PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND NODIER
[Sidenote: The fate of popular minor novelists.]
The mediocre poet has had a hard fate pronounced against him of old; but
the minor novelist, perhaps because he is much more likely to get some
good things in his own time, has usually a harder lot still, and in more
than one way, after physical or popular death. In fact it may be said
that, the more popular he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten
he is likely to be in the other. Besides the obvious facts that his
popularity must always have been gained by the adoption of some more or
less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of his own kind are always ready
to take his place--doing, like the heir in the old story, all they can
to substitute _Requiescat in Pace_ for _Resurgam_ on his
hatchment--there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The
more widely he or she has been read the more certain either has been of
being "read to pieces."
[Sidenote: Examples of them.]
These fates, and especially the last, have weighed upon the minor French
novelists of the early nineteenth century perhaps even more heavily than
upon our own: for the circulating library was an earlier and a more
widely spread institution in France than in England, and the lower and
lowest middle classes were a good deal more given to reading, and
especially to "light" reading, there than here. Nor can it be said that
any of the writers to be now mentioned, with one possible and one
certain exception, is of importance to literature as literature.
But all have their importance to literary--and especially
departmental-literary--history, in ways which it is hoped presently to
show: and there is still amusement in some. The chief, though not the
only, names that require notice here are those of Mesdames de Montolieu
and (again) de Genlis, of Ducray-Duminil, born almost as early as
Pigault-Lebrun, even earlier a novelist, and yoked with him by Victor
Hugo in respect of his novel _Lolotte et Fanfan_ in the sneer noted in
the last volume;[37] the _other_ Ducange, again as much "other" as the
other Molière;[38] the Vicomte d'Arlincourt; and--a comparative (if,
according to some, blackish) swan among these not quite positive
geese--Paul de Kock. The eldest put in his work before the Revolution
and the youngest before Waterloo, but the most prolific time of all was
that of the first two or three decades of the century with which we are
dealing.
With these, but not of them--a producer at last of real "letters" and
more than any one else except Chateaubriand (more "intensively" perhaps
even than he was) a pioneer of Romanticism--comes Charles Nodier.
[Sidenote: Paul de Kock.]
Major Pendennis, in a passage which will probably, at least in England,
preserve the name of the author mentioned long after his own works are
even more forgotten with us than they are at present, allowed, when
disparaging novels generally, and wondering how his nephew could have
got so much money for one, that Paul de Kock "certainly made him laugh."
In his own country he had an enormous vogue, till the far greater
literary powers and the wider range of the school of 1830 put the times
out of joint for him, and even much later. He actually survived the
Terrible Year: but something like a lustrum earlier, when running over a
not small collection of cheap novels in a French country inn, I do not
remember coming across anything of his. And he had long been classed as
"not a serious person" (which, indeed, he certainly was not) by French
criticism, not merely of the most academic sort, but of all decidedly
literary kinds. People allowed him _entrain_, a word even more difficult
than _verve_ to English exactly, though "go" does in a rough sort of way
for both. They were of course not very much shocked at his indecorums,
which sometimes gave occasion for not bad jokes.[39] But if any
foreigner made any great case of him they would probably have looked, if
they did not speak their thoughts, very much as some of us have looked,
if we have not spoken, when foreigners take certain popular scribes and
playwrights of our own time and country seriously.[40]
Let us see what his work is really like to the eyes of impartial and
comparative, if not cosmopolitan, criticism.
[Sidenote: _L'Enfant de ma Femme._]
Paul de Kock, whose father, a banker, was a victim, but must have been a
late one, of the Terror, was born in 1794, and took very early to
letters. If the date of his first book, _L'Enfant de ma Femme_, is
correctly given as 1812, he must apparently have written it before he
was eighteen. There is certainly nothing either in the quantity or the
quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not
fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very
closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is
not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between
the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he
goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and
adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent
character (the hero, Henri de Framberg, is very "small doings"), the
hussar-soldier-servant, and most oddly selected "governor" of this hero
as a boy, Mullern, is obviously studied off those semi-savage "old
moustaches" of whom we spoke in the last volume, though he is much
softened, if not in morals, in manners. In fact this softening process
is quite obvious throughout. There is plenty of "impropriety" but no
mere nastiness, and the impropriety itself is, so to speak, rather
indicated than described. As nearly the last sentence announces, "Hymen
hides the faults of love" wherever it is possible, though it would
require a most complicated system of polygamy and cross-unions to enable
that amiable divinity to cover them all. There is a villain, but he is a
villain of straw, and outside of him there is no ill-nature. There seems
to be going to be a touch of "out-of-boundness" when Henri, just about
to marry his beloved Pauline, is informed that she is his sister, and
when the pair, separating in horror, meet again and, let us say, forget
to separate. But the information turns out to be false, and Hymen duly
uses the not uncomfortable extinguisher which, as noted above, is
supplied to him as well as the more usual torch.
To call the book good would be ridiculous, but a very large experience
of first novels of dates before, the same as, and after its own may
warrant allotment to it of possibilities of future good gifts. The
history, such as it is, runs currently; there are no hitches and stops
and stagnations, the plentiful improbabilities are managed in such
fashion that one does not trouble about them, and there is an
atmosphere, sometimes of horseplay but almost always of good humour.
[Sidenote: _Petits Tableaux de Moeurs._]
The matter which, by accident or design, goes with this in mid-century
reprints of Paul, is of much later date, but it shows that, for some
time, its author had been exercising himself in a way valuable to the
novelist at any time but by no means as yet frequently practised.
