, to show how it must be daily recreated and directed in harmony with the universe. Not as though this cult were a finality ; " Nega- tion has not yet finished its task," but it is " the best wait- ing-ground." " Why should not a generation disgusted with much, perhaps with everything except playing with ideas, try metaphysical romance ? " So in his first volume he describes " the awakening of a youth to conscious life, first among books, then among urban brutalities." The second recounts the experiments of the hero Philippe, who by striving always to be ardent yet clear-sighted grows to be " a free man," and so first becomes ready for action. " It is we who create the universe. This is the truth that impreg- nates each page of this little work. . . . Let each develop his own ego, and humanity will be a beautiful forest, beauti- 376 A Century of French Fiction ful in this, that all, trees, plants, and animals, develop freely there, grow according to their nature." Thus in Barres fiction becomes the handmaid of psychology, with whom in Bourget she had claimed a nominal equality. It is a curi- ous witness to the disorientation of an old civilisation, in which cynical democracy mocks the sensitive delicacy of the over-refined, that a considerable number of young tal- ents befuddle their brains for a time with such social meta- physics before clarifying them by work, which is the ultimate though somewhat ironical teaching of these volumes. For the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola and retire- ment in a Lorraine hermitage lead to the conclusion that the pursuit of wealth is " the asylum where spirits careful for the inner Hfe can best await" some organisation to combat the suppression of the ego ; and so Barr^s's hero applies for a license to open a suburban hippodrome. No doubt much in these volumes is due to a morbid desire of singularity and French love of system. When he escaped from these bonds, Barres showed even in these early novels remarkable power of irony, directed espe- cially against Renan, exquisite feeling and sympathy in the pages devoted to Hypatia, and beautiful descriptions of Lorraine landscape. We are constrained often, as we read, to exclaim with his Seneca, " Qualis artifex pereo ! " What an artist, and yet how sure of perishing. For it is the spirit, not the art, that quickens, and selfish negation, if it endure for its beauty, endures only as a warning that the old culture is out of touch with the new environment. Democracy is beginning to realise itself in the life of the people, to change the popular character. In such trans- formations those who cannot go with the current find con- solation in a perverse Pyrrhonism. This is still the The Generation of the Second Empire 377 position of The Enemy of Law (rEnnemi des lois, 1892), but in The Uprooted (les D^racin^s, 1897) the genius of Barr^s has worked itself out of this aristocratic dilettantism to the point where he is ready to write " the romance of national energy," preaching the gospel of brotherhood as earnestly as he had done that of egoism, seeing at last that in abstraction and logical ideals there is only waste, disillu- sion, and disappointment ; that a nation is made by its tra- ditions, and that all growth is development. Thus Barres offers in his way as interesting a case of physic development as Huysmans, and as significant. In the generation of the sixties there are many men of promise whose general characteristic is eccentricity. It is still too early to characterise the talent of Ligaux, of Es- tauni^, of Brada, or of many others who may achieve dis- tinction. Two only have done so, and this volume may close with an appreciation of the work of Provost and of Margueritte. The former is two years the younger, and now but thirty-six. His first novel, published at twenty-five, 2Vie Scorpion (1887), is an attempt at hereditary psychology, an analysis of the fusion in a child of a woman's religious monomania with the sensualism of a commercial traveller. The life in a Jesuit school, from which the book gets its name, is exceedingly well done and shows the influence of Zola. The close is sensational, but few novelists have en- tered the lists with a work of such power and promise. In a preface to his next novel, Chonchette (1888), shrewdly seeking between the naturaUsts and the psycholo- gists a name that should antagonise neither. Provost posed as the originator of a romantic naturalism, with which he sought to attract those weary of aristocratic "states of 3/8 A Century of French Fiction soul" and plebeian states of life. In Chonchette there is less crudity, more of the idyllic, elegant, mannered, and even sentimental, and the same might be said of Mademoi- selle Jauf re ^ though there is here a luxuriant freshness of style that reminds one of George Sand rather than of Marivaux. The purpose of the book, like that of Feuillet's The Dead Wife is to show that young ladies should not have a scientific education. But in the next year, in a preface to Cousin Laura (1890), he ceased to pose as a moralist and claimed for the moment no higher aim than to amuse the public. He avowed himself here, what he had always been at heart, a keen mocker of society, an amateur collector of the distortions of love ; and he illustrated this position excellently by his next story The Lover's Co7ifes- sion (1891), a piece of sentimental romanticism in which the hero's ideals of womanhood contradict nature so