French profiles

UBRAKt

ONlVERS.Tt Of
CAUFORNtA

SAN DIEGO

FRENCH PROFILES

Other Works by Mr. Edmund Gosse

On Viol and FluU
Flrdausi in Exile
King Erik
In Rusiet and Silver

Hypolympia

IN PROSE
Northern Studies

Life of Gray

Seventeenth Century Studies

Life of Congreve

A History of Eighteenth Century Literature

A Short History of Modern English Literature

Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S.

Gossip in a Library

The Secret of Narcisse

Questions at Issue

Critical Kit-Kats

Life and Letters of John Donne
Life of Jeremy "Taylor

FRENCH PROFILES

BY

EDMUND GOSSE

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

MCMV

Printed in Great Britain

All rights reserved

To

My Friend

SIR ALFRED BATEMAN, K.C.M.G.

In Memory of

The Talks of Many Tears

I Affectionately Inscribe

these Studies

Digitized by the Internet Arciiive

in 2007 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/frenchprofilesOOgossiala

PREFACE

It is characteristic of native criticism that it con-
templates, or should contemplate, the products of
native literature from the front ; that it looks at
them, in other words, from a direct and complete
point of view. Foreign criticism must not pretend
to do this ; unless it is satisfied to be a mere echo
or repetition, its point of view must be incomplete
and indirect, must be that of one who paints a
face in profile. In preparing the following side-
views of some curious figures in modern French
literature, I have attempted to keep two aims
prominently before me. I have tried to preserve
that attitude of sympathy, of general comprehen-
sion, for the lack of which some English criticism
of foreign authors has been valueless, because
proceeding from a point so far out of focus as to
make its whole presentation false ; and yet I have
remembered that it is a foreigner who takes the
portrait, and that he takes it for a foreign audience,
and not for a native one.

What I have sought in every case to do is to
give an impression of the figure before me which

vHI PREFACE

shall be in general harmony with the tradition of
French criticism, but at the same time to preserve
that independence which is the right of a foreign
observer, and to illustrate the peculiarities of my
subject by references to English poetry and prose.

It should not be difficult to carry out this
scheme of portraiture in the case of authors whose
work is finished. But the study of contemporary
writers, also, is of great interest, and must not
be neglected, although its results are incomplete.
Several of the authors who are treated here are
still alive, and some are younger than myself. It
is highly probable that all of these will, in the
development of their genius, make some new
advance which may render obsolete what the
most careful criticism has said about them up to
the present time. In these living cases, there-
fore, it seems more helpful to consider certain
books — to take snapshots, as it were, at the
authors in the course of their progress — than to
attempt a summing-up of what is still fortunately
undefined. Of the art with which this can be
done, and the permanent value of that art, the
French criticism of our generation has given
admirable proof.

The last chapter in this book is not in any
sense a profile, but the writer trusts that he will
be forgiven for introducing it here. Last winter
he had the honour of being invited to Paris to

PREFACE ix

deliver an address before the Societe des Con-
ferences. The Committee of that Society, consist-
ing of MM. Ferdinand Bruneti^re, Edouard Rod
and Gaston Deschamps, in proposing the subject
of the address, asked that it should be delivered in
English. In an admirable French translation,
made by my accomplished friend, M. Henry D.
Davray, it was afterwards published in the Mercure
de France and then as a separate brochure, but the
English text is now printed for the first time.

Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has been so kind
as to read the proofs of this volume, and I am
indebted to his rare acquaintance with Continental
literature for many valuable corrections and
suggestions. My thanks are due to the pro-
prietors of the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary
Review, the International Quarterly Review, the
Saturday Review and the Daily Chronicle, for per-
mission to reprint what originally appeared in
their pages. I regret that in one other case,
that of the useful and unique European review,
Cosmopolis, there is no one left who can receive
this acknowledgment.

ARGELks-GAZOST,
September 1904.

CONTENTS

Page

Preface

vii

Alfred de Vigny ....

I

Mademoiselle A'tsse ....

35

A Nun's Love-Letters

68

Barbey W Aurevilly ....

92

Alphonse Daudet ....

108

The Short Stories of Zola .

129

Ferdinand Fabre ....

153

The Irony of M. Anatole France

189

Pierre Loti .....

202

Some Recent Books of M. Paul Bourget

239

M. Rene Ba%in ....

266

M. Henri de Regnier . .

292

Four Poets : —

Stephane Mallarme

305

M. Emile Verhaeren .

312

Albert Samain ....

318

M. Paul Fort ....

324

The Influence of France upon English Poetry

330

Index ......

365

FRENCH PROFILES

ALFRED DE VIGNY

The reputation of Alfred de Vigny has endured
extraordinary vicissitudes in France. After having
taken his place as the precursor of French ro-
mantic poetry and as one of the most admired of
its proficients, he withdrew from among his noisier
and more copious contemporaries into that " ivory
tower " of reverie which is the one commonplace
of criticism regarding him. He died in as deep a
retirement as if his body had lain in the shepherd's
hut on wheels upon the open moorland, which he
took as the symbol of his isolation. He had long
been neglected, he was almost forgotten, when the
publication of his posthumous poems — a handful
of unflawed amethysts and sapphires — revived his
fame among the enlightened. But the Second
Empire was a period deeply unfavourable to such
contemplation as the writings of Vigny demand.
He sank a second time into semi-oblivion ; he
became a curiosity of criticism, a hunting-ground
for anthology-makers. Within the last ten years,
however, a marked revolution of taste has occurred
in France. The supremacy of Victor Hugo has

A

2 FRENCH PROFILES

been, if not questioned, since it is above serious
attack, at least mitigated. Other poets have re-
covered from their obscurity ; Lamartine, who had
been quenched, shines like a lamp relighted ; and,
above all, the pure and brilliant and profoundly
original genius of Alfred de Vigny now takes, for
the first time, its proper place as one of the main
illuminating forces of the nineteenth century. It
was not until about ninety years after this poet's
birth that it became clearly recognised that he is
one of the most important of all the great poets of
France.

The revival of admiration for Vigny has not yet
spread to England, where he is perhaps less known
than any other French writer of the first class.
This is the more to be regretted because he did
not, in the brief day of his early glory, contrive to
attract many hearers outside his own country. It
is not merely regrettable, moreover, it is curiously
unjust, because Vigny is of all the great French
poets the one who has assimilated most of the
English spirit, and has been influenced most by
English poetry. Andr6 Ch^nier read Pope and
Thomson and the Faerie Queen but he detested
the Anglo-Saxon spirit. Alfred de Vigny, on the
other hand, delighted in it ; he was a convinced
Anglophil, and the writers whom he resembles, in
his sublime isolation from the tradition of his own
country, are Wordsworth and Shelley, Matthew
Arnold and Leopardi. He has much of the spirit
of Dante and of the attitude of Milton. Wholly
independent as he is, one of the most unattached
of writers, it is impossible not to feel in him a

t

ALFRED DE VIGNY 3

certain Anglo-Italian gravity and intensity, a cer-
tain reserve and resignation in the face of human
suffering, which distinguish him from all other
French writers of eminence. It is not from any
of Alfred de Vigny's great contemporaries that life
would have extracted that last cry in the desert : —

" Seul le silence est grand : tout le teste est faiblesse,"

nor should we look to them for the ambiguous
device *' Parfaite illusion — R6alit6 parfaite." The
other poets of France have been picturesque,
abundant, gregarious, vehement ; Alfred de Vigny
was not of their class, but we can easily conceive
him among those who, in the Cumberland of
a hundred years ago, were murmuring by the
running brooks a music sweeter than their own.

One word of warning may not be out of place.
If Alfred de Vigny was known to English readers
of a past generation it was mainly through a
brilliant study by Sainte-Beuve in his Nouveaux
Lundis. This was composed very shortly after
the death of Vigny, and, in spite of its excessive
critical cleverness, it deserves very little commen-
dation. Sainte-Beuve, who had been more or less
intimate with Vigny forty years before, had formed
a strange jealousy of him, and in this essay his
perfidy runs riot. It is Sainte-Beuve who calls
the poet of Les Desitnees a " beautiful angel
who had been drinking vinegar," and the modern
reader needs a strong caution against the malice
and raillery of the quondam friend who was so
patient and who forgot nothing.

4 FRENCH PROFILES

I

An image of the youthful Alfred de Vigny is
preserved for us in the charming portrait of the
Carnavalet Museum. Here he smiles at us out of
gentle blue eyes, and under copious yellow curls,
candid, dreamy, almost childlike in his magnificent
scarlet and gold uniform of the King's Musketeers,
This portrait was painted in 1815, when the sub-
ject of it was just eighteen, yet had already served
in the army for a year. Alfred de Vigny was born
at Leches, on March 27, 1797. Aristocrats and
of families wholly military, his father and mother
had been thrown into prison during the Terror,
had escaped with their lives, and had concealed
themselves after Thermidor, in the romantic little
town of the Touraine. The childhood of the poet
was not particularly interesting ; what is known
about it is recorded in M. S^che's recent volume 1
and elsewhere. But there effervesced in his young
soul a burning ambition for arms, and before he
was seventeen, he contrived to leave school and
enter a squadron of the Gendarmes Rouges. He
was full of military pride in his early life, and until
his illusions overcame him he hardly knew whether
to be more vain of the laurel or of the sword. He
says : —

" J'ai mis sur le cimier dore du gentilhomme
Une plume de fer qui n'est pas sans beautd ;
J'ai fait illustre un nom qu'on m'a transmis sans gloire,"

for he knew that the deeds of that " petite nob-

^ L6on Sech^, Alfred de Vigny et son Temps, Paris, Felix Juven, 1902.

