A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 21

[201] This would supply the ghost of Varus with a crushing answer to "Give me back my legions!" in such form as "Why did you send me with them?"

[202] At another time there might have been a little gentle satire in this, but hardly then.

[203] It would seem, however, that the Scuderys were not originally Norman.

[204] Chateaubriand hardly counts in strictness.

[205] Although some say that almost every one of the numerous _personae_ of the _Astree_ had a live original.

[206] These books, having been constantly referred to in this fashion, offer a good many traps, into some of which I have fallen in the past, and may have done so even now. For instance, Korting rightly points out that almost every one calls this "_La_ Jeune Alcidiane," whereas A. is the hero, who bears his mother's name.

[207] I had made this remark before I knew that Korting had antic.i.p.ated it.

[208] The more recent books which refer to him, and (I think) the British Museum Catalogue, drop this addition. But he was admittedly of the Pontcarre family.

[209] Neither the original, however, nor this revision seems to have enjoyed the further honour of a place in the British Museum. Other books of his which at least sound novelish were _Darie_, _Aristandre_, _Diotrephe_, _Cleoreste_ (of which as well as of _Palombe_ a.n.a.lyses may be found in Korting). The last would seem to be the most interesting.

But in the bibliography of the Bishop's writings there are at least a dozen more t.i.tles of the same kind.

[210] Cf. the "self-precipitation" of Celadon. Perhaps no cla.s.s of writers has ever practised "imitation," in the wrong sense, more than these "heroic" romancers.

[211] I am glad to find the high authority of my friend Sir Sidney Colvin on my side here as to the wider position--though he tells me that he was not, when he read _Endimion_, conscious of any positive indebtedness on Keats' part.

[212] _V. sup._ p. 177, note 3.

[213] Gombauld seems to have been a devotee of both Queens: and commentators will have it that this whole book is courtship as well as courtiership in disguise.

[214] A kind of intermediary nymph--an enchantress indeed--who has a.s.sisted and advised him in his quests for the G.o.ddess.

[215] emile Magne, _Mme. de V._, Paris, 1907.

[216] This sometimes causes positive obscurity as to fact. Thus it is impossible to make out from M. Magne whether Hortense, in her last days, actually married the cousin with whom she had been intimate in youth, or merely lived with him.

[217] By M. H. E. Chatenet, Paris, 1911.

[218] There is a little in the verse, most of which belongs to the "flying" kind so common in the century.

[219] _V. inf._ upon it.

[220] His own admirable introduction to Perrault in the Clarendon Press series will, as far as our subject is directly concerned, supply whatever a reader, within reason further curious, can want: and his well-known rainbow series of Fairy Books will give infinite ill.u.s.tration.

[221] The longest of all, in the useful collection referred to in the text, are the _Oiseau Bleu_ and the charming _Biche au Bois_, each of which runs to nearly sixty pages. But both, though very agreeable, are distinctly "sophisticated," and for that very reason useful as gangways, as it were, from the simpler fairy tale to the complete novel.

[222] Enchanters, ogres, etc. "count" as fairies.

[223] Apuleius, who has a good deal of the "fairy" element in him, was naturally drawn upon in this group. The _Psyche_ indebtedness reappears, with frank acknowledgment, in _Serpentin Vert_.

[224] If Perrault really wrote this, the Muses, rewarding him elsewhere for the good things he said in "The Quarrel," must have punished him here for the silly ones. It has, in fact, most of the faults which _neo_-cla.s.sicism attributed to its opposite.

[225] For a spoiling of this delightful story _v. inf._ on the _Cabinet_.

[226] Its full t.i.tle, "ou Collection Choisie des C. des F. _et autres Contes Merveilleux_," should in justice be remembered, when one feels inclined to grumble at some of the contents.

[227] This indeed was the case, in one or other kind of longer fiction writing, with most of the authors to be mentioned. The total of this in the French eighteenth century was enormous.