radi- cally that the tortures of his soul, which occupy the larger part of the book, can but lead to an impotent conclusion. This book was followed by the very popular Letters of Wo7nen (1892), which with the New Letters of Women (1894), and the Last Letters of Women (1897), are sup- posed to be written by ladies and to deal with one phase or another of love. These tales are as graceful and ingeni- ous as those of Maupassant, as ironically witty, and very much more indecent. The society for and of which they are written appears to consist solely of idle, inconsequent, lustful, and wealthy vagrants, with the instincts and preoccu- pations of a cage of monkeys. Occasionally there is an- other strain, but the dominant note is of a sensual or cynical perversity, illustrating most painfully the hardness that underlies the superficial sentiment of French culture. A Woman's Autumn (I'Automne d'une femuie, 1893) The Generation of the Second Empire 379 has a nobler tone. It is a story suggesting Maupassant's Strong as Deaths of love rising imperious in a woman who can no longer inspire a corresponding passion, and is fain at last to give to fresher beauty the man she loves, who is himself a sentimental sensualist, so that the situation sug- gests also George Sand's Lucrezia Floriani. Provost's most sensational success was attained by The Demi-ViergeSf of 1894, a study of maids who have lost their bloom by a social freedom alleged to be imported from England and America, and who in Provost's opinion tend thus to become morally impure in spite of physical purity. The novel is a sensational appeal to a narrow provincial nationalism, and is neither creditable nor charac- teristic. It is hard to see how any training could produce a more rotten femininity than that illustrated by the aristo- cratic writers of his Letters of Women, and the picturesque interest of the story does not mask the careless laxity of its psychology. In his interest in feminine vice or folly Provost does not forget the men of France. The peculiarly discreditable bestiality of the hero of TJie Nazareth Mill (le Moulin de Nazareth, 1894) makes him as revolting as the fate of his victim is pitiful. We can but trust that the Frenchmen who spy through keyholes servants at their toilet are no more characteristic of their country than " naptha queens " from Boston who send their immensely wealthy husbands to German universities and find delight in the society of such disgusting little beasts as Jacques Ebel. Provost should let America alone. He returns to more familiar ground in the short stories of Our Country (Notre campagne), which are never vulgar, always clever, and sometimes pure. With Tlie Hidden Garden (le Jardin secret, 1897), 380 A Century of French Fiction Provost takes us, almost for the first time, to the middle class, and with the moral of Goethe's Fellow-Sinners tells the strongest and noblest story that he has yet written. A woman discovers that she has linked her life to an epilep- tic adulterer, lapses from despair to rage and desire for vengeance, but shrinks from divorce, and, gradually recall- ing the secrets of her own life, sees that her faults balance her husband's, and so is brought to a tolerant charity. But the interest here lies less in the story than in the light it casts on the nature of conventional marriage, both on its physical and psychic side, and on the explanation that this affords of the prominence in French fiction of extra-marital love and its seemingly irresistible crises. Regarding Provost's work as a whole, he will be found most nearly allied to Maupassant, less profound, less pessi- mistic, less cynical, and far less powerful in his conceptions, but almost as deft, lucid, compact, swift, and unerring in attaining the lesser effects that he essays. A more virile spirit than any whom we have considered in this chapter, one in whom is a healthier view of life, a new, profounder, and purified realism, and the best promise of the immediate future, is Paul Margueritte, whose develop- ment from All Four (Tousquatre, 1884) to The Disaster (le D^sastre, 1897) is as interesting as that of Huysmans dur-| ing the same period, and far more inspiring and reassuring. Margueritte was always serious and never base, but his early work was extremely, almost defiantly, naturalistic, though it was rather the naturalism of the Goncourts than of Zola, both in conception, structure, and style. In All Four he seems restless, unquiet, working by short, sharp strokes, as nervously anxious as the Goncourts to " pin the adjective" and to startle by a crudity of expression at The Generation of the Second Empire 38 1 which you feel the author himself shrinks, for all his deter- mination to look life steadily in the face, even in its most repulsive details. Yet here at the outset there is a ques- tioning conscience and a moral purpose, obscured and per- verted as it may seem. He feels that to strip vice is to shame hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy that most irritates him is that of the philistine bourgeois and the intriguing man of letters. There is in AU Four a morbid tendency to introspective revery and to pessimistic fatalism, which may be traced in all his work for the next six years ; but even in his next novel. The Posthumous Confession (la Confession posthume, 1886) his hero feels that "he has failed in ac- tion in leaving a great responsibility to chance," and recog- nises that his misfortunes " have come from his lack of will," — words that probe the ulcer of the neuropathic cul- ture of his generation. From Pascal Gafosse (1887) onward, action becomes more and more the motive power of Margueritte's fiction. He says here that naturalism, as he had at first conceived it, is " a form of decadence, base and vulgar." There is still over much revery and crudity, too, but the tonic moral of this book is Work. And in Days of Trial (Jours d'6preuve, 1889, written in 1886) there is the same forti- fying lesson, a lesson that none in France to-day teaches with such power except Zola, and none with such confi- dence. This study of the humbler aspects of bourgeois life, of " lowly happiness, narrow, resigned, but sure," breathes a spirit of deep compassion and yet of valorous hope. It is not only a good book, but in spite of all its crudities, it is a good book, a tonic to the will that sets the nerves vibrating with the need of action. The doctrine of The Force of Environment (la Force 382 A Century of French Fiction des choses, 1891) is at first not quite so clear, but as we look more nearly we see that here it is our will-not-to-do that is forced by life into action, that it is not well that love should clasp grief forever, or that sin should demand a long repentance, that humanity claims us from ourselves for its good and ours ; and so this book is neither fatalistic nor pessimistic, but the trumpet of the triumph of life, of the germinal forces in our human nature. In this direction Over the Crest (Sur le retour, 1892) marks no advance. But the hero is still the human will, this time in a man passed middle age conquering a late- born love with a chaste and vigorous reason. The book shows less crudity of expression than any that had pre- ceded. It is clean, but it is sombre and ill constructed. Nor is there reason to dwell at length on the novels of the next four years, — TJie Whirlwind (la Tourmente), Ma Grande f Save Honour (Fors I'honneur), and The Flight (I'Essor), — except to note that there is growing delicacy and tenderness, and the same grave, strong, simple sincerity. Nor is it necessary to speak of the short stories of these years gathered in Lovers and in The White Cuirassier^ for all his art and all his moral power is concentrated in The Disaster (le Desastre, 1897), written in collaboration with his brother Victor, a story of the fall of Metz in that wax with Prussia in which their father met a glorious death. Zola's Downfall alone in France can compare with this picture of war. His is the more artistic book, but it is also the more gloomy. Both are patriotic, but this is the more tonic and inspiring, tempering the mind to hardness in that military school of whose " servitude and grandeur " Vigny had written so nobly. There is here a virile grappling with the problems of duty, a power of moral self-control and The Generation of the Second Empire 383 abnegation, that the authors inherited from General Mar- gueritte as the most precious of his legacies. It means that there is iron yet in the culture, as there has ever been in the heart of France, that in Hterature also there is a sav- ing remnant to whom war has taught endurance, solidarity, heroism, in whom the example of the dead has strengthened the living. The book is a noble tribute of a son to a father and of a patriot to his country. Among the dilettants of Christianity and Symbolism and Psychology and the cultus of the Ego and of Decadence, of mysticism and paganism and pessimism, it is refreshing to come upon a man at last on whom may fall the mantle of Zola, with as noble a pur- pose and a clearer moral vision. Index Containing authors and titles of French fiction in the nineteenth cen- tury only. Names are alphabetised after omission of de. Titles are entered without their initial articles, and in their French form only. Each title is followed by the author's name in parentheses. Abandonn6 (Maupassant), 359. Abb6 Aubain (M6rimee), 199. Abb6 Constantin (Halevy), 327. Abbesse de Castro (Stendhal), 41. Abb6 Tigrane (Fabre), 337-8, 339. About ^ 262, 279. Accident de M. Hubert (Hennique), 34J Adam, Mme., 336. Adieu (Balzac), 100, 104, 168, 176. Adolphe (Constant), 21, 28, 29, 281. Affaire Clemenceau (Dumas fils), 280. Affaire Lerouge (Gaboriau), 328. Aim6 (Richepin), 334. A la Salpetrifere (Daudet), 374. Albert Savarus (Balzac), 147, 148. Alexis, 341. Amants (Margueritte), 382. Ames du purgatoire (Merimee), 193. Amour d'automne (Theuriet), 329. Andr6 (Sand), 227. Andr6 Corn61is (Bourget), 369. Andre le Savoyard (Kock), 2>^. Ane (Maupassant), 359. Ange Pitou (Dumas p^re), 70, 72. Aphrodite (Louys), 336. Apostrophe (Balzac), no. A rebours (Huysmans), 343-4. Arlne, 329. Aristide Froissart (Gozlan), 84. Argent (Zola), 291, 302. Armance (Stendhal), 34-5, 39, 42. Armature (Hervieu), ^j^. Arria Marcella (Gautier), 2r3, 215,217. Arsene Guillot (Merim6e), 196-8. Arthur (Daudet), 311. Assassin (Claretie), 330. Assommoir (Zola), 267, 285, 290, 294-6, 297, 298, 299, 342. Astre noir (L. Daudet), 374. Atala (Chateaubriand), i, 4, 5, 13, 21, 67, 116, 220. Atta Gull (Sue), 81. Attaque du moulin (Zola), 288. Auberge rouge (Balzac), 104-5, 1^6. Au bonheur des dames (Zola), 291, 299. Aurevilly, S7, 334. Autre 6tude de ferame (Balzac), 114, 143, 144, 149- Automne d'une femme (Provost), 378-9. Autour d'une source (Droz), 327. Autour du mariage (Gyp), 367. Aux bois (Maupassant), 358. Aux champs (Maupassant), 359. Avatar (Gautier), 212, 217. Aventure de Mile, de St.