ALFRED DE VIGNY 5

lebse" from which he sprang were excellent, but
not magnificent.

No one seems to have discovered under what
auspices he began to write verses. There appear
in his works two idyls, La Dryade and Syme'tha,
which are marked as " written in 1815."
Sainte-Beuve, with curious coarseness, after
Vigny's death, accused him in so many terms
of having antedated these pieces by five years in
order to escape the reproach of having imitated
Andre Chenier, whose poems were first collected
posthumously in 18 19. Such a charge is contrary
to everything we know of the upright and chival-
rous character of Vigny. That the influence of
Chenier is strong on these verses is unquestionable.
But Sainte-Beuve should not have forgotten that
the eclogues of Chenier were quoted by Chateau-
briand in a note to the G^nie du Christianisme in
1802, and that this was quite enough to start the
youthful talent of Vigny. From this time forth,
no attack can be made on the originality of the
poet, so far as all French influences are concerned.
The next piece of his which we possess, La Dame
Romainef is dated 1817 ; this and Le Baly of
18 18, show the attraction which Byron had for
him. In these verses the romantic school of
French poetry made its earliest appeal to the
public, and in 1819 Alfred de Vigny's friendship
with the youthful Victor Hugo began.

It was in 1822 that a little volume of the highest
historical importance was issued, without the
name of its author, and under the modest title
of Poemes. It was divided into three parts,

6 FRENCH PROFILES

Antiques, Judaiques, and Modernes, and the second
of these sections contained one poem which
can still be read with undiluted pleasure. This
is the exquisite lyrical narrative entitled La Fille
de Jephte, which had been composed in 1820.
To realise what were the merits of Alfred de
Vigny as a precursor, we have but to compare
this faultless Biblical elegy with anything of the
kind written up to that date by a French poet,
even though his name was Hugo.

Meanwhile the life of Vigny was a picturesque
and melancholy one. A certain impression of its
features may be gathered, incidentally, from the
pages of the Grandeur et Servitude Militaires, al-
though that was written long afterwards. He was
a soldier from his seventeenth to his thirtieth year,
and many of his best poems were written by
lamplight, in the corner of a tent, as the young
lieutenant lay on his elbow, waiting for the tuck
of drum. He was long in garrison with the Royal
Foot Guards at Vincennfes, and thence he could
slip in to Paris, meet the other budding poets at
the rooms of Nodier, and recite verses with Emile
Deschamps and Victor Hugo. But in 1823 he
was definitely torn from Paris. The Spanish War
took his regiment to the Pyrenean frontier and it
was while in camp, close to Roncevaux and Fuent-
arrabia, that he seems to have heard, one knows
not how, of the newly discovered wonders of the
Chanson de Roland, which was still unknown save
to a few English scholars ; the result was that
he wrote that enchanting poem, Le Cor. If the
student is challenged, as he sometimes is, to name

ALFRED DE VIGNY 7

a lyric in the French language which has the
irresistible magic and melody of the best pieces of
Coleridge or Keats, that fairy music which is the
peculiar birthright of England, he cannot do
better than to quote, almost at random, from Le
Cor : —

" Sur le plus haut des monts s'arretent les chevaux ;
L'^cume les blanchit ; sous leurs pieds, Roncevaux
Des feux mourants du jour k peine se colore.
A I'horizon lointain fuit I'etendard du More.

* Turpin, n'as-tu rien vu dans le fond du torrent ?'
' J'y vols deux chevaliers ; I'un mort, I'autre expirant.
Tous deux sont ecrases sous une roche noire :
Le plus fort, dans sa main, dleve un Cor d'ivoire,
Son ime en s'exhalant nous appela deux fois.'

Dieu I que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois."

Begun at Roncevaux in 1823, Le Cor was
finished at Pau in 1825. At the former date,
Alfred de Vigny was slightly in love with the
fascinating Delphine Gay, and some verses, re-
cently given to the world, lead to the belief that
he failed to propose to her because she ^Haughed too
loudly." Already the melancholy and distinguished
sobriety of manner which was to be the mark of
Alfred de Vigny had begun to settle upon him.
Already he shrank from noise, from levity, from
hollow and reverberating enthusiasm. His regi-
ment was sent to Strasburg and he became a
captain. Returning to the Pyrenees, he wrote
Le Deluge and Dolorida ; in the Vosges he
composed the first draft of £lloa, which he
called Satan. In the second edition of his
PoemeSf there were included a number of pieces

8 FRENCH PROFILES

vastly superior to those previously published, and
Alfred de Vigny boldly claimed for himself that
distinction as a precursor, which was long denied
to him, and which is now again universally con-
ceded. He wrote that "the only merit of these
poems," — it was not their only or their greatest
merit, but it was a distinction, — " c'est d'avoir
devance en France toutes celles de ce genre."
That was absolutely true.

When we reflect that the earliest poems of
Victor Hugo which display his characteristic
talent, such as Le Sylphe and La Grand'mere,
belong to 1823, the originality of Mo'tse, which
was written in 1822, is extraordinary. In spite
of all that has been published since, this poem
may still be read with complete pleasure ; there
are few narratives in the French language more
distinguished, more uplifted. Moses stands at
sunset on the brow of Nebo ; the land of Canaan
lies spread at his feet. He gazes at it with long-
ing and despair, and then he turns to climb the
mountain. Amid the hymns of Israel he ascends
into the clouds, and in the luminous obscurity he
speaks with God. In a majestic soliloquy he ex-
patiates on the illusions of his solitary greatness,
and on the disappointment of his finding his own
life more isolated and more arid the vaster his
destinies become. The angels, themselves, envy
his position : —

" Vos anges sont jaloux et m'admirent entre eux,
Et cependant, Seigneur, je ne suis pas heureux ;
Vous m'avez fait vieillir puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre."

ALFRED DE VIGNY 9

Here we have at length the master accent of
Alfred de Vigny, that which was to be the central
note of his poetry, a conception of the sublimity
of man, who, having tasted of the water of
life, sinks back " dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing."
Nothing could be more poignant than the
melodious reverie of Moses : —

" J'ai vu I'amour s'eteindre et I'amitie tarir ;
Les vierges se voilaient et craignaient de mourir.
M'enveloppant alors de la colonne noire,
J'ai marche devant tous, triste et seul dans ma gloire,
Et j'ai dit dans mon coeur : ' Que vouloir a present ?'
Pour dormir sur un sein mon front est trop pesant,
Ma main laisse I'effroi sur la main qu'elle touche,
L'orage est dans ma voix, I'dclair est sur ma bouche ;
Aussi, loin de m'aimer, voili qu'ils tremblent tous,
Et, quand j'ouvre les bras, on tombe k mes genoux.
O Seigneur ! j'ai vdcu puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre ! "

On the morning when these enchanting verses
were composed, poetry was full-grown again in
France, reborn after the long burial of the eigh-
teenth century.

The processes of the poet's mind are still better
observed in Le Deluge, a. less perfect poem. All
was serene and splendid in the primeval world,

" Et la beaute du Monde attestait son enfance,"

but there was one blot on the terrestrial paradise,
for " I'Homme etait m^chant." In consequence of
a secret warning, Noah builds the ark, and enters
it with his family. One of his descendants,
however, the young Sara, refuses to take shelter
in it, because she has an appointment to meet

lo FRENCH PROFILES

Emmanuel, her angel lover, on Mount Arar.
The deluge arrives ; Sara calls in vain on her
supernatural protector, and, climbing far up the
peak, is the last of mortals to be submerged. The
violence of the flood is rather grotesquely described ;
the succeeding calm is, on the other hand, of the
purest Vigny : —

" La vague ^tait paisible, et moUe et cadencde,
En berceaux de cristal moUement balancee ;
Les vents, sans resistance, dtaient silencieux ;
La foudre, sans echos, expirait dans les cieux ;
Les cieux devenaient purs, et, reflechis dans I'onde,
Teignaient d'un azur clair Timmensite profonde."

Written in the Pyrenees in 1823, Le Deluge exempli-
fies the close attention which Alfred de Vigny paid
to English literature, and particularly to Byron.
In Moise the sole influences discoverable are those
of the Bible and Milton ; Le Deluge shows that
the French poet had just been reading Heaven
and Earth. This drama was not published until
January 1823, a week after Moore's Loves of
the Angels, which also was already exercising a
fascination over the mind of Vigny. The prompti-
tude with which he transferred these elements into
his own language is very remarkable, and has never,
I think, been noted.