[228] She is even preceded by a Mme. de Murat, a friend of Mme. de Parabere, but a respectable fairy-tale writer. It does not seem necessary, according to the plan of this book, to give many particulars about these writers; for it is their writings, not themselves, that our subject regards. The curious may be referred to Walckenaer on the Fairy Tale in general, and Honore Bonhomme on the _Cabinet_ in particular, as well as (_v. inf._) to the thirty-seventh volume of the collection itself.

[229] There is sometimes alliance and sometimes jealousy on this subject. In one tale the "Comte de Gabalis" is solemnly "had up," tried, and condemned as an impostor.

[230] _Ricdin-Ricdon_, one of those which pa.s.s between Coeur de Lion and Blondel, is of the same kind, is also good, and is longer.

[231] She seems, however (see vol. 37 as above), to have been a real person.

[232] The would-be anonymous compiler (he was really Gueulette, on whom _v. inf._) of this and the other collections now to be noticed, when acknowledging his sufficiently evident _supercherie_ and some of his indebtednesses (_e.g._ to Straparola), defends this on Edgeworthian principles. But though it is quite true that a healthy curiosity as to such things may be aroused by tales, it should be left to satisfy itself, not forestalled and spoilt and stunted by immediate information.

[233] The once very popular _Tales of the Genii_ (_v. inf._) which are often referred to by Scott and other men of his generation, seem to have dropped out of notice comparatively. We shall meet them here in French.

[234] The late Mr. Henley was at one time much interested in this point, and consulted me about it. But I could tell him nothing; and I do not know whether he ever satisfied himself on the subject. Lesage _is_ said (though I am not sure that the evidence goes beyond _on dit_) to have revised the work of Petis de La Croix in the _Days_; and some of his own certainly corresponds to it.

[235] Or, as it was once put, with easy epigram, when the artificial fairy tale is not dreadfully improper it is apt to be dreadfully proper.

[236] Nothing suits the entire group better than the reply of the ferocious and sleepless but not unintelligent Sultan Hudgiadge, in the _Nouveaux Contes Orientaux_, when his little benefactress Moradbak says that she will have the honour to-morrow of telling him a _histoire Mongole_. "Le pays n'y fait rien," says he. And it doesn't.

[237] All of them, be it remembered, the work of Gueulette (_v. inf._).

[238] The recently recovered "episodes" of this are rather more like the _Cabinet_ stories than _Vathek_ itself; and perhaps a sense of this may have been part of the reason why Beckford never published them.

[239] He came to ask, or rather demand, Zibeline's hand for his master: and the fairy made his magnificence appear rags and rubbish.

[240] Mr. Toots's "I'm a-a-fraid you must have got very wet." When Courtebotte returns from his expedition, across six months of snow, to the Ice Mountain on the top of which rests Zibeline's heart, "many thousand persons" ask him, "_Vous avez donc eu bien froid?_"

[241] She is also said to have been a "love-child" of no less a father than Prince Eugene.

[242] Anybody who is curious as to this should look up the matter, as may be done most conveniently in an _excursus_ of Napier's edition, where my "friend of" [more than] "forty years," the late Mr. Mowbray Morris, in a note to his own admirable one-volume "Globe" issue, thought that Macaulay was "proved to be absolutely right." Morris, though his published and signed writings were few, and though he pushed to its very furthest the hatred of personal advertis.e.m.e.nt natural to most English "_gentlemen_ of the press," was a man of the world and of letters in most unusual combination; of a true Augustan taste both in criticism and in composition; of wit and of _savoir vivre_ such as few possess. But, like all men who are good for anything, he had some crazes: and one of them was Macaulay. I own that I do not think all the honours were on T.

B. M.'s side in this mellay: but this is not the place to reason out the matter. What is quite certain is that in this long-winded and mostly trivial performance there is a great deal of intended, or at least suggested, political satire. But Johnson, though he might well think little of _t.i.ti_, need not have despised the whole _Cabinet_ (or as he calls it, perhaps using the real t.i.tle of another issue, _Bibliotheque_), and would not on another occasion. Indeed the diary-notes in which the thing occurs are too much in shorthand to be trustworthy texts.

[243] Pierre Francois G.o.dard de Beauchamps seems to have been another fair example of the half-scholarly bookmakers of the eighteenth century.