_Petits Tableaux de Moeurs_ consists of about sixty short sketches of
a very few pages each (usually two or three) and of almost exactly the
same kind as those with which Leigh Hunt, a little earlier in England,
transformed the old _Spectator_ essay into the kind of thing taken up
soon afterwards by "Boz" and never disused since. They are sketches of
types of men, of Parisian cafés, gardens, and restaurants; fresh
handlings of old subjects, such as the person who insists on taking you
home to a very bad "pot-luck" dinner, and the like. Once more, there is
no great brilliance in these. But they are lightly and pleasantly done;
it must be obvious to every one that they are simply invaluable training
for a novelist who is to leave the beaten track of picaresque adventure
and tackle real ordinary life. To which it may be added, as at least
possible, that Thackeray himself may have had the creation of Woolsey
and Eglantine in _The Ravenswing_ partly suggested by a conversation
between a tailor and a hairdresser in Paul's "Le Banc de Pierre des
Tuileries." As this is very short it may be worth giving:
To finish our observations, my friend and I went and sat
behind two young men dressed in the extreme of the fashion,
who, with their feet placed on chairs as far as possible
from those in which they were sitting, gracefully rocked
themselves, and evidently hoped to attract general
attention.
In a minute we heard the following conversation:
"Do you think my coat a success?" "Superb! delicious! an
admirable cut!" "And the pantaloons?" "Ravishing! Your get
up is really stunning." "The governor told me to spend three
hours in the Grand Alley, and put myself well forward. He
wants people to take up this new shape and make it
fashionable. He has already one order of some consequence."
"And, as for me, do you think my hair well done?" "Why, you
look like a very Adonis. By the way, _my_ hair is falling
off. Do give me something to stop that." "You must give it
nourishment. You see hairs are plants or flowers. If you
don't water a flower, you can see it withering." "Very true.
Then must I use pommade?" "Yes, but in moderation; just as a
tree too much watered stops growing. Hair is exactly like
vegetables." "And both want cutting?" "Why, yes; it's like a
plantation; if you don't prune and thin the branches it
kills the young shoots. Cutting helps the rise of the sap."
"Do you hold with false fronts?" "I believe you! Why, I make
them; it's just like putting a new roof on a house." "And
that does no harm to one's head?" "Impossible! neither glue
nor white of egg, which needs must hinder growth, are used.
People who wear them mix their own hair with the front. They
are two flocks, which unite to feed together, as M. Marty
says so well in the _Solitaire_."[41] "Two torrents which
join in the valley: that is the image of life!"
We had heard enough, and so we left the tailor's young man
and the romantic hairdresser to themselves.
[Sidenote: _Gustave._]
In _Gustave ou Le Mauvais Sujet_, a book still early but some years
later than _L'Enfant_, Paul de Kock got nearer to his proper or improper
subject--bachelor life in Paris, in the sense of his contemporary Pierce
Egan's _Life in London_.[42] The hero may be called a French Tom Jones
in something (but not so much as in the original phrase) of the sense in
which Klopstock was allowed to be a German Milton. He has his Allworthy
in a benevolent uncle-colonel, peppery but placable; he is far more
plentifully supplied than even Tom was with persons of the other sex who
play the parts of Black George's daughter and Mrs. Waters, if not
exactly of Lady Bellaston. A Sophia could hardly enter into the Kockian
plan, but her place in that scheme (with something, one regrets to add,
of Lady Bellaston's) is put in commission, and held by a leash of
amiable persons--the erring Madame de Berly, who sacrifices honour and
beauty and very nearly life for the rascal Gustave; Eugénie Fonbelle, a
rich, accomplished, and almost wholly desirable widow, whom he is
actually about to marry when, luckily for her, she discovers his
_fredaines_, and "calls off"; and, lastly, a peasant girl, Suzon, whom
he seduces, whom he keeps for six weeks in his uncle's house, after a
fashion possibly just not impossible in a large Parisian establishment;
who is detected at last by the uncle; who runs away when she hears that
Gustave is going to marry Eugénie, and who is at the end produced, with
an infant ready-made, for Paul's favourite "curtain" of Hymen, covering
(like the curtain) all faults. The book has more "scabrous" detail than
_L'Enfant de ma Femme_, and (worse still) it relapses into
Smollettian-Pigaultian dirt; but it displays a positive and even large
increase of that singular readableness which has been noticed. One would
hardly, except in cases of actual novel-famine, or after an immense
interval, almost or quite involving oblivion, read a book of Paul's
twice, but there is seldom any difficulty in reading him once. Only,
beware his moral moods! When he is immoral it is in the bargain; if you
do not want him you leave him, or do not go to him at all. But when, for
instance, the unfortunate Madame de Berly has been frightfully burnt and
disfigured for life by an act of her own, intended to save--and
successful in saving--her _vaurien_ of a lover, Paul moralises thus at
the end of a chapter--
Julie perdit en effet tous ses attraits: elle fut punie par
où elle avait pêché. Juste retour des choses ici-bas.
there being absolutely no such _retour_ for Gustave--one feels rather
inclined, as his countrymen would say, to "conspue" Paul.[43] It is
fair, however, to say that these accesses of morality or moralising are
not very frequent.
[Sidenote: The caricatured _Anglais_.]
But there is one thing of some interest about _Gustave_ which has not
yet been noticed. Paul de Kock was certainly not the author,[44] but he
must have been one of the first, and he as certainly was one of the most
effective and continuous, promoters of that curious caricature of
Englishmen which everybody knows from French draughtsmen, and some from
French writers, of the first half of the nineteenth century. It is only
fair to say that we had long preceded it by caricaturing Frenchmen. But
they had been slow in retaliating, at least in anything like the same
fashion. For a long time (as is again doubtless known to many people)
French literature had mostly ignored foreigners. During the late
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries few, except the
aristocracy, of either country knew much of the other, and there was
comparatively little (of course there was always some) difference
between the manners and customs of the upper classes of both. Prévost
and Crébillon, if not Marivaux,[45] knew something about England. Then
arose in France a caricature, no doubt, but almost a reverential one,
due to the _philosophes_, in the drawing whereof the Englishman is
indeed represented as eccentric and splenetic, but himself philosophical
and by no means ridiculous. Even in the severe period of national
struggle which preceded the Revolutionary war, and for some time after
the beginning of that war itself, the scarecrow-comic _Anglais_ was slow
to make his appearance. Pigault-Lebrun himself, as was noted in the last
volume, indulges in him little if at all. But things soon changed.
