A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 35

Of course I ought to have consoled her. I ought to have pressed her to my heart and said, "Let us live for each other; let us forget the misjudgments of men; let us be happy in our mutual regard and our mutual love." I tried to do so, but what can a resolution made out of duty do to revive a sentiment that is extinct? Ellenore and I each concealed something from the other. She dared not tell me her troubles, arising from a sacrifice which she knew I had not asked of her. I had accepted that sacrifice; I dared not complain of ills which I had foreseen, and which I had not had courage enough to forestall. We were therefore silent on the very subject which occupied us both incessantly. We were prodigal of caresses, we babbled of love, but when we spoke of it we spoke for fear of speaking of something else.

Here is the full Nemesis of the sentiment that, to use Constant's own words, is "neither pa.s.sion nor duty," and has the strength of neither, when it finds itself in presence of a stronger than itself. There were none of these unpleasant meetings in Sensibility proper. There sentiment met sentiment, and "exchanged itself," in Chamfort's famous phrase. When the rate of exchange became unsatisfactory it sought some other customer--a facile and agreeable process, which was quite consistent in practice with all the sighs and flames. Adolphe is not to be quit so easily of his conquest. He is recalled by his father, and his correspondence with Ellenore is described in one of the astonishingly true pa.s.sages which make the book so remarkable.

During my absence I wrote regularly to Ellenore. I was divided between the desire of not hurting her feelings and the desire of truthfully representing my own. I should have liked her to guess what I felt, but to guess it without being hurt by it. I felt a certain satisfaction when I had subst.i.tuted the words "affection," "friendship," "devotion,"

for the word "love." Then suddenly I saw poor Ellenore sitting sad and solitary, with nothing but my letters for consolation: and at the end of two cold and artificial pages I added in a hurry a few phrases of ardour or of tenderness suited to deceive her afresh. In this way, never saying enough to satisfy her, I always said enough to mislead her, a species of double-dealing the very success of which was against my wishes and prolonged my misery.

This situation, however, does not last. Unable to bear his absence, and half puzzled, half pained by his letters, Ellenore follows him, and his father for the first time expresses displeasure at this compromising step. Ellenore being threatened with police measures, Adolphe is once more perforce thrown on her side, and elopes with her to neutral territory. Then events march quickly. Her father's Polish property, long confiscated, is restored to him and left to her. She takes Adolphe (still struggling between his obligations to her and his desire to be free) to Warsaw, rejects an offer of semi-reconciliation from the Count de P----, grows fonder and more exacting the more weary of her yoke her lover becomes; and at last, discovering his real sentiments from a correspondence of his with an artful old diplomatic friend of his father's, falls desperately ill and dies in his arms. A prologue and epilogue, which hint that Adolphe, far from taking his place in the world (from which he had thought his _liaison_ debarred him), wandered about in aimless remorse, might perhaps be cut away with advantage, though they are defensible, not merely on the old theory of political justice, but on sound critical grounds.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Duras's "postscript."]

[Sidenote: _Sensibilite_ and _engouement_.]

This was the end of sensibility in more senses than one. It is true that, five years later than _Adolphe_, appeared Madame de Duras's agreeable novelettes of _Ourika_ and _edouard_, in which something of the old tone revives. But they were written late in their author's life, and avowedly as a reminiscence of a past state of sentiment and of society. "Le ton de cette societe," says Madame de Duras herself, "etait l'engouement." As happy a sentence, perhaps, as can be anywhere found to describe what has been much written about, and, perhaps it may be said without presumption, much miswritten about. _Engouement_ itself is a nearly untranslatable word.[413] It may be clumsily but not inaccurately defined as a state of fanciful interest in persons and things which is rather more serious than mere caprice, and a good deal less serious than genuine enthusiasm. The word expresses exactly the att.i.tude of French polite society in the eighteenth century to a vast number of subjects, and, what is more, it helps to explain the _sensibilite_ which dominated that society. The two terms mutually involve each other, and _sensibilite_ stands to mere flirtation on the one hand, and genuine pa.s.sion on the other, exactly as _engouement_ does to caprice and enthusiasm. People flirted admirably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the art was, I fancy, recovered in the nineteenth with some success, but I do not think they flirted, properly speaking, in the eighteenth.[414] Sensibility (and its companion "sensuality") prevented that. Yet, on the other hand, they did not, till the society itself and its sentiments with it were breaking up, indulge in anything that can be called real pa.s.sion. Sensibility prevented that also. The kind of love-making which was popular may be compared without much fancifulness to the favourite card-game of the period, quadrille. You changed partners pretty often, and the stakes were not very serious; but the rules of the game were elaborate and precise, and it did not admit of being treated with levity.