He wrote a few light plays and some serious _Recherches sur les Theatres de France_ which are said to have merit. He translated the late and c.o.xcombical but not uninteresting Greek prose romance of _Hysminias and Hysmine_, as well as that painful verse-novel, the _Rhodanthe and Dosicles_ of Theodoras Prodromus: and he composed, under a pseudonym, of course, a naughty _Histoire du Prince Apprius_ to match his good _Funestine_. The contrasted ways and works of such bookmakers at various times would make a not uninteresting essay of the Hayward type.

[244] "Engageant," "Adresse," "Parlepeu," etc. The _Avertiss.e.m.e.nt de l'Auteur_ is possibly a joke, but more probably an awkward and miss-fire _supercherie_ revealing the usual ignorance of the time as to matters mediaeval. "Alienore" (though it would be better without the final _e_) is a pretty as well as historic form of one of the most beautiful and protean of girl's names: but how did her father, a "seigneur _anglais_,"

come to be called "Rivalon Murma.s.son"? And did they know much about Arabia Felix in Brittany when "Daniel Dremruz" reigned there between A.D. 680 and 720? Gueulette himself was a barrister and Procureur-Subst.i.tut at the Chatelet. He seems to have imitated Hamilton, to whom the editors of the Cabinet rather idly think him "equal,"

though, inconsistently, they admit that Hamilton "stands alone" and Gueulette does not. On the other hand, they charge Voltaire with actually "tracing" over Gueulette. ("_Zadig_ est calque sur les _Soirees Bretonnes_.") This is again an exaggeration; but Gueulette had, undoubtedly, a pleasant and exceedingly fertile fancy, and a good knack of narrative.

[245] The best perhaps is of a certain peppery Breton, Saint-Foix, who was successively a mousquetaire, a lieutenant of cavalry, aide-de-camp to "Broglie the War-G.o.d," and a long-lived _litterateur_ in Paris. M. de Saint-Foix picked a quarrel in the _foyer_ of the opera with an unknown country gentleman, as it seemed, and "gave him a rendezvous." But the other party replied coolly that it "was his custom" to be called on if people had business with him, and gave his address. Saint-Foix goes next morning, and is received with the utmost politeness and asked to breakfast. "That's not the question," says the indignant Breton. "Let us go out." "I never go out without breakfasting; _it is my custom_," says the provincial, and does as he says, politely repeating invitations from time to time to his fretting adversary. At last they do go out, to Saint-Foix's great relief; but they pa.s.s a _cafe_, and it is once more the stranger's sacred custom to play a game of chess or draughts after breakfast. The same thing happens with a "turn" in the Tuileries, at which Saint-Foix does not fume quite so much, because it is on the way to the Champs elysees, where fighting is possible. The "turn" achieved, he himself proposes to adjourn there. "What for?" says the stranger innocently. "What _for_? A pretty question _pardieu_! To fight, of course! Have you forgotten it?" "_Fight!_ Why, sir, what are you thinking of? What would people say of me? A magistrate, a treasurer of France, put sword in hand? They would take us for a couple of fools."

Which argument being unanswerable, according to the etiquette of the time, Saint-Foix leaves the dignitary--who himself takes good care to tell the story. It must be remembered--first that no actual _challenge_ had pa.s.sed, merely an ambiguous demand for addresses; secondly, that the treasurer, as the superior by far in rank, had a right to suppose himself known to his inferiors; and thirdly, that to challenge a "magistrate" was in France equivalent to being, in the words of a lampoon quoted by Macaulay, "'Gainst ladies and bishops excessively valiant" in England.

[246] Although there is a good deal of merit in some of these tales, none of them approaches the charming _Diable Amoureux_ which Cazotte produced in 1772, twenty years before his famous and tragical death after once escaping the Revolutionary fangs. This little story, which is at least as much of a fairy tale as many things "cabinetted," would be nearly perfect if Cazotte had not unluckily botched it with a double ending, neither of the actual closes being quite satisfactory. If, in one of them, he had had the pluck to stop at the outcry of the succubus Biondetta when she has at last attained her object,

"Je suis le diable! mon cher Alvare, je suis le diable!"