In the book of which we have been speaking, Gustave and a scapegrace
friend of his determine to give a dinner to two young persons of the
other sex, but find themselves penniless, and a fresh edition of one of
the famous old _Repues Franches_ (which date in French literature back
to Villon and no doubt earlier) follows. With this, as such, we need not
trouble ourselves. But Olivier, the friend, takes upon him the duty of
providing the wine, and does so by persuading a luckless vintner that he
is a "Milord."
In order to dress the part, he puts on a cravat well folded, a very long
coat, and a very short waistcoat. He combs down his hair till it is
quite straight, rouges the tip of his nose, takes a whip, puts on
gaiters and a little pointed hat, and studies himself in the glass in
order to give himself a stupid and insolent air, the result of the
make-up being entirely successful. It may be difficult for the most
unbiassed Englishman of to-day to recognise himself in this portrait or
to find it half-way somewhere about 1860, or even, going back to actual
"_temp._ of tale," to discover anything much like it in physiognomies
so different as those of Castlereagh and Wellington, of Southey and
Lockhart, nay, even of Tom and Jerry.[46] But that it is the Englishman
of Daumier and Gavarni, _artistement complet_ already, nobody can deny.
Later in the novel (before he comes to his very problematical "settling
down" with Suzon and the ready-made child) Gustave is allowed a rather
superfluous scattering of probably not final wild oats in Italy and
Germany, in Poland and in England. But the English meesses are too
_sentimentales_ (note the change from _sensibles_); he does not like the
courses of horses, the combats of cocks, the bets and the punches and
the plum-puddings. He is angry because people look at him when he pours
his tea into the saucer. But what annoys him most of all is the custom
of the ladies leaving the table after dinner, and that of preferring
cemeteries for the purpose of taking the air and refreshing oneself
after business. It may perhaps diminish surprise, but should increase
interest, when one remembers that, after Frenchmen had got tired of
Locke, and before they took to Shakespeare, their idea of our literature
was largely derived from "Les Nuits de Young" and Hervey's _Meditations
among the Tombs_.
Another bit of copy-book (to revert to the Pauline moralities) is at the
end of the same very unedifying novel, when the benevolent and
long-suffering colonel, joining the hands of Gustave and Suzon, remarks
to the latter that she has proved to him that "virtues, gentleness,
wits, and beauty can serve as substitutes for birth and fortune." It
would be unkind to ask which of the "virtues" presided over Suzon's
original acquaintance with her future husband, or whether the same or
another undertook the charge of that wonderful six weeks' abscondence of
hers with him in this very uncle's house.
[Sidenote: _Edmond et sa Cousine._]
But no doubt this capacity for "dropping into" morality stood Paul in
good stead when he undertook (as it was almost incumbent on such a
universal provider of popular fiction to do) what the French, among
other nicknames for them, call _berquinades_--stories for children and
the young person, more or less in the style of the _Ami des Enfants_. He
diversified his _gauloiseries_ with these not very seldom. An example is
bound up with _Gustave_ itself in some editions, and they make a very
choice assortment of brimstone and treacle. The hero and heroine of
_Edmond et sa Cousine_ are two young people who have been betrothed from
their youth up, and neither of whom objects to the situation, while
Constance, the "She-cosen" (as Pepys puts it) is deeply in love with
Edmond. He also is really fond of her, but he is a bumptious and
superficial snob, who, not content with the comfortable[47] income which
he has, and which will be doubled at his marriage, wants to make fame
and fortune in some way. He never will give sufficient scope and
application to his moderate talents, and accordingly fails very plumply
in music, playwriting, and painting. Then he takes to stock-exchange
gambling, and of course, after the usual "devil's _arles_" of success,
completely ruins himself, owes double what he has, and is about to blow
out his somewhat unimportant brains. But Constance, in the truest spirit
of melodrama, and having long sought him in vain under the guidance of a
_quarta persona_, of whom more presently, realises almost the whole of
her fortune, except a small pittance, dashes it down before him in the
nick of time, and saves him for the moment.
Perhaps the straitest sect of the Berquinaders would have finished the
story here, made the two marry on Constance's pittance, reconciled
Edmond to honest work, and so on. Paul, however, had a soul both above
and below this. Edmond, with the easy and cheap sham honour of his kind,
will not "subject her to privations," still hopes for something to turn
up, and in society meets with a certain family of the name of
Bringuesingue--a father who is a retired mustard-maker with some money
and no brains, a mother who is a nonentity, and a daughter Clodora,[48]
a not bad-looking and not unamiable girl, unfortunately dowered with the
silliness of her father and the nullity of her mother combined and
intensified. There is some pretty bad stock farce about M. Bringuesingue
and his valet, whom he pays to scratch his nose when his master is
committing solecisms; and about Edmond's adroitness in saving the
situations. The result is that the Bringuesingues throw their not
unwilling daughter at Edmond's head. To do him the only justice he ever
deserves, he does not like to give up Constance; but she, more
melodramatic than ever, contrives to imbue him with the idea that she is
false to him, and he marries Clodora. Again the thing might have been
stopped; but Paul once more goes on, and what, I fear, must be called
his hopeless bad taste (there is no actual bad _blood_ in him), and the
precious stage notion that "Tom the young dog" may do anything and be
forgiven, make him bring about a happy ending in a very shabby fashion.
Edmond is bored by his stupid though quite harmless and affectionate
wife, neglects her, and treats his parents-in-law with more contempt
still. Poor Clodora dies, but persuades her parents to hand over her
fortune to Edmond, and with it he marries Constance. "Hide, blushing
honour! hide that wedding-day." But, you see, the Paul-de-Kockian hero
was not like Lord Welter. There was hardly anything that _this_ "fellow
couldn't do."
Paul, however, has kept his word with his subscribers by shutting out
all sculduddery, even of the mildest kind, and has, if not reconciled,
partly conciliated critics by throwing in some tolerable minor
personages. Pélagie, Constance's lively friend, has a character which he
could somehow manage without Richardsonian vulgarity. Her amiable
father, an orchestra musician, who manages to find _des jolies choses_
even in a damned piece, is not bad; and, above all, Pélagie's lover,
and, till Edmond's misconduct, his friend, M. Ginguet--a modest
Government clerk, who adores his mistress, is constantly snubbed by her,
but has his flames crowned at last,--is, though not a particularly novel
character, a very well-played part.