[Sidenote: Some final words on the matter.]

Only a small part, though the most original and not the least remarkable part, of the representation of this curious phenomenon in literature has been attempted in this discussion. The English and German developments of it are interesting and famous, and, merely as literature, contain perhaps better work than the French, but they are not so original, and they are out of our province. Marivaux[415] served directly as model to both English and German novelists, though the peculiarity of the national temperament quickly made itself felt in both cases. In England the great and healthy genius of Fielding applied the humour cure to Sensibility at a very early period; in Germany the literature of Sensibility rapidly became the literature of suicide--a consummation than which nothing could be more alien from the original conception. It is true that there is a good deal of dying in the works of Madame de la Fayette and her imitators. But it is quite transparent stage-dying, and the virtuous Prince of Cleves and the penitent Adelaide in the _Comte de Comminge_ do not disturb the mind at all. We know that, as soon as the curtain has dropped, they will get up again and go home to supper quite comfortably. It is otherwise with Werther and Adolphe. With all the first-named young man's extravagance, four generations have known perfectly well that there is something besides absurdity in him, while in Adolphe there is no extravagance at all. The wind of Sensibility had been sown, in literature and in life, for many a long year, and the whirlwind had begun to be reaped.[416]

[Sidenote: Its importance here.]

This, however, is the moral side of the matter, with which we have not much to do. As a division of literature these sentimental novels, artificial as they are, have a good deal of interest; and in a _History_ such as the present they have very great importance. They are so entirely different in atmosphere from the work of later times, that reading them has all the refreshing effect of a visit to a strange country; and yet one feels that they themselves have opened that country for coming writers as well as readers. They are often extraordinarily ingenious, and the books to which in form they set the example, though the power of the writers made them something very different in matter--_Julie_, _La Religieuse_, _Paul et Virginie_,[417]

_Corinne_, _Rene_--give their progenitors not a little importance, or at least not a little interest of curiosity. Besides, it was in the school of Sensibility that the author of _Manon Lescaut_ somehow or other developed that wonderful little book. I do not know that it would be prudent to recommend modern readers to study Sensibility for themselves in the original doc.u.ments just surveyed. Disappointment and possibly maledictions would probably be the result of any such attempt, except in the case of Xavier de Maistre and Constant. But these others are just the cases in which the office of historical critic justifies itself. It is often said (and n.o.body knows the truth of it better than critics themselves) that a diligent perusal of all the studies and _causeries_ that have ever been written, on any one of the really great writers, will not give as much knowledge of them as half an hour's reading of their own work. But then in that case the metal is virgin, and to be had on the surface and for the picking up. The case is different where tons of ore have to be crushed and smelted, in order to produce a few pennyweights of metal.

Whatever fault may be found with the "Sensibility" novel, it is, as a rule, "written by gentlemen [and ladies] for [ladies and] gentlemen." Of the work of two curious writers, who may furnish the last detailed notices of this volume, as much cannot, unfortunately, be said.

[Sidenote: Restif de la Bretonne.]

It may, from different points of view, surprise different cla.s.ses of readers to find Restif de la Bretonne (or as some would call him, Retif) mentioned here at all--at any rate to find him taken seriously, and not entirely without a certain respect. One of these cla.s.ses, consisting of those who know nothing about him save at second-hand, may ground their surprise on the notion that his work is not only matter for the _Index Expurgatorius_, but also vulgar and unliterary, such as a French Ned Ward, without even Ned's gutter-wit, might have written. And these might derive some support from the stock ticket-jingle _Rousseau du ruisseau_, which, though not without some real pertinency, is directly misleading.

Another cla.s.s, consisting of some at least, if not most, of those who have read him to some extent, may urge that Decency--taking her revenge for the axiom of the boatswain in _Mr. Midshipman Easy_--forbids Duty to let him in. And yet others, less under the control of any Mrs. Grundy, literary or moral, may ask why he is let in, and Choderlos de Laclos[418] and Louvet de Courray, with some more, kept out, as they most a.s.suredly will be.