-Alais (Rabus- son), 373. Aventure du dernier Abenoerage (Cha- teaubriand), 4, 13. A vau I'eau (Huysmans), 343. Aziyad6 (Loti), 363, 364. Bac (Daudet), 311. Baccara (Malot), 327. Bal de Sceaux (Balzac), 99. 25 386 Index Balthasar (France), 335. Balzac, 31, 36, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48, 82, 86, 88-186, 187, 205, 217, 219, 227, 229, 230, 238, 239, 242, 265, 273, 283, 299. 3oi» 310. 323. 329* 339- Banville, 262, 265, 280, 356. Bapteme (Maupassant), 358. Barbier de Paris (Kock), 83. Barrhs, 374-7. Batard de Maul^on (Dumas pfere), 72. Baudelaire, 281. Beatrix (Balzac), 126, 139, 140-1, 142, 147, 154. Bel-Ami (Maupassant), 351-2, 353. Belle Imperia (Balzac), no. Belle Imp6ria marine (Balzac), 112. Belle journ6e (C6ard), 341. Belot, 281. Bentzon, Mme., 330. Bernard, 69, 85, 86. Berthe la repentie (Balzac), in, 112. Bete humaine (Zola), 290, 297, 301. Bex, see Rosny. Beyle, see Stendhal. Blanc, see Bentzon. Blancs et les bleus (Dumas pfere), 72, 75- Boh^miens (M^rim^e), 200. Boisgobey^ 328. Bol de punch (Gautier), 205. Bonnet de la marine (Mendes), -^2)1- Bons proupos des religieuses de Poissy (Balzac), in. Boule de suif (Maupassant), 348, 350, 355, 356, 359- Bourgeois de Molinchart (Champfleury) 273- Bourget, 31, 39, 42, 242, 270, 334, 349, 362, 367-72, 373, 374- Bourse (Balzac), 108, 114. Bouvard et P6cuchet (Flaubert), 246, 259, 260. Brada, 377. Bug-Jargal (Hugo), 51-2, 53, 54. Cabinet des antiques (Balzac), 131, 135, 137, 143- Qa Ira (Maupassant), 358. Canne de jonc (Vigny), 62. Capitaine Fracasse (Gautier), 55, 214, 215-7. Carmen (M6rim6e), 190, 198-9, 200, 201. Carnet de danse (Zola), 285. Cas de Mme. Luneau (Maupassant), 359- Cath^diale (Huysmans), 345, 346, 347. Ceard, 341. Cecile(Sue), 81. Celle-ci ou celle-lk (Gautier), 205. Celle qui m'aime (Zola), 286. C^sar Birotteau (Balzac), 92, 119, 136- 7, 155- Chaine d'or (Gautier), 211. Chali (Maupassant), 358. Chambre bleue (M^rimee), 200. Champfleury, 170, 262, 265, 273, 340. Chandelier (Nodier), 50. Chansons de Bilitis (Louys), 336. Chapelle d'Ayton (Mme. Meulan), 25. Charles Demailly (Goncourt), 263, 264- 5, 268. Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal), 33, 34, 39-41, 42. Chasseur vert (Stendhal), 34, 41, 42. Chateaubriand, 1-17, 24, 30, 33, 35, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 61, 83, 154, 155, 222, 253, 259. Chatrain, 262, 273, 274. Chef d'oeuvre inconnu (Balzac), 104^ 136, 142, 210, 301. Cherbuliez, 262, 278-9. Cherie (Goncourt), 270-1. Chevalier d'Harmental (Dumas p^re), 1^^ 74, 75- ChevaUer de la Maison-Rouge (Dumas pere), 72. Chien-Caillou (Champfleury), 273. Chien de Brisquet (Nodier), 50. Chiere nuict6e d'amour (Balzac), in. Chimferes de Marc Lepraistre (Rabus- son), 373. Chonchette (Prevost), 377-8. Chouans (Balzac), 94-5, 145. Index 387 Chronique du rhgne de Charles IX. (M6rim6e), 188, 189-90. Cinq-Mars (Vigny), 47, 60, 61-2, 190. C/ade/, 82, 333. Claretie, 267, 326, 330. Claude Gueux (Hugo), 53. Clochette (Maupassant), 358. Club des hachichiens (Gautier), 214. Coco (Maupassant), 359. Cceur de femme (Bourget), 371. Coeur simple (Flaubert), 258, 260. Collier de la reine (Dumas pfere), 72. Colomba (Merim6e), 190, 194-6, 198, 201. Colonel Chabert (Balzac), 108. Com6diens sans le savoir (Balzac), 154, 158. Comment feut basti le chasteau d'Azay (Balzac), iii. Comment la belle fille de Portillon, etc. (Balzac), 112. Compagnon de la Tour de France (Sand), 227, 228. Compagnons de J6hu (Dumas pfere), 72. Comte Kostia (Cherbuliez), 279. Comtesse de Chamy (Dumas p^re), 72. Comtesse de Rudolstadt (Sand), 228. Confession de Claude (Zola), 286. Confession d'un amant (Pr6vost), 37S. Confession d'un enfart du si^cle (Mus- set), 45, 63, 64. Confession posthume (Margueritte), Connestable (Balzac), no. Conquete de Plassans (Zola), 291, 293. Conscience (Malot), 327. Conscrit de 1813 (Erckmann-Chatrian), 274. Constant, 21, 23, 27, 281. Consuelo (Sand), 228. Contes k Ninon (Zola), 285. Contes drolatiques (Balzac), 90, 92, 104, 107, 108, 109-112, lis, 136, 142, 172. Contes du lundi (Daudet), 307, 311. Contradictions (Mme. Meulan), 25. Contrat de mariage (Balzac), 108, 127, 128, 132, 134. Co//>Se, 330-1, 334, 356. Corinne (Stael), 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 220. Cosmopolis (Bourget), 371-2. Cottin, Mme., 25, 26. Coucher de soleil (Coppee), 330. Coup de pistolet (M6rimee), 200. Coup d'etat (Maupassant), 359. Courbezons (Fabre), 337, 338, 339. Cousine Bette (Balzac), 148, 158, 160-2, 163, 172, 177, 183. Cousine Laure (Prevost), 378. Cousin Pons (Balzac), 135, 153, 158, 159, 161, 162-3, 177, 183, 184. Crime d'amour (Bourget), 369. Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (France), 334- Criquette (Hal6vy), 327. Croisilles (Musset), 65. Cruelle enigme (Bourget), 369. Cuirassier blanc (Margueritte), 382. Cur^ d'Azay (Balzac), no. Cure de Cucignan (Daudet), 311. Cure de Tours (Balzac), 113, 114, 134. Cure de village (Balzac), 118, 139, 140, 144. Curee (Zola), 291, 292, 295, 317. Cy est demonstr6 que la Fortune est tousiours femelle (Balzac), 112. Dame aux cam61ias (Dumas fils), 280, 360. Dame aux perles (Dumas fils), 2S0. Dame de Monsoreau (Dumas pere), 72. Dame de pique (M6rim6e), 199. Daniel Jovard (Gautier), 205. Daniella (Sand), 235. Dangler d'estre trop coquebin (Balzac), III. Daudet, A., 54, 260, 261, 269, 293, 305-325, 326, 331, 341, 355, 356. Daudet, Mme. A., 309, 374. Daudet, E., 305. 