[Sidenote: _André le Savoyard._]
One of the author's longer books, _André le Savoyard_, is a curious
blend of the _berquinade_ with what some English critics have been kind
enough to call the "candour" of the more usual French novel. The
candour, however, is in very small proportion to the berquinity. This, I
suppose, helped it to pass the English censorship of the mid-nineteenth
century; for I remember a translation (it was the first book of the
author's I ever read) far away in the 'fifties, among a collection of
books where nothing flagrantly scabrous would have been admitted. It
begins, and for the most part continues, in an almost completely
Marmontelish or Edgeworthian fashion. A selfish glutton and
_petit-maître_ of a French count, M. de Francornard, loses his way (with
a postilion, a valet, and his little daughter, whom he has carried off
from her mother) in the hills of Savoy, and is rescued and guested by a
good peasant, whom he rewards with a _petit écu_ (three _livres_, not
five or six). The peasant dies, and his two eldest boys set out for
Paris as chimney-sweeps. The elder (eleven-year-old) André himself is
befriended by a good Auvergnat water-carrier and his little daughter
Manette; after which he falls in with the Francornards--now, after a
fashion, a united family. He is taken into their household and made a
sort of protégé by the countess, the child Adolphine being also very
fond of him; while, though in another way, their _soubrette_ Lucile, a
pretty damsel of eighteen, is fonder still. Years pass, and the
fortunate André distributes his affections between the three girls.
Manette, though she ends as his wife, is more of a sister at first;
Adolphine is an adored and unhoped-for idol; while Lucile (it is hardly
necessary to say that it is in the scenes with her that "candour" comes
in) is at first a protectress, then a schoolmistress of the school of
Cupid, in process of time a mistress in the other sense, and always a
very good-natured and unselfish helper. In fact, Manette is so
preternaturally good (she can't even be jealous in a sufficiently human
way), Adolphine so prettily and at last tragically null, that one really
feels inclined to observe to André, if he were worth it, the recondite
quotation
Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori,
though perhaps seven years _is_ a long interval in the first third of
life.
[Sidenote: _Jean._]
A still better instance of the modified _berquinade_--indeed, except for
the absence of riotous fun, one of the best of all Paul de Kock's
books--is _Jean_, also an example of his middle and ripest period. If
translated into English it might have for second title "or, The History
of a Good Lout." The career of Jean Durand (one of the French
equivalents for John Brown or Jones or Robinson) we have from the moment
of, and indeed a little before, his birth to that crowning of a virtuous
young Frenchman's hopes, which consists in his marrying a pretty,
amiable, sensible, and well-to-do young widow.[49] Jean is the son of a
herbalist father who is an eccentric but not a fool, and a mother who
is very much of a fool but not in the least eccentric. The child, who is
born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a
corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the
way they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in
consequence of his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely
nothing, and (though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very
bad company. With two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away
(having, again by his mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in
gold) at the age of sixteen, and executes a sort of picaresque journey
in the environs of Paris, till he is brought to his senses through an
actual robbery committed by the worst of his companions. He returns home
to find his father dead: and having had a substantial income left him
already by an aunt, with the practical control of his mother's
resources, he goes on living entirely _à sa guise_. This involves no
positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be
remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-class
circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink
and strong language. He spends and gives money freely, but does not get
into debt; flirts with grisettes, but falls into no discreditable
entanglement, etc., etc.
His most characteristic peculiarity, however, is his absolute refusal to
learn the rudiments of manners. He keeps his hat on in all companies;
neglects all neatness in dress, etc.; goes (when he _does_ go) among
ladies with garments reeking of tobacco and a mouth full of strange
oaths, and generally remains ignorant of, or recalcitrant to, every form
of conventional politeness in speech and behaviour.
The only person of any sense with whom he has hitherto come in contact,
an old hairdresser named Bellequeue (it must be remembered that this
profession or vocation is not as traditionally ridiculous in French
literature as in ours), persuades his mother that the one chance of
reforming Jean and making him like other people is to marry him off.
They select an eligible _parti_, one Mademoiselle Adelaide Chopard, a
young lady of great bodily height, some facial charms, not exactly a
fool, but not of the most amiable disposition, and possessed of no
actual accomplishment (though she thinks herself almost a "blue") except
that of preserving different fruits in brandy, her father being a
retired liqueur manufacturer. Jean, who has never been in the least "in
love," has no particular objection to Adelaide, and none at all to the
preserved cherries, apricots, etc., and the scenes of his introduction
and, after a fashion, proposal to the damsel, with her first resentment
at his unceremonious behaviour and later positive attraction by it, are
far from bad. Luckily or unluckily--for the marriage might have turned
out at least as well as most marriages of the kind--before it is brought
about, this French Cymon at last meets his real Iphigenia. Walking
rather late at night, he hears a cry, and a footpad (one of his own old
comrades, as it happens) rushes past him with a shawl which he has
snatched from two ladies. Jean counter-snatches the shawl from him and
succours the ladies, one of whom strikes his attention. They ask him to
put them into a cab, and go off--grateful, but giving no address.
However, he picks up a reticule, which the thief in his fright has
dropped, discovers in it the address he wants, and actually ventures to
call on Madame Caroline Derville, who possesses, in addition to viduity,
all the other attractions catalogued above.
Another scene of farce, which is not so far short of comedy, follows
between the lout and the lady, the fun being, among other things, caused
by Jean's unconventional strolling about the room, looking at
engravings, etc., and showing, by his remarks on things--"The Death of
Tasso," "The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," and the like--that he is
utterly uneducated.
There is about half the book to come, but no more abstract can be
necessary. The way in which Jean is delivered from his Adelaide and
rewarded with his Caroline, if not quite probable (for Adelaide is made
to blacken her own character to her rival), is not without ingenuity.