In the first place, there is no vulgarity in Restif. If he had had a more regular education and society, literary or other, and could have kept his mind, which was to a certainty slightly unhinged, off the continual obsession of morbid subjects, he might have been a very considerable man of letters, and he is no mean one, so far as style goes,[419] as it is. He avails himself duly of the obscurity of a learned language when he has to use (which is regrettably often) words that do not appear in the dictionary of the Academy: and there is not the slightest evidence of his having taken to p.o.r.nography for money, as Louvet and Laclos--as, one must regretfully add, Diderot, if not even Crebillon--certainly did. When a certain subject, or group of subjects, gets hold of a man--especially one of those whom a rather celebrated French lady called _les cerebraux_--he can think of nothing else: and though this is not absolutely true of Restif (for he had several minor crazes), it is very nearly true of him, and perhaps more true than of any one else who can be called a man of letters.

Probably no one has read all he wrote;[420] even the late M. a.s.sezat, who knew more about him than anybody else, does not, I think, pretend to have done so. He was himself a printer, and therefore found exceptional means of getting the mischief, which his by no means idle hands found to do, into publicity of a kind, though even their subject does not seem to have made his books popular.[421] His largest work, _Les Contemporaines_, is in forty-two volumes, and contains some three hundred different sections, reminding one vaguely, though the differences in detail are very great, of Amory's plan, at least, for the _Memoirs of Several Ladies_. His most remarkable by far, the quasi-autobiographical _Monsieur Nicolas_,[422] in fourteen. He could write with positive moral purpose, as in the protest against _Le Paysan Parvenu_, above referred to; in _La Vie de Mon Pere_ (a book agreeably free from any variety of that sin of Ham which some biographical writings of sons about their fathers display); and in the unpleasantly t.i.tled _p.o.r.nographe_, which is also morally intended, and dull enough to be as moral as Mrs. Trimmer or Dr. Forsyth.

Indeed, this moral intention, so often idly and offensively put forward by those who are themselves mere p.o.r.nographers, pervades Restif throughout, and, while it certainly sometimes does carry dulness with it, undoubtedly contributes at others a kind of piquancy, because of its evident sincerity, and the quaint contrast with the subjects the author is handling. These subjects make explicit dealing with himself difficult, if not impossible: but his _differentia_ as regards them may, with the aid of a little dexterity, be put without offence. In the first place, as regards the comparison with Rousseau, Restif is almost a gentleman: and he could not possibly have been guilty of Rousseau's blackguard tale-telling in the cases of Madame de Warens (or, as I believe, we are now told to spell it "Vuarrens") or Madame de Larnage.

The way in which he speaks of his one idealised mistress, Madame "Parangon," is almost romantic. He is, indeed, savage in respect to his wife--whom he seems to have married in a sort of _clairvoyant_ mixture of knowledge of her evil nature and fascination by her personal charms and allurements, though he had had no difficulty in enjoying these without marriage. But into none other of his scores and hundreds of actual loves in some cases and at least pa.s.sing intimacies in others,[423] does he ever appear to have taken either the Restoration and Regency tone on the one hand, or that of "sickly sentimentality" on the other. Against commerce for money he lifts up his testimony unceasingly; he has, as his one editor has put it, a _manie de paternite_, and denounces any vice disconnected with it. With the privileges of Solomon or Haroun al Raschid, Restif would have been perfectly contented: and he never would have availed himself of that of Schahriar before the two divine sisters put a stop to it.

All this, however, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject, and is merely intended as a sort of excuse for the introduction of a writer who has been unfairly ostracised, not as a pa.s.sport for Restif to the young person. But his actual qualities as tale-teller are very remarkable. The second t.i.tle of _Monsieur Nicolas_--_Le Coeur Humain Devoile_--ambitious as it is, is not fatuous. It is a human heart in a singularly morbid condition which is unveiled: but as, if I remember rightly, either Goethe or Schiller, or both, saw and said near the time, there is no charlatanery about the unveiling, and no bungling about the autopsy. Restif has been compared, and not unfairly, to Defoe, as well as to Rousseau; in a certain way he may be likened to Pepys; and all four share an intense and unaffected reality, combined, however, in the Frenchman's case with a sort of exaggeration of a dreamy kind, and with other dream-character, which reminds one of Borrow, and even of De Quincey. His absolute shamelessness is less unconnected with this dream-quality than may at first appear, and, as in all such cases, is made much less offensive by it. Could he ever have taken holiday from his day-long and night-long devotion to

Cotytto or Venus Astarte or Ashtoreth,

he might have been a most remarkable novelist, and as it is his _mere_ narrative faculty is such as by no means every novelist possesses.