Still more observable are these English influences
in &loa, which was written in the spring of 1824.
This is the romance of pity, tenderness, and sacri-
fice, of vain self-sacrifice and of pity without hands
to help. It was received by the young writers of its
own country with a frenzy of admiration. In La
Muse Fran^aise Victor Hugo reviewed it in terms

ALFRED DE VIGNY ii

of redundant eulogy. A little later, and when so
much more of a brilliant character had been
published, Gautier styled £loa " the most beautiful
and perhaps the most perfect poem in the French
language." As a specimen of idealistic religious
romanticism it will always be a classic and will
always be read with pleasure ; but time has
somewhat tarnished its sentimental beauty. It
is another variant of The Loves of the Angels f
but treated in a far purer and more ethereal spirit
than that of Moore or Byron.

It would be difficult to point to a more delicate
example of the school of sensibility than Eloa. To
submit one's self without reserve to its pellucid
charm is like gazing into the depths of an ame-
thyst. The subject is sentimental in the highest
degree ; Eloa is an angel, who, in her blissful
state, hears of the agony of Satan, and is drawn
by curiosity and pity to descend into his sphere.
Her compassion and her imprudence are rewarded
by her falling passionately in love with the stricken
archangel, and resigning herself to his baneful
force. Brought face to face with his crimes, she
resists him, but the wily fiend melts into hypo-
critical tears, and Eloa sinks into his arms.
Wrapped in a flowing cloud they pass together
down to Hell, and a chorus of faithful seraphim,
winging their way back to Paradise, overhear this
latest and fatal dialogue: —

" ' Oil me conduisez-vous, bel ange ? ' ' Viens toujours.'
— * Que votre voix est triste, et quel sombre discours !
N'est-ce pas ifcloa qui soul^ve ta chaine ?
J'ai cru t'avoir sauve.' ' Non ! c'est moi qui t'entraine.'

12 FRENCH PROFILES

— * Si nous sommes unis, peu m'importe en quel lieu !

Nomme-moi done encore ou ta soeur ou ton dieu ! '

— ' J'enl^ve mon esclave et je tiens ma victime.'

— 'Tu paraissais si bon ! Oh ! qu'ai-je fait ? ' ' Un crime.

— ' Seras-tu plus heureux ? du moins, es-tu content ? '

— ' Plus triste que jamais.' — ' Qui done est-tu ? ' ' Satan.' "

Taste changes, and ^loa has too much the
appearance, to our eyes, of a wax-work. But
nothing can prevent our appreciation of the
magnificent verses in which it is written. The
design and scheme of colour may be those of Ary
Scheffer, the execution is worthy of Raphael.

Before we cease to examine these early writings,
however, we must spare a moment — though only
a moment — to the consideration of a work which
gave Vigny the popular celebrity which served to
introduce his verses to a wider public. Early in
1826 he was presented to Sir Walter Scott in
Paris, and, fired with Anglomaniac ambition, he
immediately sat down to write a French Waverley
novel. The result was Cinq-Mars, long the most
successful of all his writings, although not the
best. It is a story of the time of Louis XIII. and
of Cardinal Richelieu ; it deals with all the court
intrigues which led up to the horrible assassina-
tion of De Thou and of Henri d'Effiat, Marquis
de Cinq- Mars. Anne of Austria is a foremost
figure on the scene of it. Cinq-Mars, a very care-
ful study in the manner of Walter Scott, was
afterwards enriched by notes and historical
apparatus, and by an essay " On Truth in Art,"
written in 1827. It has passed through countless
editions, but it is overfull of details, the plot drags.

ALFRED DE VIGNY 13

and the reader must be simple to find it an excit-
ing romance. It is interesting to notice in it the
Anglophil tendencies of its author betrayed in
quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron,
and the restricted circle of his friends by frequent
introduction of the names of Delphine Gay,
Soumet, Nodier, Lammenais. Cinq -Mars will
always be remembered as the earliest French
romantic novel of the historical order.

The marriage of Alfred de Vigny, the facts and
even the date of which have been persistently
misreported by his biographers — even by M.
Pal^ologue — took place, as M. S6ch6 has proved,
at Pau, on February 3, 1825. He married Miss
Lydia Bunbury, the daughter of Sir Edward
Bunbury, a soldier and politician not without
eminence in his day. She was twenty-six years
of age, of a " majestic beauty " which soon dis-
appeared under the attacks of ill-health, and
everything about her gratified the excessive Anglo-
mania of the poet. She could not talk French
with ease, and curiously enough when she had
for many years been the Comtesse Alfred de
Vigny, it was observed that she still spoke broken
French with a strong English accent. It appears
that this was positively agreeable to the poet, who
had a little while before written that his only
penates were his Bible and " a few English engrav-
ings," and whose conversation ran incessantly on
Byron, Southey, Moore, and Scott. It is certain
that some French critics have found it hard to
forgive the intensity of Vigny's early love of all
things English.

14 FRENCH PROFILES

French writers have laboured to prove that the
marriage of Alfred de Vigny was an unhappy one.
It was certainly both anomalous and unfortunate,
but there is no need to exaggerate its misfortunes.
Lydia Bunbury appears to have been limited in
intelligence and sympathy, and bad health gradually
made her fretful. Yet there exists no evidence
that she ever lost her liking for her husband or
ceased to be soothed by his presence. He, for
his part, had never loved when he proposed to
Lydia Bunbury, and their relations continued to
be as phlegmatic on the one side as on the other.
For four or five years they lived together in sober
friendship, Lydia sinking deeper and deeper into
the condition of a chronic invalid. She was then
nursed and tended by her husband with the
tenderest assiduity and patience, and in later
years he was a constant visitor at her sofa. She
had exchanged a husband for a nurse, and doubt-
less renunciation would have been the greater
part for Vigny also to play. But over his calm
existence love now, for the first and only time,
swept like a whirlwind of fire. In the tumult of
this passion it is to his credit that he never forgot
to be patient with and solicitous about the helpless
invalid at home. If morality is offended, let this
at least be recollected, that Lydia de Vigny knew
all, and expressed no murmur which has been
recorded.

The first period of Alfred de Vigny's life closed
in 1827, when he left the army, on the pretext of
health. He travelled in England with his wife,
and it was at Dieppe, on a return journey in 1828,

ALFRED DE VIGNY 15

that he wrote the most splendid of his few lyrical
poems, La Fre'gate ' La Serieuse.' This ode is too
long for its interest, but contains stanzas that
have never been surpassed for brilliance, as for
example : —

" Comme un dauphin elle saute,

Elle plonge comme lui
Dans la mer profonde et haute

Ou le feu Saint-Elme a lui.
Le feu serpente avec grace ;
Du gouvernail qu'il embrasse
II marque longtemps la trace,

Et Ton dirait un Eclair
Qui, n'ayant pu nous atteindre,
Dans les vagues va s'eteindre,
Mais ne cesse de les teindre

Du prisme enflammd de I'air."

II

It is remarkable to notice how many English
influences the nature of Alfred de Vigny obeyed.
In May, 1828, the performances of Edmund Kean
in Paris stirred his imagination to its depths. He
immediately plunged himself into a fresh study of
Shakespeare, and still further exercised his fancy
by repeated experiences of the magic of Mrs.
Siddons during a long visit he paid to London.
The result was soon apparent in his attempts to
render Shakespeare vocal to the French, who had
welcomed Kean's " Othello " with " un vulgaire le
plus profane que jamais I'ignorance parisienne ait
d6chain6 dans une salle de spectacle" (May 17,
1828). Vigny translated The Merchant of Venice,
Romeo and Juliet, and, above all, Othello, which

i6 FRENCH PROFILES

was acted in October, 1829, amid the plaudits
of the whole romantic camp of Paris. That
night Vigny, already extremely admired within
a limited circle, became universally famous, and
a dangerous rival to Victor Hugo, with whose
Hemani and Marion de Lorme, moreover, com-
parison soon grew inevitable.

But Alfred de Vigny cared little for the jealousies
of the Cenacle. He was now absorbed by a very
different passion. It appears to have been on May
30, 1829,^ that, after a performance of Casimir
Delavigne's romantic tragedy of Marino Faliero,
Vigny was presented to the actress, Marie Dorval.
This remarkable woman of genius had been born
in 1798, had shown from the age of four years a
prodigious talent for the stage, had made her
debut in Paris in 1818, and had been a universal
favourite since 1822. She was, therefore, neither
very young nor very new when she passed across
the path of Alfred de Vigny with such fiery results.
She was highly practised in the arts of love, and
he a timid and fastidious novice. It may even be
said, without too great a paradox, that the romance
of £lloa was now enacted in real life, with the parts
reversed, for the poet was the candid angel, drawn
to his fall by pity, curiosity, and tenderness, while
Madame Dorval was the formidable and fatal demon
who dragged him down. " Demon," however, is
far too harsh a word to employ, even in jest, for
this tremulous and expansive woman, all emotion
and undisciplined ardour. M. S6ch6 has put the
position very well before us : " When, at the age

^ See M. L^on S&he's monograph, pp. 53-56.