388 Index Daudet^ Z,., 320. Debacle (Zola), 290, 295, 302, 382. Debut dans la vie (Balzac), 108, 148. Decor6 (Maupassant), 358. D6 d'argent (Copp6e), 330. Delphine (Stael), 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 49. Demi-vierges (Pr6vost), 379. Denis (Maupassant), 358. D6put6 d'Arcis (Balzac), 155, 158-9. D6racin6s (Barrfes), ^^tj. Dernier chapitre de mon roman (No- dier), 49, 50. Derni^re Aldini (Sand), 227. Dernifere classe (Daudet), 311. Derniferes lettres de femmes (Provost), 378. Demi^res nouvelles (M6rim6e), 190. Dernier jour d'un condamn6 (Hugo), 53. Demiers br^tons (Souvestre), 84. D6sastre (Margueritte), 380, 382-3. D^sesp6rance d'amour (Balzac), iii. Deux amis (Maupassant), 360. Deux auberges (Daudet), 311. Deuxifeme amour (Bourget), 369. Deux mattresses (Musset), 65. Deux reves (Balzac), 99, loi. Diable (Maupassant), 359. Diaboliques (Aurevilly), %t. Diamant et une vengeance (Penchet), 79- Diane de Lys (Dumas fils), 280. Dilemme (Huysmans), 344. Diligence de Beaucaire (Daudet), 311. Dires in con grus (Balzac), 112. Disciple (Bourget), 371. Dix contes (Lemaitre), 373. Djoumane (M6rini6e), 200. Docteur Pascal (Zola), 288, 291, 302, 303- , Domenique (Fromentin), 273-4. Dosia (Gr6ville), 330. Dossier 113 (Gaboriau), 328. Double famille (Balzac), 99, 113. Double m6prise (Merimee), 190, 192. Drame au bord de la mer (Balzac), 123, 126. Droz^ 327. Duchesse de Langeais (Balzac), 102, 119, 121, 122. Dudevant, see Sand. Duguesclin (Dumas p^re), 72. Dtttnasfils^ 262, 279-80. Dumas pire, 44, 68, 69-80, 82, 83, 168, 182, 216, 219. D'ung justiciard (Balzac), in. D'ung pauvre . . . Vieulx-par-Che- mins (Balzac), 112. Durandj see Greville. Duranty, 340. Duras^ Mtne., 26-7, 35. l^douard (Duras), 26. ;6ducation sentimentale (Flaubert), 58, 243, 254-6, 257, 259, 298. Elixir de longuevie (Balzac), 100, 104. Elixir du p^re Gaucher (Daudet), 309, 3"- Elle et lui (Sand), 21, 227. ^^motions de Polydore Marasquin (Goz- lan), 84. Employes (Balzac), 131, 135-6, 137. ^nault, 262, 281. En 18- (Goncourt), 264. En Camargue (Daudet), 311. Enfance d'une parisienne (Mme. Daudet), 309. Enfant maudit (Balzac), 104, 130, 133, 134. Enfants et autres (Mme. Daudet), 309. Enlevement de la redoute (M6rim6e), 191. En manage (Huysmans),342. En mer (Maupassant), 359. Ennemi des lois (Barres), ^yj. En rade (Huysmans), 344. En route (Huysmans), 345-6. Ensorcel^e (Aurevilly), 87. Envers de I'histoire contemporaine (Balzac), 148, 152, 153, 158, 163, 184. ^pingle (Maupassant), 360. J^pisode sous la Terreur (Balzac), loi, 104. Erckmann, 262, 273, 274. Index 389 Essor (Margueritte), 382. Estaunie^ y]"]. J^toiles (Daudet), 311. Etude de femrae (Balzac), 97. j^tui de nacre (France), 335. Eug6nie Grandet (Balzac), 89, 97, 103, 119, 120-1, 124, 133, 160, 177, 180. :^vangeliste (Daudet), 269, 319-20, 322, 323. Exilees de Siberie (Cottin), 25. Exiles (Balzac), 104. Fabre, 262, 326, 329, 337-40. Facino Cane (Balzac), 132. Famille Cardinal (Halevy), 327. Fanny (Feydeau), 281. Faulse courtisane (Balzac), iii. Fausse maitresse (Balzac), 144, 146-7. Faustin (Goncourt), 270. Faute de l'abb6 Mouret (Zola), 2S4, 29 1 » 293, 294, 295. Federigo (M6rimee), 191. Fedor (Daudet), 322, 323. Fee amoureuse (Zola), 285. Fee aux miettes (Nodier), 50. Femme abandonnee (Balzac), 112, 113, 151. Femme de trente ans (Balzac), 104, no, 112, 121, 133, 151, 180. Fenime-enfant (Mendes), 333. Femmes d'artistes (Daudet), 311. Ferragus (Balzac), 117. Feuillet, 233, 262, 274-8, 347, 367, Z7Z, 378. Feval, 262. Feydeau, 262, 281. Figures et choses, etc. (Loti), 364, 366.^ Filandiere (Balzac), 109. Fille aux yeux d'or (Balzac), 100, 126-7, 128, 134. Fille d'Eve (Balzac), 137, 138. Fille de tristesse (Copp6e), 330. Fille du regent (Dumas), 72. Fille !]^lisa (Goncourt), 269, 271, 342. Fils (Maupassant), 360. Flaubert, 16, 39, 58, 136, 148, 177, 179, 187, 188, 224, 238, 239, 242-261, 262, 265, 273, 274, 289, 298, 306, 323, 325, 326, 333, 334, 348-9, 350, 351, 352,361, 365. Force des choses (Margueritte), 381-2. Fors I'honneur (Margueritte), 382. Fort comme la mort (Maupassant), 354, 379- Fortune des Rougon (Zola), 290. Fortunio (Gautier), 206, 207-8, 209. Fou (Maupassant), 360. Fou? (Maupassant), 360. Foyer breton (Souvestre), 85. Prance, 334. Francois le Champi (Sand), 229, 230-1. Frederic et Bernerette (Musset), 65. Fr^re d'armes (Balzac), no. Freres Zemganno (Goncourt), 270. Fromentin, 262, 273. Fromont jeune et Risler.ain6 (Daudet), 312-3, 315, 323- Gaboriau, 326, 328. Gaietes champetres (Janin), 84. Gambara (Balzac), 104, 136, 142, 182. Gaudissart II. (Balzac), 154, 158. Gautier, 45, 48, 55, 75, 104, 141, 169, 173, 182, 201, 202-218, 264, 265, 280, 281, 333- Gay, Delphine, 2.(i, loi. Gay, Sophie, 26, loi, 102. George Sand, see Safid. Germinal (Zola), 261, 267, 290, 295, 299-301, 302. Germinie Lacerteux (Goncourt), 260, 266-8, 269, 270, 289, 294, 314. Glouvet, 326, 329. Gobseck (Balzac), 97, 98, 99, 107. Goncourt {frlres), 152, 255, 260, 262, 263-273, 298, 320, 326, 2>Zl^ 342, 355, 365, 380. Gozlan, 84. Grand bretfeche (Balzac), 108, 114, 149. Graziella (Lamartine), 66, 67. Grecque (Mme. Adam), 336. Grenadiere (Balzac), 112, 113, 133, 151. 