Moreover, he counts, once more, in the advance towards real things in fiction. "A pretty kind of reality!" cries Mrs. Grundy. But the real is not always the pretty, and the pretty is not always the real.

[Sidenote: Pigault-Lebrun--the difference of his positive and relative importance.]

There is also a good deal that is curious, as well as many things that are disgusting, for the student of the novel in Pigault-Lebrun.[424] In the first place, one is constantly reminded of that redeeming point which the benevolent Joe Gargery found in Mr. Pumblechook--

And, wotsume'er the failings on his part, He were a corn-and-seedsman in his hart.

If Pigault cannot exactly be said to have been a good novelist, he "were" a novelist "in his hart." Beside his _polissonneries_, his frequent dulness, his singular gropings and failures at anything like good novelist _faire_, one constantly finds what might be pedantically and barbarously called a "novelistic velleity." His much too ambitiously t.i.tled _Melanges Litteraires_ turn to stories, though stories touched with the _polisson_ brush. His _Nouvelles_ testify at least to his ambition and his industry in the craft of fiction. "Je ne suis pas Voltaire," he says somewhere, in reference, I think, to his plays, not his tales. He most certainly is not; neither is he Marmontel, as far as the tale is concerned. But as for the longer novel, in a blind and blundering way, constantly trapped and hindered by his want of genius and his want of taste, by his literary ill-breeding and other faults, he seems to have more of a "glimmering" of the real business than they have, or than any other Frenchman had before him.

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Pigault-Lebrun[425] spent nearly half of his long life in the nineteenth century, and did not die till Scott was dead in England, and the great series of novel-romances had begun, with Hugo and others, in France. But he was a man of nearly fifty in 1800, and the character of his work, except in one all-important point, or group of points, is thoroughly of the eighteenth, while even the excepted characteristics are of a more really transitional kind than anything in Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, whom we have postponed, as well as in Constant and Xavier de Maistre, whom we have admitted. He has no high reputation in literature, and, except from our own special point of view, he does not deserve even a demi-reputation. Although he is not deliberately p.o.r.nographic, he is exceedingly coa.r.s.e, with a great deal of the nastiness which is not even naughty, but nastiness pure and simple. There is, in fact, and in more ways than one, something in him of an extremely inferior Smollett.

Comparing him with his elder contemporary, Restif de la Bretonne, he is vulgar, which Restif never is. Pa.s.sing to more purely literary matters, it would be difficult, from the side of literature as an art--I do not say as a craft--to say anything for him whatever. His style[426] is, I should suppose (for I think no foreigner has any business to do more than "suppose" in that matter), simply wretched; he has sentences as long as Milton's or Clarendon's or Mr. Ruskin's, not merely without the grandeur of the first, the beauty of the last, and the weighty sense of the second, but lacking any flash of graceful, pithy, or witty phrase; character of the model-theatre and cut-out paper kind; a mere acc.u.mulation of incidents instead of a plot; hardly an attempt at dialogue, and, where description is attempted at all, utter ineffectiveness or sheer rhyparography.[427]

It is a fair _riposte_ to the last paragraph to ask, "Then why do you drag him in here at all?" But the counter-parry is easy. The excepted points above supply it. With all his faults--admitting, too, that every generation since his time has supplied some, and most much better, examples of his kind--the fact remains that he was the first considerable representative, in his own country, of that variety of professional novelist who can spin yarns, of the sort that his audience or public[428] wants, with unwearied industry, in great volume, and of a quality which, such as it is, does not vary very much. He is, in short, the first notable French novelist-tradesman--the first who gives us notice that novel-production is established as a business. There is even a little more than this to be said for him. He has really made considerable progress, if we compare him with his predecessors and contemporaries, in the direction of the novel of ordinary life, as that life was in his own day. There are extravagances of course, but they are scarcely flagrant. His atmosphere is what the cooks, housemaids, footmen, what the grocers and small- or middle-cla.s.s persons who, I suppose, chiefly read him, were, or would have liked to be, accustomed to. His scene is not a paradise in either the common or the Greek sense; it is a sort of cabbage-garden, with a cabbage-garden's lack of beauty, of exquisiteness in any form, with its presence of untidiness, and sometimes of evil odour, but with its own usefulness, and with a cultivator of the most sedulous. Pigault-Lebrun, for France, may be said to be the first author-in-chief of the circulating library. It may not be a position of exceeding honour; but it is certainly one which gives him a place in the story of the novel, and which justifies not merely these general remarks on him, but some a.n.a.lysis (not too abundant) of his particular works. As for translating him, a Frenchman might as well spend his time in translating the English newspaper _feuilletons_ of "family" papers in the earlier and middle nineteenth century. Indeed that _Minnigrey_, which I remember reading as a boy, and which long afterwards my friend, the late Mr. Henley, used to extol as one of the masterpieces of literature, is worth all Pigault put together and a great deal more.