ALFRED DE VIGNY 17

of thirty-two, she saw kneeling at her feet this
gentleman of ancient lineage, his charming face
framed in his blond and curly hair and delicately
lighted up by the tender azure of his eyes, she
experienced a sentiment she had never felt before,
as though a cup of cold well-water had been lifted
to her burning lips."

Reserved, irreproachable, by temperament ob-
scure and chilly, it was long before Alfred de
Vigny succumbed to the tumult of the senses.
For a long time the animated and extravagant
actress was dazzled by the mystical adoration, the
respectful and solemn worship of her new admirer.
She was accustomed to the rough way of the world,
but she had never been loved like this before. She
became hypnotised at last by the gaze of Alfred de
Vigny fixed upon her in what Sainte-Beuve has
called "a perpetual seraphic hallucination." A
transformation appeared to come over herself.
She fell in love with Vigny as completely as the
poet had with her, and she became, in virtue of
the transcendent ductility of her temperament as
an actress, a temporary copy of himself. She
was all reverie, all abstract devotion, and the
strange pair floated through the stormy life of
Paris, a marvel to all beholders, in a discreet and
delicate rapture, as a poet with his muse, as a
nun with her brother. This ecstatic relation
continued until 183 1, and during these years
Alfred de Vigny scarcely wrote anything in prose
or verse, entirely supported by the exquisite senti-
ment of his attachment. He fulfilled the dream
of Pascal, "Tant plus le chemin est long dans

B

i8 FRENCH PROFILES

I'amour, tant plus un esprit d61icat sent de
plaisir."

The circumstances under which this seraphic
and mystical relation came to an end have but
recently beeen made public. The wonder is that
Madame Dorval, so romantic, violent, and suscep-
tible, should have been willing so long to preserve
such an idyllic or even angelic reserve. George
Sand, who saw her at this time, selects other adjec-
tives for her, " Oh ! naive et passionn^e, et jeune et
suave, et tremblante et terrible." But she deter-
mined at last to play the comedy of renunciation
no longer, and Vigny's subtlety and platonism
were burned up like grass in the flame of her
seduction. He was Eloa, as I have said ; she was
the tenebrous and sinister archangel, and he sank
in the ecstatic crisis of her will. For the next few
years, Mme. Dorval possessed the life of the poet,
swayed his instincts, inspired his intellect. His
genius enjoyed a new birth in her ; she brought
about a palingenesis of his talent, and during this
period he produced some of the most powerful
and the most solid of his works.

Under the influence of these novel and violent
emotions, Vigny began at the close of 1831 to
write Stello; he composed it in great heat, and it
was finished in January, 1832, and immediately
sent to press. Stello is a book which has been
curiously neglected by modern students of the
poet ; it is highly characteristic of the author at
this stage of his career, and deserves a closer
examination than it usually receives. It is a triad
of episodes set in a sort of Shandean framework

ALFRED DE VIGNY 19

of fantastic prose ; the influence of Sterne is
clearly visible in the form of it. It occupies a
single night, and presents but two characters.
Stello, a very happy and successful poet, wealthy
and applauded, nevertheless suffers from the
" spleen." In a fit of the blue devils, he is
stretched on his sofa, the victim of a headache,
which is described in miraculous and Brobdig-
nagian terms. A mystic personage, the Black
Doctor, a physician of souls, attends the sufferer,
and engages him in conversation. This conver-
sation is the book called Stello.

The Black Doctor will distract the patient by
three typical anecdotes of poets, who, in Words-
worth's famous phrase,

" began in gladness,
But thereof came, in the end, despondency and madness."

He tells a story of a mad flea, which develops
into the relation of the sad end of the poet
Gilbert. To this follow the history of Chatter-
ton, and an exceedingly full and close chronicle
of the last days of Andr6 Ch^nier. The friends
converse on the melancholy topic of the rooted
antipathy which exists between the Man of
Action and the Man of Art. Poets are the
eternal helots of society ; modern life results
in the perpetual ostracism of genius. Stello, in
whom Alfred de Vigny obviously speaks, is
roused to indignation at the charge of inutility
constantly brought against the fine arts, and
charges Plato with having given the original
impetus to this heresy by his exclusion of the

20 FRENCH PROFILES

poets from his republic. But the Black Doctor
is inclined to accept Plato's view, and to hold that
the great mistake is made by the men of reverie
themselves in attempting to act as social forces.
The friends agree that the propaganda of the
future must be to separate the Life Poetic from
the Life Politic as with a chasm.

Then in eloquent and romantic pages the law
of conduct is laid down. The poet must not
mix with the world, but in solitude and liberty
must withdraw that he may accomplish his mis-
sion. He must firmly repudiate the too facile
ambitions and enterprises of active life. He
must keep firmly before him the image of those
martyrs of the mind, Gilbert, Chatterton, and
Ch^nier. He must say to his fellow men, what
the swallows say as they gather under our eaves,
" Protect us, but touch us not." Such is the
teaching of Stelloy a book extraordinary in its
own day, and vibrating still ; a book in which
for the first time was preached, without the least
reserve, the doctrines of the aristocracy of ima-
gination and of the illusiveness of any theory of
equality between the artist and the common pro-
letariat of mankind. Alfred de Vigny wrote Stel/o
in a passion of sincerity, and it is in its pages that
we first see him retiring into his famous "ivory
tower." It is the credo of a poet for whom the
charges of arrogance and narrowness do not exist;
who doubted as little about the supremacy of
genius as an anointed emperor does about Right
Divine.

The stage now attracted Vigny. In the summer

ALFRED DE VIGNY 21

of 1 83 1 he wrote, and in 1834 brought out on the
stage of the Second Theatre Frangais, La Marechale
d AncrCy a melodrama in prose, of the beginning
of the seventeenth century, a poison and dagger
piece, thick with the intrigues of Concini and
Borgia. In May 1833 he produced Quitte pour la
Peur, a trifle in one act. These unimportant
works lead us up to what is perhaps the most
famous of all Vigny's writings, the epoch-making
tragedy of Chatterton. This drama, which is in
very simple prose, was the work of seventeen
nights in June 1834, when the poet was at the
summit of his infatuation for Madame Dorval. The
subject of Chatterton had been already sketched in
Stelloy and the play is really nothing more than
one of the episodes in that romance, expanded
and dramatised. Vigny published Chatterton with
a preface which should be carefully read if we are
to appreciate the point of view from which the
poet desired his play to be observed.

The subject of Chatterton is the perpetual
and inevitable martyrdom of the Poet, against
whom all the rest of the successful world nourishes
an involuntary resentment, because he will take no
part in the game of action. Vigny tells the story
of the young English writer, with certain neces-
sary modifications. He represents him as a lodger
at the inn of John and Kitty Bell, where at the end
he tears up his manuscripts and commits suicide.
The English reader must try to forgive and forget
the lapses against local colour. Chatterton has been
a spendthrift at Oxford, and has friends who hunt
the wild boar on Primrose Hill ; Vigny keeps to

22 FRENCH PROFILES

history only when it suits him to do so. These
eccentricities did not interfere with the frenetic
joy with which the play was received by the
young writers and artists of Paris, and they ought
not to disturb us now. Chatterton drinks opium
in the last scene, because a newspaper has said
that he is not the author of the " Rowley Poems,"
and because he has been offered the situation of
first flunkey to the Lord Mayor of London. But
these things are a symbol.

Much of the plot of Chatterton may strike
the modern reader as mere extravagance. The
logic of the piece is, nevertheless, complete and
highly effective. It was the more strikingly effec-
tive when it was produced because no drama of
pure thought was known to the audience which
witnessed it. Classics and romantics alike filled
their stage with violent action ; this was a play of
poignant interest, but that interest was entirely in-
tellectual. The mystical passion of Chatterton and
Kitty Bell is subtle, silent, expressed in thoughts;
here were brought before the footlights " infinite
passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn "
without a sigh. It is a marvellous tribute to genius
that such a play could succeed, yet it was precisely
in the huge psychological soliloquy in the third
act — where the danger seemed greatest — that suc-
cess was most eminent. When the audience lis-
tened to Chatterton murmuring in his garret, with
the thick fog at the window, all the cold and
hunger supported by pride alone, and when they
listened to the tremendous words in which the
pagan soul of Alfred de Vigny speaks through the

ALFRED DE VIGNY 23

stoic boy, their emotion was so poignant as to be
insupportable.

The Poet as the imaginative pariah — that is the
theme of Chatterton ; the man of ideaUsm crushed
by a materiaUstic society. It is a case of romantic
neurosis, faced without shrinking. Chatterton, the
dramatist admits, is suffering from a malady of
the mind. But why, on that account, should he
be crushed out of existence ? Why should there
be no pity for the infirmities of inspiration ? Has
the poet really no place in the state ? Is not the
fact that he "reads in the stars the pathway that
the finger of God is pointing out " reason enough
for granting him the trifle that he craves, just
leisure and a little bread ? Why does the man
of action grudge the inspired dreamer his reverie
and the necessary food ? Everybody in the world
is right, it appears, except the poets. I do not
know that it has ever been suggested that, in his
picture of Chatterton, Vigny was thinking of the
poet, H6g6sippe Moreau, who, in 1833, was in
hospital, and who eminently " n'etait pas de ceux
qui se laissent prot^ger ais^ment."