390 Index Greville^ 326, 330. Gustave le mauvais sujet (Kock), 83. Gyp, 356, 362, 366, 367. Halevy, 327-8, 356. Han d'Islande (Hugo), 47, 52-3, 59, 84. Haute (Lavedan), 366. Hautot p^re et fils (Maupassant), 359. Hennique, 341. Henriette (Copp^e), 330. Heritage (Maupassant), 358. H^ritier du diable (Balzac), no. H6rodias (Flaubert), 258-9. Hervieu, 373. Histoire des treize (Balzac), 122. Histoire d'une fiUe de ferme (Maupas- sant), 359. Histoire d'une parisienne (Feuillet), 277. Histoires extraordinaires de Poe (Bau- delaire), 281. Homme d'affaires (Balzac), 158. Homme libre (Barr^s), 374, 375, 376. Homme qui rit (Hugo), 56, 59. Honneur d'artiste (Feuillet), 277. Honorine (Balzac), 150. Horla (Maupassant), 355. Houssaye, 85, 265. Hugo, 16, 30, 44, 47, 48, 51-60, 64, 76, 80, 82, loi, 164, 173, 174, 177, 182, 185, 204, 205, 216, 218, 229, 239, 242, 244, 259, 267, 283, 316, 350. Hussar (Merimee). 200. Huysmans, 54, 261, 270, 306, 341-7, 372, 377, 380. Ideas du colonel (Maupassant), 358. Idylle tragique (Bourget), 372. Illusions perdues (Balzac), loi, 117, 119, i3i» nSi 142, 143? 151. i59> 265. Illustre Gaudissart (Balzac), 121. Immortel (Daudet), 321, 324. Impressions de voyage (Dumas pfere), 73- Imprudence (Maupassant), 359. Indiana (Sand), 19, 85, 223-4, 226. Interdiction (Balzac), 108, 131-2, 138-9. Inutile beauts (Maupassant), 354. Irreparable (Bourget), 368-9. Isabelle de Bavibre (Dumas p^re), 71, 72. Jack (Daudet), 307, 311, 313-5, 318. Jacques (Sand), 226, 235, 236. Janin, 69, 74, 84, 205, 264. Jardin de B6r6nice (Barr^s), 374, 375. Jardin secret (Pr6vost), 379-80. Jean de la Roche (Sand), 232, 233. Jean et Jeanette (Gautier), 208. Jeanne (Sand), 229. Jean Sbogar (Nodier), 50. j6rome Paturel . . . position sociale (Reybaud), 82. J6r6nie Paturel . .• . meilleure repub- lique (Reybaud), 82. Jesus-Christ en Flan dre (Balzac), 106-7. Jettatura (Gautier), 212, 213, 214. Jeunes-France (Gautier), 205, 216, 280. Jeune Siberienne (Maistre), 25, 29, 86. Jeusne de Francois I. (Balzac), in. Jocaste et le chat maigre (France), 334. Joie de vivre (Zola), 290, 298, 299. Joseph (Maupassant), 359. Joseph Balsamo (Dumas p^re), 72. Journal d'une femme (Feuillet), 275, 277. Jours d'epreuve (Margueritte), 381. Joyeulsetez du roy Loys XI. (Balzac), no. Juif errant (Sue), 68, 82, 113. Julia de Trecoeur (Feuillet), 275, 276. Justice (Malot), 327. Karr, 69, 85. Kock, 69, 83, 86. Kriidener, 25. O-bas (Huysmans), 344-5. Ladislas Bolski (Cherbuliez), 279. L^-haut (Rod), 373. Laide (Mme. Adam), 336. Index 391 Laitiere de Montfermeil (Kock), 8^. Lamartine, 16, 51, 65-7, 76, loi, 154, I55> 247, 257. Lamiel (Stendhal), 34, 42. Laure d'Estell (S. Gay), 26. Lavedan, 366-7. Legende de Julian I'hospitalier (Flau- bert), 258. Legende de I'homme ^ la cervelle d'or (Daudet), 311. Lelia (Sand), 225, 226, 235. Lemaitre^ 373. Leone Leoni (Sand), 226, 227, L6onie de Montbreuse (S. Gay), 26. Lepreux de la cite d'Aoste (Maistre), 29. Lettres \ un absent (Daudet), 311. Lettres de femmes (Prevost), 378, 379. Lettres de mon moulin (Daudet), 307, 308, 310, 323. Ligazix, m. Lit (Maupassant), 358. Livre de la pitie et de la mort (Loti), 364- Livre de mon ami (France), 335. Lokis (M^rim^e), 200, 201. Lorgnon (D. Gay), 26. Loti^ 16, 54, 362-6. Louis Lambert (Balzac), 91, 104, 108, 114-5, "6, 121, 184, i85. Lourdes (Zola), 302-3. Louys, 336. Lucifer (Fabre), 339-40. Lucrezia Floriani (Sand), 235, 238, 379- Lucy (Lamartine), 66. Lui (Maupassant), 361. Lys dans la vallee (Balzac), 96, 121, 125, 132-3, 135, 153, 174. Lys rouge (France), 334. M acquets 79. Madame Andre (Richepin), 333. Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 148, 151, 224, 243, 245-252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 259, 260, 267, 273, 289, 340, 344- Madame Chrysanthfeme (Loti), 363, 364- Madame Firmiani (Balzac), 96, 108. Madame Gervaisais (Goncourt), 268-9, 270. Madame Lefebvre (Maupassant), 359. Madame Paul (Maupassant) 357, 360. Madame Th^r^e (Erckmann-Chatrian) 274. Madeleine F^rat (Zola), 287. Mademoiselle dela Seigli^re (Sandeau), 85. Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 204, 206-7. Mademoiselle Fifi (Maupassant), 356, 360. Mademoiselle Jaufre (Provost), 378. Mademoiselle la Quintinie (Sand), 232, 233, 234. Mademoiselle Loulou (Gyp), 367. Mademoiselle Merquem (Sand), 234. Mademoiselle Perle (Maupassant), 358. Ma Grande (Margueritte), 382^ Mahommet-Fripouille (Maupassant), 359. Main gauche (Maupassant), 360. Maison de Penarvan (Sandeau), 85. Maison du chat-qui-pelote (Balzac), 98, 99. 165. Maison Nucingen (Balzac), 137, 138. Maison Tellier (Maupassant), 355, 356, 359- Maistre, 25, 29, 86. Maitre Cornelius (Balzac), 107. Maitre des forges (Ohnet), 331. Maitres mosaistes (Sand), 227. Maitres sonneurs (Sand), 229, 231. Alaizeroy, 366. Mai d' Andre (Maupassant), 358. Malot, 262, 326-7. Maman Nunu (Copp6e), 330. Manette Salamon (Goncourt), 268. Mannequin d'osier (France), 336. Marana (Balzac), 115. Mare au diable (Sand), 227, 229, 230, 231. 234, 235. MargueriUe, 362, 377, 380-3. 392 Index Manage dans le monde (Feuillet), 276-7. Mariage de Gerard (Theuriet), 329. Mariage de Loti (Loti), 194, 363, 364, 365. Marquis de Letori^res (Sue), 81. Marquis de Pierrerue (Fabre), 340. Marquis de Villemer (Sand), 232-3, 235. Marthe (Huysmans), 342. Martyr calviniste (Balzac), 135, 145. Martyrs (Chateaubriand), 4, 5, 10, 13, 15-6, 24, 252, 253. Massimilla Doni (Balzac), 142, 182. Matelot (Loti), 365. Mateo Falcone (Merimee), 191. Maujbassant, 177, 259, 261, 274, 329, 341, 348-361, 362, 378, 379, 380. Mauprat (Sand), 224, 227. Medaille (Copp6e), 330. M^decin de campagne (Balzac), 102, 116, 117-9, 120, 125, 140, 176. Meditations d'uu cloitre (Nodier), 49. Melmoth r^concili^ (Balzac), 123, 126. M^moires de deux jeunes marines (Bal- zac), 125, 131, 144, 146, 150, 154, 186. M^moires du diable (Mery), 68, 84. M^moires d'un m6decin (Dumas p^re), 75- Manage de garden, see Rabouilleuse. Mendls, 333. Mensonges (Bourget), 370-1, 372. Menuet (Maupassant), 357, 358. Mere Sauvage (Maupassant), 360. Merimee^ 29, 42, 45, 80, 177, 187-202. 