And the narrative (which has Paul de Kock's curious "holding" quality
for the hour or two one is likely to bestow on it) is diversified by the
usual duel, by Jean's noble and rather rash conduct, in putting down his
pistols to bestow sacks of five-franc pieces on his two old friends (who
try to burgle and--one of them at least--would rather like to murder
him), etc., etc.[50] But the real value--for it has some--of the book
lies in the vivid sketches of ordinary life which it gives. The curious
Cockneydom, diversified by glimpses of a suburban Arcadia, in which the
French _bourgeois_ of the first half of the nineteenth century seems to
have passed his time; the humours of a _coucou_ journey from Paris to
Saint-Germain; all sorts of details of the Durand and Chopard
households--supply these. And not the least of them is given by the
bachelor ménage of Bellequeue with his eighteen-year-old _bonne_ Rose,
the story whereof need not sadden or shock even Mrs. Grundy, unless she
scents unrecounted, indeed not even hinted at, improprieties.
Bellequeue, as noted above, is by no means a fool, and achieves as near
an approach to a successful "character" as Paul de Kock has ever drawn;
while Rose plays the same part of piebald angel as Lucile in _André_,
with a little more cleverness in her espièglerie and at least no
vouched-for unlawfulnesses.
[Sidenote: _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant._]
But perhaps if any one wants a single book to judge Paul de Kock by
(with one possible exception, to follow this), he cannot do better than
take _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant_, a novel again of his middle period,
and one which, if it shows some of his less desirable points, shows them
characteristically and with comparatively little offence, while it
exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I believe, call "a range of his
best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul Deligny, is one of his
nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call him insipid or
priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in
the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not
such a madcap as the similarly situated Frédérique of _Une Gaillarde_
(_v. inf._), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are
"l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it
may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same
time no prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very
much less of a success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as
reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and
affectionate wife, but treats his lower-class loves shabbily, and allows
himself to be swindled and fooled to the _n_th by an adventuress of
fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this
book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most
gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois,
the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally
manages to make his friends pay the bill, are not bad common form of
farce. One of the best of Paul's own special scenes, the pancake party,
with a bevy of grisettes, is perhaps the liveliest of all such things,
and, but for one piece of quite unnecessary Smollettism or Pigaulterie,
need only scandalise the "unco guid." The whole has, in unusual measure,
that curious _readableness_ which has been allowed to most of our
author's books. Almost inevitably there is a melodramatic end; but this,
to speak rather Hibernically, is made up for by a minute and curious
account, at the beginning, of the actual presentation of a melodrama,
with humours of pit, box, and gallery. If the reader does not like the
book he will hardly like anything else of its author's; if he does, he
will find plenty of the same sort of stuff, less concentrated perhaps,
elsewhere. But if he be a student, as well as a consumer, of the novel,
he can hardly fail to see that, at its time and in its kind, it is not
so trivial a thing as its subjects and their treatment might, in the
abstract, be pronounced to be by the grave and precise.
[Sidenote: _Mon Voisin Raymond._]
Yet somebody may say, "This is all very well, but what was it that made
Major Pendennis laugh?" Probably a good many things in a good many
books; but I do not know any one more likely to have received that crown
than the exception above mentioned, _Mon Voisin Raymond_, which also
bears (to me) the recommendation of a very competent friend of mine. My
experience is that you certainly do begin laughing at the very
beginning, and that the laughter is kept up, if not without cessation,
with very few intervals, through a remarkable series of comic scenes.
The book, in fact, is Paul de Kock's _Gilbert Gurney_, and I cannot sink
the critic in the patriot to such an extent as to enable me to put
Theodore, even in what is, I suppose, his best long story, above, or
even on a level with, Paul here.
The central point, as one sees almost at once, is that this Raymond (I
think we are never told his other name), a not entirely ill-meaning
person, but a _fâcheux_ of almost ultra-Molièresque strength, is
perpetually spoiling his unlucky neighbour's, the autobiographic Eugène
Dorsan's, sport, and, though sometimes paid out in kind, bringing
calamities upon him, while at last he actually capots his friend and
enemy by making him one of the _derniers_ already mentioned! This is
very bold of Paul, and I do not know any exact parallel to it. On the
other hand, Eugène is consoled, not only by Raymond's death in the Alps
(Paul de Kock is curiously fond of Switzerland as a place of punishment
for his bad characters), but by the final possession of a certain
Nicette, the very pearl of the grisette kind. We meet her in the first
scene of the story, where Dorsan, having given the girl a guiltless
sojourn of rescue in his own rooms, is detected and exposed to the
malice of a cast mistress by Raymond. I am afraid that Paul rather
forgot that final sentence of his own first book; for though Pélagie,
Dorsan's erring and unpleasant wife, dies in the last chapter, I do not
observe that an actual Hymen with Nicette "covers the fault" which,
after long innocence, she has at last committed or permitted. But
perhaps it would have been indecent to contract a second marriage so
soon, and it is only postponed to the unwritten first chapter of the
missing fifth volume.[51]
The interval between overture and finale is, as has been said or hinted,
uncommonly lively, and for once, not only in the final retribution, Paul
has distributed the _peine du talion_ pretty equally between his
personages. Dorsan has already lost another grisette mistress, Caroline
(for whose sake he has neglected Nicette), and a _femme du monde_, with
whom he has for a short time intrigued; while in both cases Raymond,
though not exactly the cause of the deprivation, has, in his meddling
way, been mixed up with it. In yet other scenes we have a travelling
magic-lantern exhibition in the Champs Élysées; a night in the Tivoli
Gardens; an expedition to a party at a country house, which, of course,
Raymond's folly upsets, literally as well as metaphorically; a long
(rather too long) account of a musical evening at a very
lower-middle-class house; a roaringly farcical interchange of dinners
_en cabinet particulier_ at a restaurant, in which Raymond is the
victim. But, on the whole, he scores, and is a sort of double cause of
the hero's last and greatest misfortune. For it is a lie of his about
Nicette which determines Dorsan to make a long-postponed visit to his
sister in the country, and submit at last to her efforts to get him
married to the exaggeratedly _ingénue_ Pélagie, and saddled with her
detestable aunt, Madame de Pontchartrain. The end of the book is not
quite equal to some other parts of it. But there is abundance of
excellent farce, and Nicette might reconcile the veriest sentimentalist.