Chatterton is Alfred de Vigny's one dramatic
success. Its form is extremely original ; it expresses
with great fulness one side of the temperament of
the author, and it suits the taste of the young artist
not only in that but in every age. It is written
with simplicity, although adorned here and there,
as by a jewel, with an occasional startling image,
as where the Quaker (a chorus needed because the
passion of Chatterton and Kitty is voiceless) says
that "the peace that reigns around you has been

24 FRENCH PROFILES

as dangerous for the spirit of this dreamer as sleep
would be beneath the white tuberose." What-
ever is forgotten, Chatterton must be remembered,
and in each generation fresh young pulses will
beat to its generous and hopeless fervour. Vigny
was writing little verse at this time, but the curious
piece called " Paris : Elevation " belongs to the
year 1834, and is interesting as a link between
the otherwise unrelated poetry of his youth and
the chain of philosophical apologues in which his
career as a poet was finally to culminate. But his
main interest at this time was in prose.

Tenacity of vision was one of the most remark-
able of Vigny's characteristics. When an experi-
ence had once made its impression upon him, this
became deeper and more vivid as the years went
on. He concealed it, he brooded on it, and sud-
denly the seed shot up and broke in the perfect
blossom of imaginative writing. Hence we need
not be surprised that the military adventures of
his earliest years, when the yellow curls fell round
the candid blue eyes of the boy as he rode in his
magnificent scarlet uniform, although long put aside,
were not forgotten. In the summer of 1835, with
that curious activity in creation which always fol-
lowed his motionless months of reverie, Alfred de
Vigny suddenly set about and rapidly carried
through the composition of the finest of his prose
works, the admirable classic known as Grandeur et
Servitude Militaires. The subject of this book is
the illusion of mihtary glory as exemplified in
three episodes of the great war. The form of the
volume is very notable ; its stories rest in an auto-

ALFRED DE VIGNY 25

biographical setting, and it was long supposed that
this also was fiction. But a letter has recently
been discovered, written to a friend while the
Grandeur et Servitude was being composed, in which
the author says, categorically, " wherever I have
written 'I,' what I relate is the truth. I was at
Vincennes when the poor adjutant died. I saw
on the road to Belgium a cart driven by an old
commander of a battalion. It was I who galloped
along smgxngjoconde." This testimony adds great
value to the delightful setting of the three stories,
Laurette, La Veillee de Vincennes, and La Canne de
Jonc. It is the confession of a sensitive spirit,
striking the note of the disappointment of the
age.

Laurette is an experience of 181 5, in which a
tale of 1797 is told; the poet makes a poignant
appeal to the feelings by relating a savage crime
of the Directory. A blunt sea captain is ordered
to take a very young man and his child-wife to
the tropics, and on a certain day to open a sealed
letter. He becomes exceedingly attached to the
charming pair of lovers, but when at last the letter
is opened, he finds that he is instructed to shoot
the husband for a supposed political offence. This
he does, being under the " servitude " of duty, and
the little wife goes mad. Nothing can exceed the
exquisite simplicity of the scenes on shipboard, and
the whole narrative is conducted with a masterly
and almost sculptural reserve. The moral of Lau-
rette is the illusion of pushing the sentiment of duty
to its last and most inhuman consequences.

Somewhat later experiences in Vigny's life inspire

26 FRENCH PROFILES

La Veillee de VincenneSy a story of 1819. This epi-
sode opens with a delicious picture of a summer
evening in the fortress before the review, the soldiers
lounging about in groups, the white hen of the regi-
ment strutting across the courtyard in her scarlet
aigrette and her silver collar. It is full of those
marvellous sudden images in which Vigny delights,
phrases that take possession of the fancy ; such as,
" Je sentais quelque chose dans ma pens^e, comme
une tache dans une emeraude."

As a story La Veillee de Vincennes is not so in-
teresting as its companions, but as an illustration
of the poet's reflection upon life, it has an extreme
value. The theme is the illusion of military excite-
ment ; the soldier only escapes ennui by the mag-
nificent disquietude of danger, and in periods of
peace he lacks this tonic. The curious and quite
disconnected narrative of the accidental blowing
up of the powder magazine, towards the close of
this tale, is doubtless drawn directly from the ex-
perience of Vigny, who narrates it in a manner
which is almost a prediction of that of Tolstoi.

In La Canne de J one we have the illusion of
active glory. In the military life, when it is not
stagnant, there is too much violence of action, not
space enough for reflection. The moral of this
story of disappointment in the person of Napoleon
is that we should devote ourselves to principles
and not to men. There are two magnificent scenes
in La Canne de Jonc, the one in which the Pope con-
fronts Napoleon with the cry of " Commediante ! "
the other in which the author pays a noble tribute
to Collingwood, and paints that great enemy of

ALFRED DE VIGNY 27

France as a hero of devotion to public duty. The
whole of this book is worthy of close attention. It
is one of the most distinguished in modern litera-
ture. Nothing could have been more novel than
this exposure to the French of the pitiful fallacies
of their military glory, of the hollowness of vows
of poverty and obedience blindly made to power,
whose only design was to surround itself by a body-
guard of gladiators. Of the reserve and sobriety
of emotion in Grandeur et Servitude Militaires, and of
the limpid, delicate elegance of its style, there can-
not be any question. It will be a joy to readers
of refinement as long as the French language
endures.

At the close of 1835 Alfred de Vigny made the
distressing discovery — he was the only member of
the circle who had remained oblivious of the fact
— that Madame Dorval was flagrantly unfaithful to
him. He became aware that she was in intrigue with
no less a personage than the boisterous Alexandre
Dumas. Recent investigations have thrown an
ugly light on this humiliating and painful incident.
Wounded mortally in his pride and in his passion,
he felt, as he says, "the earth give way under his
feet." He was from this time forth dead to the
world, and, in the fine phrase of M. Pal^ologue,
he withdrew into his own intellect as into " an
impenetrable Thebaid where he could be alone in
the presence of his own thoughts." Alfred de
Vigny survived this blow for more than a quarter
of a century, but as a hermit and a stranger among
the people.

28 FRENCH PROFILES

III

When Alfred de Vigny perceived the treason of
Madame Dorval in December, 1835, his active life
ceased. Something snapped in him — the chords of
illusion, of artistic ambition, of the hope of happiness.
He never attempted to forgive the deceiver, and
he never forgave woman in her person. His pes-
simism grew upon him ; he lost all interest in the
public and in his friends ; after a brief political effort
he sank into a soundless isolation. He possessed a
country house, called Le Maine-Giraud, in the west
of France, and thither he withdrew, absorbed in the
care of his invalid wife, and in the cultivation of his
thoughts. His voice was scarcely heard any more
in French literature, and gradually he grew to be
forgotten. The louder and more active talents of
his contemporaries filled up the void ; Alfred de
Vigny glided into silence, and was not missed.
During the last twenty-eight years of his existence,
on certain rare occasions, Vigny's intensity of
dream, of impassioned reverie, found poetical re-
lief. When he died, ten poems of various length
were discovered among his papers, and these were
published in 1864, as a very slender volume called
Les Destinies, by his executor, Louis Ratisbonne.

Several of these posthumous pieces are dated,
and the earliest of them seems to be La Colere de
Samson, written in April 1839, when the Vignys
were staying with the Earl of Kilmorey at Shav-
ington Park in Shropshire. It is a curious proof
of the intensity with which Alfred de Vigny con-

ALFRED DE VIGNY 29

centrated himself on his vision that this terrible
poem, one of the most powerful in the French
language, should have been written in England
during a country visit. It would seem that for
more than three years the wounded poet had been
brooding on his wrongs. Suddenly, without warn-
ing, the storm breaks in this tremendous picture
of the deceit of woman and the helpless strength
of man, in verses the melody and majesty of which
are only equalled by their poignant agony : —

" Toujours voir serpenter la vip^re dorde
Qui se traine en sa fange et s'y croit ignoree ;
Toujours ce compagnon dont le coeur n'est pas sur,
La Femme, enfant malade et douze fois impur !
Toujours mettre sa force k garder sa colore
Dans son coeur offense, comme en un sanctuaire,
D'ou le feu s'echappant irait tout d^vorer ;
Interdire k ses yeux de voir ou de pleurer,
C'est trop ! Dieu, s'il le veut, peut balayer ma cendre,
J'ai donne mon secret, Dalila va le vendre."

He buried the memory of Madame Dorval under
La Colere de Samson, as a volcano buries a guilty
city beneath a shower of burning ashes, and he
turned to the contemplation of the world as he
saw it under the soft light of the gentle despair
which now more and more completely invaded
his spirit.

The genius of Alfred de Vigny as the philo-
sophical exponent of this melancholy composure
is displayed in the noble and sculptural elegy,
named Les Desiine'es, composed in ierza ritna in
1849; but in a still more natural and personal way
in a poem which is among the most fascinating
that he has left behind him, La Maison du Berger.