368. Merle blanc (Musset), 65. Mery, 83. Mes paysans (Cladel), 333. Message (Balzac), 108, 149. Messe d'ath^e (Balzac), 131. Meta Holdenis (Cherbuliez), 279. Meulan, Mme., 25. Meunier d'Angibault (Sand), 26, 228. Miarka (Richepin), 333, 334. Michel Tessier (Rod), 373. Militona (Gautier), 208. Mille et deuxieme nuit (Gautier), 214. Mimi Pinson (Musset), 65. Mis^rables (Hugo), 55, 56-8, 59, 60, 82, 229, 350. Miss Harriet (Maupassant), 358, 361. Miss Rovel (Cherbuliez), 279. Modeste Mignon (Balzac), 153, 154-5. Mon frfere Ives (Loti), 363. Mon oncle Benjamin (Tillier), 87. Mon oncle C^Iestin (Fabre), 337, ■},-})%■, 339. Monsieur de Camors (Feuillet), 275, 276. Monsieur et madame Cardinal (Hal6vy)j 327. Monsieur, madame et b^b^ (Droz), 327. Monsieur Parent (Maupassant), 357, 360. Monte Cristo (Dumas pfere), 68, 74, 75, 78, 79-80, 82, 282. Montolieu, Mme., 27. Mont-Oriol (Maupassant), 352-3. Morte (Feuillet), 275, 277, 378. Morte amoureuse (Gautier), 209, 210- II. Mortes bizarres (Richepin), 333. Morticoles (L. Daudet), 374. Mosaique (Merimee), 190, 192. Mouche (Musset), 64. Moulin de Nazareth (Pr6vost), 379. Mule du pape (Daudet), 310. Murger, 262, 280-1. Muse du d^partement (Balzac), 143, 144, 150. Musset, 45, 48, 63-65, 179, 2x8, 225, 226, 227, 274. Mye du roy (Balzac), no'. Mystferes de Marseille (Zola), 286. Mysteres de Paris (Sue), 82, 229. Nabab (Daudet), 307, 311, 313, 315-7, 318, 319, 323. Na'ifvete (Balzac), 112. Nana (Zola), 162, 267, 290, 297, 370. Natchez (Chateaubriand), 4, 11-13. Nid des rossignols (Gautier), 209, 212. Nodier, 47, 48-51, 53. Nostalgies de caserne (Daudet), 311. Index 393 Notre campagne (Provost), 379. Notre coeur (Maupassant), 354-5. Notre-Dame (Hugo), 47, 53-5, 56, 58, 59, 62, 216. Nouvelles g^nevoises (Topffer), 86, 87. Nouvelles lettres de femmes (Prevost), 378. Nouveaux pastels (Bourget), 371. Nuit de Cliopitre (Gautier), 211. Numa Roumestan (Daudet), 307, 308, 310, 318-9, 323, 324. Obermann (Senancour), 7, 27-8, 29, 49, 83. Oblate (Huysmans), 346. CEuvre (Zola), 102, 210, 290, 301. Ohnet, 278, 326, 331-2. Olivier (Mme. Duras), 35. Omphale (Gautier), 210. Oncle Jules (Maupassant), 359. Onuphrius (Gautier), 205. Opinions de Jerome Coignard (France), 335- Orme du Mail (France), 336. Ourika (Mme. Duras), 26. Page d'amour (Zola), 232, 291, 297. Paienne (Mme. Adam), 336. Pain maudit (Maupassant), 359. Paix de menage (Balzac), 98. Papa de Simon (Maupassant), 357, 358. Parapluie (Maupassant), 358. Parents pauvres, see Cousine Bstte, Cousin Pons. Paris (Zola), 302-3. Partie de billard (Daudet), 311. Partie decampagne (Maupassant), 359. Partie de tric-trac (Merim6e), 192. Pascal Gafosse (Margueritte), 381. Passion dans le d6sert (Balzac), 100, 168. Pastels, see Portraits de femmes. pates de M. Bonnicar (Daudet), 311. Paysans (Balzac), 118, 153, 155, 156-8, 179,229. Peau de chagrin (Balzac), 104, 105, 185. Peche de M. Antoine (Sand), 228. Peche v6niel (Balzac), no, 112. Pecheur d'Islande (Loti), 363, 364. Peintre de Saltzbourg (Nodier), 49. Penchet^ 79. P^re Amable (Maupassant), 359. P^re Goriot (Balzac), 121, 124-5, '54> 159, 168. Perle de TolMe (M6rim6e), 192. Perseverance d'amour (Balzac), in. Petit Bob (Gyp), 367. Petit chien de la marquise (Gautier), 212. Petit Chose (Daudet), 305, 308. Petite comtesse (Feuillet), 274, 276. Petite Fadette (Sand), 227, 229, 231. Petite paroisse (Daudet), 315, 321-2. Petite Roque (Maupassant), 361. Petites Cardinal (Halevy), 327. Petites mis^res de la vie con jugale (Bal- zac), 143, 158. Petit fut (Maupassant), 359. Petit soldat (Maupassant), 360. Petit Stenn (Daudet), 311. Petits bourgeois (Balzac), 154, 155-6. Peur (Maupassant), 360. Physiologie dumariage (Balzac), 96, 97. Picciola (Saintine), 87. Pied de momie (Gautier), 213, 215, 217. Pierre et Jean (Maupassant), 353, 356. Pierre Grassou (Balzac), 142, 144. Pierrette (Balzac), 143, 146, 299. Pigaiilt-Lebrun^ 83, 93. Pipe d'opium (Gautier), 214. Ponson dti Terrail, 262, 281, 328. Portfeuille de Bixiou (Daudet), 311. Portraits de femmes (Bourget) 371. Port-Tarascon (Daudet), 309. Pot-bouille (Zola), 291, 298-9. Prevost^ 377-80. Prince de Boheme (Balzac), 143, 144. Prisonniers (Maupassant), 360. Prisonnier du Caucasse (Maistre), 29. Promenade (Maupassant), 360. Proscrits (Nodier), 49. Prosne du joyeulx cur^ de Meudon (Balzac), iii. 394 Index Prussien de B^lisaire (Daudet), 311, Psychologic de Tamour moderne (Bour- get), 370. Pucelle de Thilhouze (Balzac), no. Puits de Sainte-Claire (France), 335. Pyat, 82. Quarante-cinq (Dumas p^re), 72, 75, Quatre-vingt-treize (Hugo), 56, 59-60. Qui sait? (Maupassant), 361. Rabou^ 155, 159. Rabouilleuse (Balzac), 144, 149, 151, 160. Rabusson, 278, 362, 372. Ramuntcho (Loti), 363, 366. Rarahu, see Mariage de Loti. Raphael (Lamartine), 66-7. Recherche de I'absolu (Balzac), 104, 121, 123. Recommencements (Bourget), 372. Regrets (Maupassant), 358, Reine Margot (Dumas pere), 72, 75. Religieuse de Toulouse (Janin), 84. Remplagant (Copp6e), 330. Rhnusat, Mme., 27. Ren6 (Chateaubriand), i, 4, 6, 7, 8-1 1, 13, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 46, 47, 49i 507 77>^ 83, 206, 276. Ren^e Mauperin (Goncourt), 266. R^quisitionnaire (Balzac), 104. Reve (Zola), 291, 301. R6veillon (Maupassant), 359. Reybaud, 82. Ricard, 341, 347, 372. Richebourg, 328, 332. Richepin, 333-4. Robert Helmont (Daudet), 311. Rochers blancs (Rod), yj-t^. Rod, 373. Roi Candaule (Gautier), 211. Rois (Lemaitre), 373. Rois (Maupassant), 360. Rois en exil (Daudet), 317-8, 323, 373. Romain Kalbris (Malot), 327. Roman de la momie (Gautier), 214. Roman du Chaperon-Rouge (Daudet), 306. Roman d'un enfant (Loti), 363. Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre (Feuillet), 274, 275, 276. Roman d'un spahi (Loti), 363, 364. Rome (Zola), 302-3. Rose et Blanche (Sand-Sandeau), 223. Rose et Ninette (Daudet), 321. Rose rouge (Dumas pfere), 'j-X)' Rosny, 341, 347, 372. Rotisserie de la reine P6dauque (France), 335. Rou6s innocents (Gautier), 208. Rouge et le noir (Stendhal), 34, 36-9,42. Rougon- Macquart (Zola), 287-302. Ruthvven (Nodier), 50. Sabots (Maupassant), 359. Sac au dos (Huysmans), 342. Sacrifice (Rod), 373. Sacs et parchemins (Sandeau), 85. Saint (Bourget), 371, 372. Saint-Antoine (Maupassant), 360. Sainte-Beuve, 48, 60, 63. Saint ine, 87. Salammbd (Flaubert), 252-254, 257. Samuel Brohl et cie (Cherbuliez), 279. Sand, George, 16, 44, 46, 48, 65, 85, 101, 169, 187, 208, 219-24T, 274, 329* 37^, 379. Sandeau, 85, 89, 223. San Francisco a Ripa (Stendhal), 41. Sans famille (Malot), 327. Sarrasine (Balzac), 100, 126, 168. Sapho (Daudet), 320-1. Sauv6e (Maupassant), 359. Scorpion (Provost), ^77' Scruple (Bourget), 372. Secret de la princesse de Cadignan (Balzac), 40, 142. Secret des Ruggieri (Balzac), 135, 146. Senancour, 27. S6raphita (Balzac), 119, 121, 123,125, 128-9, 132, I34> ^72, 184, 185, 217. S^r^nus (Lemaitre), 373. Servitude et grandeur militaires (Vigny), 60, 62-3, 382. Sibylle (Feuillet), 233, 276. Index 395 Siege de Berlin (Daudet), 311. Silvestre, 333. Smarra (Nodier), 50. Soeur Beatrix (Nodier), 50. Soeur Philom^ne (Goncourt), 265-6. ScEurs Rondoli (Maupassant), 359, 361. Sceurs Vatard (Huysmans), 342. Soirees de Medan (Zola, etc.), 288, 341, 350- Solitude (Maupassant), 360. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon (Zola), 291, 293. Sorcieres espagnoles (M^rim6e), 192. Soulie, 69, 80, 84. Sous la table (Gautier), 205. Sous les tilleuls (Karr), 85. Sous rceil des barbares (Barr^s), 374. Soutien de famille (Daudet), 321, 322. Souvestre, 69, 84. Spiridion (Sand), 228. Spirite (Gautier), 214, 217-8. Splendeurs et misferes des courtisanes (Balzac), no, 117, 137, 138, 148, 15I) 152, i53> 156, 158, 159-60, 161. Sia'el, Mme., 17-24, 49, 62, 83, 240. Stello (Vigny), 60, 62. Stendhal, 2,o-^2>i 44, "5» 142, 155, 179, 187, 253, 347. Succube (Balzac), iii, 112. 5w^, 68, 69, 80-S2, Zt,^ 117, 168, 205, 208, 229. Sur Catherine de M6dicis (Balzac), 100, 107, i3o> i35» 144, H5- Sur le moyne Amador (Balzac), in. Sur le retour (Margueritte), 382. Sylviane (Fabre), 338. Tamango (M^rim^e), 191. Tartarin de Tarascon (Daudet), 307, 309-10, 3"» 318, 319, 323, 324- Tartarin sur les Alpes (Daudet), 309, 321. Tenebreuse affaire (Balzac), 108, 144, 145. Teneur de livres (Daudet), 311. Tentation de Saint Antoine (Flaubert), 256-8. Terre (Zola), 119, 157, 289, 295, 297, 301. Terre promise (Bourget), 372. Teverino (Sand), 229. Thais (France), 335. Therese Raquin (Zola), 163,286, 287. Theuriet, 326, 328-9, 330. Tillier, 87. Toison d'or (Gautier), 209. Topffer, 86, 87. Tourmente (Margueritte), 382. Tous quatre (Margueritte), 380-1. Travailleurs de la mer (Hugo), 55, 56, 58-9. Trilby (Nodier), 50. Trio de romans (Gautier), 208. Trois clercs de Saint Nicholas (Balzac), III. Trois contes (Flaubert), 258-9. Trois dames de la Kasbah (Loti), 363. Trois mousquetaires (Dumas p^re), 62, 72, 74. 75, 78-9, 80, 282. Trois vilies (Zola), 288, 302-3, 339. Tulipe noire (Dumas p^re), 75. Ulbach, 262, 281. Ursule Mirouet (Balzac), 144, 146, 151, 185. Vagabond (Maupassant), 359. Valentine (Sand), 224-5, 226, 230, 235- Valerie (Kriidener), 25. ValvMre (Sand), 236. Vase 6trusque (M6rim6e), 192, 193. Vendetta (Balzac), 99. Ventre de Paris (Zola), 290, 292, 343, 344- V^nus de Gordes, 287. V^nus d'llle (M6rimee), 194, 198. Verdugo (Balzac), 97, 98. Verne, 282. Verrou (Maupassant), 358. Veuve (Feuillet), 277. Viaud, see Loti. Vicaire des Ardennes (Balzac), 93. 396 Index Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia (M6ri- mee), 198. Vicomte de Bragelonne (Dumas p^re), 72, 75, 79. Victimes d'amour (Malot), 326. Vie (Maupassant), 350-2. Vie i vingt ans (Dumas fils), 280. Vie de Boh erne (Murger), 280-1. Vieille fiUe (Balzac), 114, 130, 134, 137-8. Vieux (Daudet), 311. Vieux (Loti), 365. Vieux Bias (Mend^s), 333. yi£7ty, 16, 30, 44, 45, 48, 60-3, 64, 80, 2i8, 382. Ville noire (Sand), 232. Vingt ans apr&s (Dumas pfere), 72, 75, 79. Vision de Charles XI. (M6rim6e), 192. Vceu d'une morte (Zola), 286. Volupte (Sainte-Beuve), 63. Voyage autour de ma chambre (Maistre), 29. Voyageuses (Bourget), 372. Walter Schnaffs (Maupassant), 360. Wildmanstadius (Gautier), 205. Yvette (Maupassant), 359, 361. Z. Marcas (Balzac), 143, 144. Zo/a, 31, 39, 42, 54, 89, 104, 119, IS7, 162, 163, 174, 178, 229, 232, 243, 255, 259, 260, 262, 267, 269, 271, 277, 283-304, 305, 316, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 331, 336, 339^ 341, 342, 349, 352, 370, 374, 377, 380, 381, 382, 383. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subjea to immediate recall. 27>1ay'64HK i^CD LLi lM2B3±:mi nm^m 14 NOV 29 '66 -1PM w^ LOAN DEPT. |:£B26l968^i^^v;"isy^ *% REO ^ FEB17'68-12M subiect to recall ait iOVie W74 1:5 LD2 (E General Library lltWf^ef^^^ ^'t-i^f""^' •■1 ■