[Sidenote: _Le Barbier de Paris._]
At one time in England--I cannot speak for the times of his greatest
popularity in France--Paul de Kock's name, except for a vague knowledge
of his grisette and _mauvais sujet_ studies, was very mainly connected
with _Le Barbier de Paris_. It was an instance of the constant mistakes
which almost all countries make about foreign authors. I imagine, from a
fresh and recent reading of it, that he probably did take more trouble
with it than with most of his books. But, unfortunately, instances of
lost labour are not confined to literature. The subject and the author
are very ill matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so in a way competing
with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics. But for such a
task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of concocting a
readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such high
graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book with
_Notre-Dame de Paris_ or the _Contes Drolatiques_, _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_ or the _Chronique de Charles IX_. But even the lower ways he
could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his
wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but
rather late Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed
and Dumas possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations,
if not in actual temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of
_lingua franca_ suitable to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant
with, _any_ particular time and _any_ particular state of manners. He
could throw in types of the kind so much admired by no less a person
than Sir Philip Sidney--a garrulous old servant, an innocent young girl,
a gasconading coward, a revengeful daughter of Italy, a this and that
and the other. But he could neither make individual character nor vivid
historical scene. And so the thing breaks down.
The barber-hero-villain himself is the most "unconvincing" of barbers
(who have profited fiction not so ill in other cases), of heroes (who
are too often unconvincing), and even of villains (who have rather a
habit of being so).[52] Why a man who is represented as being intensely,
diabolically, wicked, but almost diabolically shrewd, should employ, and
go on employing, as his instrument a blundering poltroon like the Gascon
Chaudoreille, is a question which recurs almost throughout the book,
and, being unanswered, is almost sufficient to damn it. And at the end
the other question, why M. le Marquis de Villebelle--represented as,
though also a villain, a person of superior intelligence--when he has
discovered that the girl whom he has abducted and sought to ruin is
really his daughter; when he has run upstairs to tell her, has knocked
at her locked door, and has heard a heavy body splashing into the lake
under her window,--why, instead of making his way at once to the water,
he should run about the house for keys, break into the room, and at
last, going to the window, draw from the fact that "an object shows
itself at intervals on the surface, and appears to be still in a state
of agitation," the no doubt quite logical inference that Blanche is
drowning--when, and only then, he precipitates himself after her,--this
question would achieve, if it were necessary, the damnation.
[Sidenote: The Pauline grisette.]
The fact is, that Paul had no turn for melodrama, history, or tragic
matter of any kind. He wrote nearly a hundred novels, and I neither
pretend to have read the whole of them, nor, if I had done so, should I
feel justified in inflicting abstracts on my readers. As always happens
in such cases, the feast he offers us is "pot-luck," but, as too seldom
happens, the luck of the pot is quite often good. With the grisette, to
whom he did much to give a niche (one can hardly call it a shrine) in
literature, whom he celebrated so lovingly, and whose gradual
disappearance he has so touchingly bewailed, or with any feminine person
of partly grisettish kind, such as the curious and already briefly
mentioned heroine of _Une Gaillarde_,[53] he is almost invariably happy.
The above-mentioned Lucile is not technically a grisette (who should be
a girl living on her own resources or in a shop, not in service) nor is
Rose in _Jean_, but both have the requirements of the type--_minois
chiffonné_ (including what is absolutely indispensable, a _nez
retroussé_), inexhaustible gaiety, extreme though by no means
promiscuous complaisance, thorough good-nature--all the gifts, in short,
of Béranger's _bonne fille_, who laughs at everything, but is perfectly
capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not seldom
marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher _spear_," the English
"garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very
successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate
extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge
two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette
of _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_, who outwits in the cleverest way three
would-be gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and
extracts thumping solatia from these for their victims.[54]
[Sidenote: Others.]
On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous book which
suggested the title of this--_L'Homme aux Trois Culottes_, symbolising
and in a way giving a history of the times of the Revolution, the
Empire, and the Restoration, and finishing with "July"--seems to me
again a failure. As I have said, Paul could not manage history, least of
all spread-out history like this; and the characters, or rather
personages, though of the lower and lower-middle rank, which he _could_
manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others may have been, or
may be, more fortunate with them.
So, too, _Le Petit Fils de Cartouche_ (which I read before coming
across its first part, _Les Enfants du Boulevard_) did not inspire me
with any desire to look up this earlier novel; and _La Pucelle de
Belleville_, another of Paul's attempts to depict the unconventional but
virtuous young person, has very slight interest as a story, and is
disfigured by some real examples of the "coarse vulgarity" which has
been somewhat excessively charged against its author generally. _Frère
Jacques_ is a little better, but not much.[55]
Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once
"got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have
read, for instance, in succession, _M. Dupont_, which, even in the
Belgian piracy, is of 1838, and _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_, which must
be some quarter of a century later--so late, indeed, that Madame Patti
is mentioned in it. The title-hero of the first--a most respectable
man--has an _ingénue_, who loves somebody else, forced upon him,
experiences more recalcitrance than is usually allowed in such cases,
and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical injustice, is butchered to
make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does not so very distinctly
deserve his Eugénie. It contains also one Zélie, who is perhaps the
author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or most
disagreeable, grisette. _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_ gives us a whole
posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls--pretty,
middling, and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and
_couci-couci_ (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula,"
because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion
almost noble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a
mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of
Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down
with fifteen thousand francs for an old mistress (she has lost her
beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of the
extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or
half-first; a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances
of Marie's mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You
might change over some of the personages and scenes of the two books;
but they are scarcely unequal in such merit as they possess, and both
lazily readable in the fashion so often noted.
If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the
answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself supply a fuller
explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for
the space here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the
first place, from sheer and unanalysable narrative faculty, the secret
of the business, the mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other.