30 FRENCH PROFILES

Here he adopted a stanzaic form closely analogous
to rime royal, and this adds to the curiously English
impression, as of some son of Wordsworth or
brother of Matthew Arnold, which this poem pro-
duces ; it may make a third in our memories with
" Laodamia " and " The Scholar-Gipsy." Vigny
describes in it the mode in which the soul goes
burdened by the weight of life, like a wounded
eagle in captivity, dragging at its chain. The poet
must escape from this obsession of the world ; he
finds a refuge in the shepherd's cabin on wheels,
far from all mankind, on a vast, undulating surface
of moorland. Here he meditates on man's futility
and fever, on the decline of the dignity of conduct,
on the public disdain of immortal things. It is
remarkable that at this lofty station, no modern
institution is too prosaic for his touch ; his treat-
ment of the objects and methods of the day is
magnificently simple, and he speaks of railways as
an ancient Athenian might if restored to breath and
vision. A certain mystical Eva is evoked, and a
delicate analysis of woman follows. From the
solitude of the shepherd's wheeled house the
exile looks out on life and sees the face of nature.
But here he parts with Wordsworth and the pan-
theists ; for in nature, also, he finds illusion and
the reed that runs into the hand : —

" Vivez, froide Nature, et revivez sans cesse
Sur nos pieds, sur nos fronts, puisque c'est votre loi ;
Vivez, et dedaignez, si vous etes ddesse,
L'homme, humble passager, qui dut vous ^tre un roi ;
Plus que tout votre r^gne et que ses splendeurs vaines,
J'aime la majesty des souffrances humaines ;
Vous ne recevrez pas un cri d'amour de moi."

ALFRED DE VIGNY 31

Finally, it is in pity, in the tender patience of
human sympathy, in the love which is " taciturne
et toujours menace," that the melancholy poet
finds the sole solace of a broken and uncertain
existence.

It is in the same connection that we must read
La Sauvage and La Mort du Loup, poems which
belong to the year 1843. The close of the second
of these presents us with the pessimistic philosophy
of Vigny in its most concise and penetrating form.
The poet has described in his admirable way the
scene of a wolf hunt in the woods of a chateau
where he has been staying, and the death of the
wolf, while defending his mate and her cubs. He
closes his picture with these reflections : —

" Comment on doit quitter la vie et tous ses maux, —
C'est vous que le savez, sublimes animaux !
A voir ce que I'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand : tout le reste est faiblesse ;
Ah ! je t'ai bien compris, sauvage voyageur,
Et ton dernier regard m'est alle jusqu'au cceur !
II disait : ' Si tu peux, fais que ton ime arrive
A force de rester studieuse et pensive,
Jusqu' k ce haut degre de stoique fiertd
Oil, naissant dans les bois, j'ai tout d'abord montd
G^mir, pleurer, prier, est ^galement liche.
Fais energiquement ta longue et lourde t^che
Dans la voie oti le sort a voulu t'appeler —
Puis, apr^s, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler.' " '

It was in nourishing such lofty thoughts as these
that Alfred de Vigny lived the life of a country
gentleman at Maine-Giraud, reading, dreaming,
cultivating his vines, sitting for hours by the bed-
side of his helpless Lydia.

^ We have here, doubtless, a reminiscence of Byron and Childe
Harold, — " And the wolf dies in silence."

32 FRENCH PROFILES

" Silence is Poetry itself for me," Alfred de
Vigny says in one of his private letters, and as
time went on he had scarcely energy enough 'to
write down his thoughts. When he braced him-
self to the effort of doing so, as when in 1858 he
contrived to compose La Bouteille a la Mer, his
accent was found to be as clear and his music as
vivid and resonant as ever. The reason was that
although he was so solitary and silent, the labour
of the brain was unceasing ; under the ashes the
fire burned hot and red. He has a very curious
phrase about the action of his mind ; he says,
" Mon cerveau, toujours mobile, travaille et tour-
billonne sous mon front immobile avec une vitesse
effrayante ; des mondes passent devant mes yeux
entre un mot qu'on me dit et le mot que je re-
ponds." Dumas, who was peculiarly predisposed
to miscomprehend Vigny, could not reconcile him-
self, in younger days, to his " immateriality," to
what another observer called his " perpetual
seraphic hallucination"; after 1835, this discon-
certing remoteness and abstraction grew upon the
poet so markedly as to cut him off from easy
contact with other men. But his isolation, even
his pessimism, failed to harden him ; on the con-
trary, by a divine indulgence, they increased his
sensibility, the enthusiasm of his pity, his passion
for the welfare of others.

Death found him at last, and in one of its most
cruel forms. Soon after he had passed his sixtieth
year, he began to be subjected to vague pains,
which became intenser, and which presently proved
to be the symptoms of cancer. He bore this

ALFRED DE VIGNY 33

final trial with heroic fortitude, and as the
physical suffering grew more extreme, the intel-
lectual serenity prevailed above the anguish. In
the very last year of his life, the poetical faculty
awakened in him again, and he wrote Les Oracles,
the incomparably solemn and bold apologue of
Le Mont des Oliviers, and the mystical ode entitled
LEsprit Pur. This last poem closed with the
ominous words, " et pour moi c'est assez." On
September 17, 1863, his soul was released at
length from the tortured and exhausted body,
and the weary Stello was at peace.

It is not to be pretended that the poetry of
Alfred de Vigny is to every one's taste. He was
too indifferent to the public, too austere and
arrogant in his address, to attract the masses,
and to them he will remain perpetually unknown.
But he is a writer, in his best prose as well as in
the greater part of his scanty verse, who has
only to become familiar to a reader susceptible
to beauty, to grow more and more beloved. The
other poets of his age were fluent and tumultuous ;
Alfred de Vigny was taciturn, stoical, one who had
lost faith in glory, in life, perhaps even in himself.
While the flute and the trumpet sounded, his
hunter's horn, blown far away in the melancholy
woodland, could scarcely raise an echo in the heart
of a warrior or banqueter. But those who visit
Vigny in the forest will be in no hurry to return.
He shall entertain them there with such high
thoughts and such proud music that they will follow
him wherever his dream may take him. They may
admit that he is sometimes hard, often obscure,

C

34 FRENCH PROFILES

always in a certain facile sense unsympathetic, but
they will find their taste for more redundant
melodies than his a good deal marred for the
future. And some among them, if they are sin-
cere, will admit that, so far as they are con-
cerned, he is the most majestic poet whom France
produced in the rich course of the nineteenth
century.

1903.

MADEMOISELLE AISSE

Literature presents us with no more pathetic
figure of a waif or stray than that of the poor
little Circassian slave whom her friends called
Mademoiselle Aiss6. But interesting and touching
as is the romance of her history, it is surpassed by
the rare distinction of her character and the delicacy
of her mind. Placed in the centre of the most de-
praved society of modern Europe, protected from
ruin by none of those common bulwarks which
proved too frail to sustain the high-born virtues of
the Tencins and the Parabdres, exposed by her
wit and beauty to all the treachery of fashionable
Paris unabashed, this little Oriental orphan pre-
served an exquisite refinement of nature, a con-
science as sensitive as a nerve. If she had been
devote, if she had retired to a nunnery, the lesson
of her life would have been less wholesome than
it is ; we may go further and admit that it would
be less poignant than it is but for the single frailty
of her conduct. She sinned once, and expiated
her sin with tears ; but in an age when love was
reduced to a caprice and intrigue governed by
cynical maxims, Aiss^'s fault, her solitary abandon-
ment to a sincere passion, almost takes the
proportions of a virtue. Mr. Ruskin has some-
where recommended Swiss travellers who find
themselves physically exhausted by the pomp of

35

36 FRENCH PROFILES

Alpine landscape, to sink on their knees and
concentrate their attention on the petals of a
rock-rose. In comparison with the vast expanse
of French literature the pretensions of Aisse are
little more than those of a flower, but she has no
small share of a flower's perfume and beauty.

In her lifetime Mademoiselle Aiss6 associated
with some of the great writers of her time. Yet
if any one had told her that she would live in
literature with such friends as Montesquieu and
Destouches her modesty would have been over-
whelmed with confusion. She made no preten-
sions to being a blue-stocking ; she would have
told us that she did not know how to write a page.
An exact coeval of hers was the sarcastic and
brilliant young man who called himself Voltaire ;
he was strangely gentle to Aisse, but she would
have been amazed to learn that he would long
survive her, and would annotate her works in his
old age. Her works ! Her only works, she
would have told us, were the coloured embroideries
with which, in some tradition of a Turkish taste,
she adorned her own rooms in the Hotel Ferriol.
Notwithstanding all this, no history of French
literature would have any pretensions to complete-
ness if it omitted Aiss^'s name. Among all the
memoir-writers, letter-writers, and pamphleteers
of the early eighteenth century she stands in some
respects pre-eminent. As a correspondent pure
and simple there is a significance in the fact that
her life exactly fills the space between the death
of S6vign6, which occurred when Aiss6 was about
two years old, and the birth of L'Espinasse, which

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 37

happened a few months before Aiss^'s death.
During this period of nearly forty years no
woman in France wrote letters which could be
placed beside theirs except our Circassian. They
form a singularly interesting trio ; and if Aiss6
can no more pretend to possess the breadth of
vision and rich imagination of Madame de S6vign6
than to command the incomparable accent of
passion which cries through the correspondence
of Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse, she has qualities
which are not unworthy to be named with these
— an exquisite sincerity, an observation of men and
things which could hardly be more picturesque,
a note of pensive and thrilling tenderness, and a
candour which melts the very soul to pity.