[Sidenote: _L'Enfant du Carnaval and Les Barons de Felsheim._]

The worst of it is, that to be amused by him--to be, except as a student, even interested in a large part of his work--you must be almost as ill-bred in literature as he himself is. He is like a person who has had before him no models for imitation or avoidance in behaviour: and this is where his successor, Paul de k.o.c.k, by the mere fact of being his successor, had a great advantage over him. But to the student he _is_ interesting, and the interest has nothing fact.i.tious in it, and nothing to be ashamed of. There is something almost pathetic in his struggles to master his art: and his frequent remonstrances with critics and readers appear to show a genuine consciousness of his state, which is not always the case with such things.

The book which stands first in his Works, _L'Enfant du Carnaval_, starts with an ultra-Smollettian[429] pa.s.sage of coa.r.s.eness, and relapses now and then. The body of it--occupied with the history of a base-born child, who tumbles into the good graces of a Milord and his little daughter, is named by them "Happy," and becomes first the girl's lover and then her husband--is a heap of extravagances, which, nevertheless, bring the picaresque pattern, from which they are in part evidently traced, to a point, not of course anywhere approaching in genius _Don Quixote_ or _Gil Blas_, but somehow or other a good deal nearer general modern life. _Les Barons de Felsheim_, which succeeds it, seems to have taken its origin from a suggestion of the opening of _Candide_, and continues with a still wilder series of adventures, satirising German ways, but to some extent perhaps inspired by German literature. Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage.

There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he cannot bring it off.

At the close of one of his most extravagant, most indecent, and stupidest novels, _La Folie Espagnole_--a supposed tale of chivalry, which of course shows utter ignorance of time, place, and circ.u.mstance, and is, in fact, only a sort of travestied _Gil Blas_, with a rank infusion of further vulgarised Voltairianism[430]--the author has a rather curious note to the reader, whom he imagines (with considerable probability) to be throwing the book away with a suggested cry of "Quelles miseres! quel fatras!" He had, he says, previously offered _Angelique et Jeanneton_, a little work of a very different kind, and the public would neither buy nor read it. His publisher complained, and he must try to please. As for _La Folie_, everybody, including his cook, can understand _this_. One remembers similar expostulations from more respectable authors; but it is quite certain that Pigault-Lebrun--a Lebrun so different from his contemporary "Pindare" of that name--thoroughly meant what he said. He was drawing a bow, always at a venture, with no higher aim than to hit his public, and he did hit it oftener than he missed. So much the worse, perhaps, both for him and for his public; but the fact is a fact, and it is in the observation and correlation of facts that history consists.

[Sidenote: _Angelique et Jeanneton._]

_Angelique et Jeanneton_ itself, as might be expected from the above reference, is, among its author's works, something like _Le Reve_ among Zola's; it is his endeavour to be strictly proper. But, as it is also one of his most Sternian exercises, the propriety is chequered. It begins in sufficiently startling fashion; a single gentleman of easy fortune and amiable disposition, putting his latchkey in the door of his chambers one night, is touched and accosted by an interesting young person with an "argentine" voice. This may look _louche_; but the silvery accents appeal only for relief of needs, which, as it shortly appears, are those most properly to be supplied by a maternity hospital.

It is to be understood that the suppliant is an entire stranger to the hero. He behaves in the most amiable and, indeed, n.o.ble fashion, instals her in his rooms, turns himself and his servant out to the nearest hotel, fetches the proper ministress, and, not content with this Good Samaritanism, effects a legitimate union between Jeanneton and her lover, half gives and half procures them a comfortable maintenance, resists temptation of repayment (_not_ in coin) on more than one occasion, and sets out, on foot, to Caudebec, to see about a heritage which has come to Jeanneton's husband. On the way he falls in with Angelique (a lady this time), falls also in love with her, and marries her. The later part of the story, as is rather the way with Pigault, becomes more "accidented." There are violent scenes, jealousies, not surprising, between the two heroines, etc. But the motto-t.i.tle of Marmontel's _Heureus.e.m.e.nt_ governs all, and the end is peace, though not without some spots in its sun. That the public of 1799 did not like the book and did like _La Folie Espagnole_ is not surprising; but the bearing of this double attempt on the growth of novel-writing as a regular craft is important.