But it also comes, as it seems to me, from the fact that Paul de Kock is
the very first of French novelists who, though he has no closely woven
plot, no striking character, no vivid conversation or arresting phrases,
is thoroughly _real_, and in the good, not the bad, sense _quotidian_.
The statement may surprise some people and shock others, but I believe
it can be as fully sustained as that other statement about the most
different subject possible, the _Astrée_, which was quoted from Madame
de Sévigné in the last volume. Paul knew the world he dealt with as well
almost as Dickens[56] knew his very different but somewhat corresponding
one; and, unlike Dickens, the Frenchman had the good sense to meddle
very little[57] with worlds that he did not know. Of course it would be
simply _bête_ to take it for granted that the majority of Parisian shop-
and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or the
amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But
somehow or other one feels that the general _ethos_ of the class has
been caught.[58] His _bourgeois_ interiors and outings have the same
real and not merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic
endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds
up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are
unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less
unreal than vulgarity.
The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been
often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in _Vanity Fair_
itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without God
in the world." There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he
could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature
(which he never was) if he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the
other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any
expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people
are married in church as well as at the _mairie_, and I remember one
casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to mass, the whole
spiritual region--religious, theological, ecclesiastical, and what
not--is left blank. I do not remember so much as a _curé_ figuring
personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting that Paul
was born in 1794, and therefore passed his earliest childhood in the
time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in
France--when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever
hearing the name of God, except perhaps in phrases like _pardieu_ or
_parbleu_. It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or
draw inferences; I merely indicate the fact.
Another fact--perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs
stating--is that Paul de Kock is not exactly the person to "take a
course of," unless under such conditions as those under which Mr.
Carlyle took a course of a far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one
regrets to remember) very ungrateful for the good it did him. He is
(what some of his too critical countrymen have so falsely called Dumas)
a mere _amuseur_, and his amusement is somewhat lacking in variety.
Nevertheless, few critical readers[59] of the present history will, I
think, consider the space given to him here as wasted. He was a really
powerful schoolmaster to bring the popular novel into still further
popularity; and he made a distinct advance upon such persons as
Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil--upon the former in comparative
decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the latter in getting
close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the
_furniture_ of his novels--the scene-painting, property-arranging, and
general staging. This has been most unfairly assigned to Balzac as
originator, not merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention
our own men, Paul began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of
those curious efforts, half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal
with later, and nearly two decades before _Les Chouans_. And, horrifying
as the statement may be to some, I venture to say that his mere _mise en
scène_ is sometimes, if not always, better than Balzac's own, though he
may be to that younger contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard
Street in respect of plot, character, thought, conversation, and all the
higher elements, as they are commonly taken to be, of the novel.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The minors before 1830.]
It has been said that the filling-up of this chapter, as to the rank and
file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been a matter of some difficulty
in the peculiar circumstances of the case. I have, however, been enabled
to read, for the first time or afresh, examples not merely of those
writers who have preserved any notoriety, but of some who have not, and
to assure myself on fair grounds that I need not wait for further
exploration. The authors now to be dealt with have already been named.
But I may add another novelist on the very eve of 1830, Auguste Ricard,
whose name I never saw in any history of literature, but whose work fell
almost by accident into my hands, and seems worth taking as "pot-luck."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mme. de Montolieu--_Caroline de Lichtfield_.]
Isabelle de Montolieu--a Swiss by birth but a French-woman by
extraction, and Madame de Crousaz by her first marriage--was a friend of
Gibbon's friend Georges Deyverdun, and indeed of Gibbon himself, who,
she says, actually offered to father her novel. Odd as this seems, there
really is in _Caroline de Lichtfield_[60] not merely something which
distinguishes it from the ordinary "sensibility" tale of its time (it
was first printed at Lausanne in 1786), but a kind of crispness of
thought now and then which sometimes does suggest Gibbon, in something
the same way as that in which Fanny Burney suggests Johnson. This is
indeed mixed with a certain amount of mere "sensibility" jargon,[61] as
when a lover, making a surprisingly honest confession to his beloved,
observes that he is going "to destroy those sentiments which had made
him forget how unworthy he was of them," or when the lady (who has been
quite guiltless, and has at last fallen in love with her own husband)
tells this latter of her weakness in these very engaging words: "Yes! I
did love Lindorf; _at least I think I recognise some relation between
the sentiments I had for him and those that I feel at present_!"
[Sidenote: Its advance on "Sensibility."]
A kind of affection was avowed in the last volume for the "Phoebus" of
the "heroics," and something similar may be confessed for this "Jupiter
Pluvius," this mixture of tears and stateliness, in the Sentimentalists.
But Madame de Montolieu has emerged from the most _larmoyante_ kind of
"sensible" comedy. If her book had been cut a little shorter, and if
(which can be easily done by the reader) the eccentric survival of a
_histoire_, appended instead of episodically inserted, were lopped off,
_Caroline de Lichtfield_ would not be a bad story. The heroine, having
lost her mother, has been brought up to the age of fifteen by an amiable
canoness, who (to speak rather Hibernically) ought to have been her
mother but wasn't, because the actual mother was so much richer. She
bears no malice, however, even to the father who, well preserved in
looks, manners, and selfishness, is Great Chamberlain to Frederick the
Great.