In the winter of 1697 or spring of 1698, a
dissipated and eccentric old bachelor, Charles de
Ferriol, Baron d'Argental, who was French Envoy
at the court of the Grand Vizier, bought a little
Circassian child of about four years old in one of
the bazaars of Constantinople. He had often
bought slaves in the Turkish market before, and
not to the honour of his memory. But this time
he was actuated by a genuine kindly impulse.
He was fifty-one years of age ; he did not intend
to marry, and he seems to have thought that he
would supply himself with a beautiful daughter
for the care of his old age. Sainte-Beuve, with his
unfailing intuition, insisted on this interpretation,
and since his essay was written, in 1 846, various
documents have turned up, proving beyond a
doubt that the intentions of the Envoy were
parental. The little girl said that her name was

38 FRENCH PROFILES

Haidee. She preserved in later life an impression
of a large house, and many servants running
hither and thither. Her friends agreed to con-
sider her as the daughter of a Circassian prince,
and the very large price (1500 livres) which M. de
Ferriol paid for her, as well as the singular dis-
tinction of her beauty, to some extent supports
the legend. In August 1698, M. de Ferriol, who
had held temporary missions in Turkey for seven
years, was recalled to France, to be sent out again
as French ambassador to the Porte in 1699. He
brought his little Circassian orphan with him, and
placed her in the charge of his sister-in-law,
Madame de Ferriol, in Paris. She was immedi-
ately christened as Charlotte Haidee, but she
preserved neither of these names in ordinary life ;
Charlotte was dropped at once, and Haidee on
the lips of her new French relations became the
softer Aisse.

Aisse's adopted aunt, as we may call her,
Madame de Ferriol, was a very fair average
specimen of the fashionable lady of the Regency.
She belonged to the notorious family of Tencin,
whose mark on the early part of the eighteenth
century is so ineffaceable. Of Madame de Ferriol
it may be said by her defenders that she was not
so openly scandalous as her sister the Canoness,
who appears in a very curious light in the letters
of Aiss6. Born in 1674, Madame de Ferriol was
still quite a young woman, and her sons, the
Marquis de Pont-de-Veyle and Comte d'Argental,
were little children, fit to become the playmates of
Aiss6. Indeed these two boys were regarded

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 39

almost as the Circassian's brothers, and the family
documents speak of all three as " nos enfants."
She was put to school — it is believed, from a
phrase of her own, " Je viens de me ressouvenir "
-^with the Nouvelles Catholiques, a community
of nuns, whose house was a few doors away from
the Hotel Ferriol, and there for a few years we
may suppose her to have passed the happy life of
a child. From this life she herself, in one of the
most charming of her letters, draws aside the
curtain for a moment. In 1731 some gossip
accused her of a passion for the Due de Gesvres,
and her jealous mentor in Geneva wrote to know
if there was any truth in the report. Aisse, then
about thirty-seven years of age, wrote back as
follows : —

" I admit, Madame, notwithstanding your anger
and the respect which I owe you, that I have had
a violent fancy for M. le Due de Gesvres, and
that I even carried this great sin to confession.
It is true that my confessor did not think it
necessary to impose any penance on me. I was
eight years old when this passion began, and at
twelve I laughed at the whole affair, not that I
did not still like M. de Gesvres, but that I saw
how ludicrous it had been of me to be so anxious
to be talking and playing in the garden with him
and his brothers. He was two or three years older
than I, and we thought ourselves a great deal
more grown up than the rest. We liked to be
conversing while the others were playing at hide-
and-seek. We set up for reasonable people ; we
met regularly every day : we never talked about

40 FRENCH PROFILES

love, for the fact was that neither of us knew
what that meant. The window of the Httle
drawing-room opened upon a balcony, where he
often came ; we made signs to each other ; he
took us out to see the fireworks, and often to
Saint Ouen. As we were always together, the
people in charge of us began to joke about us and
it came to the ears of my aga (the Ambassador),
who, as you can imagine, made a fine romance
out of all this. I found it out ; it distressed me ;
I thought that, as a discreet person, I ought to
watch my own behaviour, and the result was that
I persuaded myself that I must really be in love
with M. de Gesvres. I was devote, and went to
confession ; I first mentioned all my little sins,
and then I had to mention this big sin ; I could
scarcely make up my mind to do so, but as a girl
that had been well brought up, I determined to
hide nothing. I confessed that I was in love with
a young man. My director seemed astonished ;
he asked me how old he was, I told him he was
eleven. He laughed, and told me that there was
no penance for that sin ; that I had only to keep
on being a good girl, and that he had nothing
more to say to me for the time being."

It is like a page of Hans Andersen ; there is the
same innocence, the same suspicion that all the
world may not be so innocent.

The incidents of the early womanhood of Aisse
are known to us only through an anonymous
sketch of her life, printed in 1787, when her
Letters first appeared. This short life, which has
been attributed to Mademoiselle Rieu, the grand-

MADEMOISELLE AiSSE 41

daughter of the lady to whom the letters were
addressed, informs us that Aiss6 was carefully
educated, so far as the head went, but more than
neglected in the lessons of the heart. " From the
moment when Mademoiselle Aiss6 began to lisp,"
says this rather pedantic memoir, " she heard
none but dangerous maxims. Surrounded by
voluptuous and intriguing women, she was con-
stantly being reminded that the only occupation
of a woman without a fortune ought to be to
secure one." But she found protectors. The
two sons of Madame de Ferriol, though them-
selves no better than their neighbours, guarded
her as though she had really been their sister ;
and in her own soul there were no germs of the
fashionable depravity. When she was seventeen,
her " aga " came back from his long exile in
Constantinople, broken in health, even, it is said,
more than a little disturbed in intellect. To the
annoyance of his relatives he nourished the design
of being made a cardinal ; he was lodged, for
safety's sake, close to the family of his brother.
From Ferriol's return in 1 7 1 1 to his death in
1722, we have considerable difficulty in realising
what Aiss^'s existence was.

There is some reason to suppose that it was
Lord Bolingbroke who first perceived the excep-
tional charm of Aissdi's mind. When the illus-
trious EngHsh exile came to France in 1 715, he
was almost immediately drawn into the society of
the Hotel Ferriol. One of A'lsse's kindest friends
was that wise and charming woman, the Marquise
de Villette, whom Bolingbroke somewhat tardily

42 FRENCH PROFILES

married about 1720, and it was doubtless through
her introduction that he became intimate with
Madame de Ferriol. As early as 17 19 Boling-
broke writes of Aisse as of an intimate friend, and
speaks of her as threatened by a " disadvantageous
metamorphosis," by which he probably refers to
an attack of the small-pox. It appears to have
been during a visit to the chateau of Lord and
Lady Bolingbroke that Aisse first met Voltaire ;
and later on we shall see that these persons played
a singular but very important part in the drama
of her life. There seems no doubt that, however
little Madame de Villette and Lord Bolingbroke
could claim the white flower of a spotless life,
they were judicious and useful friends at this
perilous moment of her career. Aisse's beauty,
which was extraordinary, and her dubious social
station, made the young Circassian peculiarly liable
to attack from the men of fashion who passed from
alcove to alcove in search of the indulgence of
some ephemeral caprice. The poets turned their
rhymes in her honour, and one of their effusions,
that of the Swiss Vernet, was so far esteemed that
it was engraved fifty years afterwards underneath
her portrait. It may thus be paraphrased : —

" Aissd's beauty is all Greek ;

Yet was she wise in youth to borrow
From France the charming tongue we speak,
And wit, and airs that banish sorrow :

A theme like this deserves a verse
As warm and clear as mine is cold,

For has there been a heart like hers
Since our Astrean age of gold ? "

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 43

Aiss6 received all this homage unmoved. The
Duke of Orleans one day met her in the salon of
Madame de Parabere, was enchanted with her
beauty, and declared his passion to Madame de
Ferriol. To the lasting shame of this woman, she
agreed to support his claim, and the Regent
imagined that the little Greek would fall an easy
prey. To his amazement, and to the indignation
of Madame de Ferriol, he was indignantly re-
pulsed ; and when further pressure was brought to
bear upon her, Aisse threatened to retire at once
to a convent if the proposition was so much as
repeated. She was one of the principal attrac-
tions of Madame de Ferriol's salon, and, says the
memoir, " as Aiss6 was useful to her, fearing to
lose her, she consented, though most unwillingly,
to say no more to her " about the Duke. This
was but one, though certainly the most alarming,
of the traps set for her feet in the brilliant and
depraved society of her guardians. The habitual
life of the Tencins and Paraberes of 1720 was
something to us quite incredible. Such a " moral
dialogue " as Le Hasard au Coin du Feu would be
rejected as the dream of a licentious satirist, if the
memoirs and correspondence of the Cidalises and
the Clitandres of the age did not fully convince us
that the novelists merely repeated what they saw
around them. We must bear in mind what an
extraordinary condition of roseate semi-nudity
this politest of generations lived in, to understand
the excellence as well as the frailty of Ai'ss^. We
must also bear in mind, when our Puritan indig-
nation is ready to carry us away in profuse

44 FRENCH PROFILES

condemnation of this whole society, that extremely
shrewd remark of Duclos : " Le peuple fran^ais
est le seul peuple qui puisse perdre ses moeurs sans
se corrompre."