[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Thomas._]

Perhaps on the whole _Mon Oncle Thomas_, which seems to have been one of the most popular, is also one of the most representative, if not the best, of Pigault-Lebrun's novels. Its opening, and not its opening only, is indeed full of that mere nastiness which we, with Smollett and others to our _dis_credit, cannot disclaim for our own parallel period, and which was much worse among the French, who have a choice selection of epithets for it. But the fortunes of the youthful Thomas--child of a prost.i.tute of the lowest cla.s.s, though a very good mother, who afterwards marries a miserly and ruffianly corporal of police--are told with a good deal of spirit--one even thinks of _Colonel Jack_--and the author shows his curious vulgar common sense, and his knowledge of human nature of a certain kind, pretty frequently, at least in the earlier part of the book.

[Sidenote: _Jerome._]

_Jerome_ is another of Pigault's favourite studies of boys--distinctly blackguard boys as a rule--from their mischievous, or, as the early English eighteenth century would have put it, "unlucky" childhood, to their most undeserved reward with a good and pretty wife (whom one sincerely pities), and more or less of a fortune. There is, however, more vigour in _Jerome_ than in most, and, if one has the knack of "combing out" the silly and stale Voltairianism, and paying little attention to the far from exciting sculduddery, the book may be read. It contains, in particular, one of the most finished of its author's sketches, of a type which he really did something to introduce into his country's literature--that of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic _routier_ or professional soldier--brave as you like, and--at least at some times when neither drunk nor under the influence of the garden G.o.d--not ungenerous; with a certain simplicity too: but as braggart as he is brave; a mere brute beast as regards the other s.e.x; utterly ignorant, save of military matters, and in fact a kind of caricature of the older type, which the innocent Rymer was so wrath with Shakespeare for neglecting in Iago.

[Sidenote: The redeeming points of these.]

It may seem that too much s.p.a.ce is being given to a reprobate and often dull author; but something has been said already to rebut the complaint, and something more may be added now and again. French literature, from the death of Chenier to the appearance of Lamartine, has generally been held to contain hardly more than two names--those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael--which can even "seem to be" those of "pillars"; and it may appear fantastic and almost insulting to mention one, who in long stretches of his work might almost be called a mere muckheap-raker, in company with them. Yet, in respect to the progress of his own department, it may be doubted whether he is not even more than their equal. _Rene_ and _Corinne_ contain great suggestions, but they are suggestions rather for literature generally than for the novel proper.

Pigault used the improperest materials; he lacked not merely taste, but that humour which sometimes excuses taste's absence; power of creating real character, decency almost always, sense very often.[431] But all the same, he made the novel _march_, as it had not marched, save in isolated instances of genius, before.

[Sidenote: Others--_Adelade de Meran_ and _Tableaux de Societe_.]

[Sidenote: _L'Officieux._]

Yet Pigault could hardly have deserved even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap. He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire subst.i.tuted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. _Adelade de Meran_ (his longest single book), _Tableaux de Societe_, _L'Officieux_, and others, are of this cla.s.s; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author has been credited. _Adelade_ is very strongly reminiscent of Richardson, and more than reminiscent of "Sensibility"; it is written in letters--though all by and to the same persons, except a few extracts--and there is no individuality of character. Pigault, it has been said, never has any, though he has some of type. But by exercising the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper"

details--conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable _naturaleza_ is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named _Tableaux de Societe_--the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by being in the most frantic state of mutual pa.s.sion with her husband, though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on the husband's. With his usual unskilfulness in managing character, Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine's almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy and "unconvincing" fashion. As for his throwing in, at the end, another fatal pa.s.sion on part of their daughter for her mother's lover, it is, though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness, entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl's death. If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing, the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost inviolably constant to happy endings.[432] _L'Officieux_, if he had only had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux might have been tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a _parvenu_ rich, but brave and extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into fearful sc.r.a.pes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other people's affairs to do them good. The situations--as where the marquis, having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room, and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining apartment--are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the most of them.