That very unsacred majesty has another favourite, a certain Count von
Walstein, who is ambassador of Prussia at St. Petersburg. It pleases
Frederick, and of course his chamberlain, that Caroline, young as she
is, shall marry Walstein. As the girl is told that her intended is not
more than thirty, and knows his position (she has, naturally, been
brought up without the slightest idea of choosing for herself), she is
not displeased. She will be a countess and an ambassadress; she will
have infinite jewels; her husband will probably be handsome and
agreeable; he will certainly dance with her, and may very possibly not
object to joining in innocent sports like butterfly-catching. So she
sets off to Berlin quite cheerfully, and the meeting takes place. Alas!
the count is a "civil count" (as Beatrice says) enough, but he is the
reverse of handsome and charming. He has only one eye; he has a huge
scar on his cheek; a wig (men, remember, were beginning to "wear their
own hair"), a bent figure, and a leaden complexion. Caroline, promptly
and not unnaturally, "screams and disappears like lightning." Nor can
any way be found out of this extremely awkward situation. The count (who
is a thoroughly good fellow) would give Caroline up, though he has
taken a great fancy to her, and even the selfish Lichtfield tries (or
_says_ he tries) to alter his master's determination. But Frederick of
course persists, and with a peculiarly Frederician enjoyment in
conferring an ostensible honour which is in reality a punishment, sees
the marriage ceremony carried out under his own eye. Caroline, however,
exemplifies in combination certain old adages to the effect that there
is "No will, no wit like a woman's." She submits quite decently in
public, but immediately after the ceremony writes a letter[62] to her
husband (whose character she has partly, though imperfectly, gauged)
requesting permission to retire to the canoness till she is a little
older, under a covert but quite clearly intelligible threat of suicide
in case of refusal. There are of course difficulties, but the count,
like a man and a gentleman, consents at once; the father, _bon gré mal
gré_, has to do so, and the King, a tyrant who has had his way, gives a
sulky and qualified acquiescence. What follows need only be very rapidly
sketched. After a little time Caroline sees, at her old-new home, an
engaging young man, a Herr von Lindorf; and matters, though she is quite
virtuous, are going far when she receives an enormous epistle[62] from
her lover, confessing that he himself is the author of her husband's
disfigurement (under circumstances discreditable to himself and
creditable to Walstein), enclosing, too, a very handsome portrait of the
count _as he was_, and but for this disfigurement might be still. What
happens then nobody ought to need, or if he does he does not deserve, to
be told. There is no greatness about this book, but to any one who has
an eye for consequences it will probably seem to have some future in it.
It shows the breaking of the Sensibility mould and the running of the
materials into a new pattern as early as 1786. In 1886 M. Feuillet or M.
Theuriet would of course have clothed the story-skeleton differently,
but one can quite imagine either making use of a skeleton by no means
much altered. M. Rod would have given it an unhappy ending, but one can
see it in his form likewise.[63]
[Sidenote: Madame de Genlis _iterum_.]
Of Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, it were tempting to say a
good deal personally if we did biographies here when they can easily be
found elsewhere. How she became a canoness at six years old, and shortly
afterwards had for her ordinary dress (with something supplementary, one
hopes) the costume of a Cupid, including quiver and wings; how she
combined the offices of governess to the Orleans children and mistress
to their father; how she also combined the voluptuousness and the
philanthropy of her century by taking baths of milk and afterwards
giving that milk to the poor;[64] how, rather late in life, she attained
the very Crown-Imperial of governess-ship in being chosen by Napoleon to
teach him and his Court how to behave; and how she wrote infinite
books--many of them taking the form of fiction--on education, history,
religion, everything, can only be summarised. The last item of the
summary alone concerns us, and that must be dealt with summarily too.
_Mlle. de Clermont_--a sort of historico-"sensible" story in style, and
evidently imitated from _La Princesse de Clèves_--is about the best
thing she did as literature; but we dealt with that in the last
volume[65] among its congeners. In my youth all girls and some boys knew
_Adèle et Théodore_ and _Les Veillées du Château_. From a later book,
_Les Battuécas_, George Sand is said to have said that she learnt
Socialism: and the fact is that Stéphanie Félicité had seen so much,
felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick
feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of
crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to
complete my idea of her were _Le Comte_ _de Corke_ and _Les Chevaliers
du Cygne_, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their
titles. The first is a collection of short tales, the title-piece
inspired and prefaced by an account of the Boyle family, and all rather
like a duller and more spun-out Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to
Marmontel accounting for this. The concluding stories of each volume,
"Les Amants sans Amour" and "Sanclair," are about the best. _Les
Chevaliers du Cygne_ is a book likely to stir up the Old Adam in some
persons. It was, for some mysterious reason, intended as a sort of
appendix--for "grown-ups"--to the _Veillées du Château_, and is supposed
to have incorporated parabolically many of the lessons of the French
Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three volumes and
eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the Empress Irene, and
the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is dead at Roncevaux),
and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the authoress, who
was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually
consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest
flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about
the book, and the whole treatment is in the _pre_-historical-novel
style. Indeed the writer of the _Veillées_ was altogether of the
_veille_--the day just expired--or of the transitional and
half-understood present--never of the past seen in some perspective, of
the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.
[Sidenote: The minor popular novel--Ducray-Duminil--_Le Petit
Carilloneur_.]
The batch of books into which we are now going to dip does not represent
the height of society and the interests of education like Madame de
Genlis; nor high society again and at least strivings after the new day,
like the noble author of the _Solitaire_ who will follow them. They are,
in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and
Paul de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they
ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very
considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The
most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's
_Lolotte et Fanfan_, escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and
careful study of the four volumes of his _Petit Carillonneur_ (1819)
has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not
merely _Lolotte_ (the second title of which is _Histoire de Deux Enfants
abandonnés dans une île déserte_), but _Victor ou L'Enfant de la Forêt_,
_Cælina ou L'Enfant du Mystère_, _Jules ou le Toit paternel_, or any
other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.
The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for
Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun _des enfants_; he writes
rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books)
loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first
hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously
tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men, and left to the chances of
divine and human assistance, is made to earn his living by
framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a
_corvée_. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high
division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no
inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies,
and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out
whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose
father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command
of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts--violent
and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always
trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain
Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by
Mr. Thomas Day)--beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to
trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of
underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent
musician; an excellent curé; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de
Surval, who, close to the end of the book, hides her trouble in the
bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the
aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the
historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of
Pigault as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing
with them are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of
general novel-development and admitting English examples, we may assign
to its author a place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the _Family Herald_:
confining ourselves to French only, he has again, like Pigault,
something of the credit of making a new start. He may appeal to the
taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the same sort of thing as "a
vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable of providing
general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.
[Sidenote: V. Ducange.]
[Sidenote: _L'Artiste et le Soldat._]