In 1720 the old ex-ambassador fell ill. Aisse
immediately took up her abode with him, and
nursed him assiduously until he died. That he
was not an easy invalid to cherish we gather from
a phrase in one of her own letters, as well as from
hints in those of Bolingbroke. In October, 1722,
he died, leaving to Aisse a considerable fortune in
the form of an annuity, as well as a sum of money
in a bill on the estate. The sister-in-law, Madame
de Ferriol, to whose guardianship Aisse had been
consigned, thought her own sons injured by the
ambassador's generosity, and had the extreme bad
taste to upbraid Aisse. The note had not yet been
cashed, and at the first word from Madame de
Ferriol, Aiss6 fetched it and threw it into the fire.
This little anecdote speaks worlds for the sensitive
and independent character of the Circassian ; one
almost blushes to complete it by adding that
Madame de Ferriol took advantage of her ward's
hasty act of injured pride. Aisse, however, had
other things to think of ; " the birthday of her life
was come, her love was come to her." As early
as 1 72 1, we find Lord Bolingbroke saying, in a
letter to Madame de Ferriol, " I fully expect you
to come ; I even flatter myself that we shall see
Madame du Deffand ; but as for Mademoiselle
Aisse, I do not expect her. The Turk will be her
excuse, and a certain Christian of my acquaintance
her reason." This seems to mean that Aiss6

MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 45

would give as her excuse for not coining to stay
with the BoHngbrokes that she was needed at the
Ambassador's pillow ; but that her real reason
would be that she wished to stay in Paris to be
near " a certain Christian." That which had been
vainly attempted by so many august aad eminent
personages, namely, the capture of Aiss^'s heart,
was now being pursued with alarming success by
a very modest candidate for her affections.

The Chevalier Blaise Marie d'Aydie, the hope
of an impoverished P^rigord family who claimed
descent, with a blot bn their escutcheon, from the
noble house of Foix, was, in 172 1, about thirty
years of age. He had lived a passably dissipated
life, after the fashion of the Clitandres of the age,
and if Mademoiselle Rieu is to be believed,
Madame la Duchesse de Berry herself had passed
through the fires on his behalf. He was poor ;
he was brave and handsome and rather stupid ; he
was expected one of these days to break his vows
as a Knight of Malta and redeem the family
fortunes by a good marriage. We have a portrait
of him by Madame du Deffand, written in her
delicate, persisent way, touch upon touch, with a
result that reminds one of Mr. Henry James's
pictures of character. Voltaire, more rapidly and
more enthusiastically, called him the " chevalier
sans peur et sans reproche," and drew him as the
hero of his tragedy of Adelaide du Guesclin. He
had the superficial vices of his time ; but his
tenderness, loyalty, and goodness of heart were
infinite, and if we judge him by the morals of his
own age and not of ours, he was a very fine fellow.

46 FRENCH PROFILES

His principal fault seems to have been that he was
rather dull. As Madame du Deffand puts it,
" They say of Fontenelle that instead of a heart he
has a second brain ; one might believe that the
head of the Chevalier contained another heart."
All evidence goes to prove that from the moment
when he first met Aisse no other woman existed
for him, and if their union was blameworthy, let it
be at least admitted that it lasted, with impassioned
fidelity on both sides, for twelve years and until
Aisse's death.

It would appear that until the Ambassador
passed away, and the irksome life at the Hotel
Ferriol began again, Aiss6 contrived to keep her
ardent admirer within bounds. To us it seems
amazingly perverse that the lovers did not marry ;
but Aiss6 herself was the first to insist that a
Chevalier d'Aydie could not and should not offend
his relations by a mesalliance with a Circassian
slave. At last she yielded ; but, as Mademoiselle
Rieu tells us, " he loved her so delicately that he
was jealous of her reputation ; he adored her, and
would have sacrificed everything for her ; while she,
on her part, loving the Chevalier, found his fame,
his fortune, his honour, dearer to her than her
own." In 1724 she found it absolutely necessary
to disappear from her circle of acquaintance. She
did not dare to confide her secret to the un-
scrupulous Madame de Ferriol, and in her despair
she examined the circle of her friends for the most
sympathetic face. She decided to trust Lady
Bolingbroke, and she could not have made a wiser
choice. That tender-hearted and deeply-experi-

MADEMOISELLE AlSSE 47

enced lady was equal to the delicate emergency.
She announced her intention of spending a few
months in England, and she begged Madame de
Ferriol to allow Aisse to accompany her. They
started as if for Calais, but only to double upon
their steps. Aisse, in company with her maid,
Sophie, and a confidential English man-servant,
was installed in a remote suburb of Paris, under
the care of the Chevalier d'Aydie, while Lady
Bolingbroke hastened on to England, and amused
herself with inventing anecdotes and messages from
A'iss6. In the fulness of time Lady Bolingbroke
returned and took care to " collect " Aisse before
she presented herself at the Hotel Ferriol. Mean-
while a daughter had been born, who was chris-
tened Cel^nie Leblond, and who was placed in
a convent at Sens, under the name of Miss Black,
as a niece of Lord Bolingbroke. The abbess of
this convent was a Mademoiselle de Villette,
the daughter of Lady Bolingbroke. No novelist
would dare to describe so improbable a stratagem ;
let us make the story complete by adding that it
succeeded to perfection, and that Madame de
Ferriol herself never seems to have suspected the
truth. This daughter, whom we shall presently
meet again, grew up to be a charming woman,
and adorned society in the next generation as the
Vicomtesse de Nanthia. If the story of Aisse
ended here it would not appeal to a Richardson, or
even to an Abb6 Pr6vost d'Exiles, as a moral tale.

Between 1723 and 1726 Aisse's life passed
quietly enough. The Chevalier d'Aydie was con-
stantly at the Hotel Ferriol, but the two lovers

48 FRENCH PROFILES

were not any longer in their first youth. A Httle
prudence went a long way in a society adorned by
Madame de Parabere and Madame de Tencin.
No breath of scandal seems to have troubled Aisse,
and when her cares came, they all began from
within. We do not possess the letters of Aisse to
her lover. I hope I am not a Philistine if I admit
that I sincerely hope they will never be discovered.
We possess the love letters of Mademoiselle de
L'Espinasse ; this should be enough of that kind
of literature for one century at least — it would be
a terrible thing to come down one morning to see
announced a collection of the letters of Aiss6 to
her Chevalier, edited by M.Edmondde Goncourt !
In the summer of 1726 there arrived from Geneva
a lady about twenty years older than Aiss^, the
wife of a M. Calandrini ; she was a step-aunt, if
such a relationship be recognised, of Lord Boling-
broke, and so was intimately connected with the
Ferriol circle. Research, which really is far too
busy in our days, has found out that Madame de
Calandrini herself had not been all that could be
desired ; but in 1726 she was devote, yet not to
such an extent as to throw any barrier between
herself and the confidences of a younger woman.
Aiss6 received her warmly, gave her heart to her
without reserve, and when the lady went back to
Geneva Aiss6 discovered that she was the first and
best friend that she had ever possessed. Madame
Calandrini carried home with her the inmost and
most dangerous secrets of Aiss^'s history, and it is
evident that she immediately planned her young
friend's conversion.

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 49

The Letters of Aiss6 are exclusively composed
of her correspondence with this Madame Calandrini
from the autumn of 1726 to her own fatal illness
in January, 1733. They remained in Geneva
until, in 1758, they were lent to Voltaire, who
enriched them with very interesting and important
notes. Nearly thirty years more passed, and at
length, in 1787, they saw the light. Next year
they were reprinted, with a very delightful portrait
of Aiss6. In this she appears as a decided beauty,
with very fair hair, an elegant and spirited head
lightly poised on delicate shoulders, and nothing
Oriental in her appearance except the large, oval,
dark eyes, languishing with incredible length of
eyelash. The text was confused and difficult in
these early editions, and in successive reprints has
occupied various biographers — M. de Barante, M.
Ravenel, M. Piedagnal. I suppose, however, that I
do no injustice to those writers if I claim for M.
Eugene Asse the credit of having done more than
any other man, by patient annotation and collection
of explicatory documents, to render the reading of
Aiss^'s letters interesting and agreeable.

The letters of Aiss6 to Madame Calandrini are
the history of an awakening conscience. It is this
fact, and the slow development of the inevitable
moral plot, which give them their singular psycho-
logical value. As the letters approach their close,
our attention is entirely riveted by the spectacle of
this tender and passionate spirit tortured by re-
morse and yearning for expiation. But at the
outset there is no moral passion expressed, and we
think less of Aiss6 herself than of the society to

D

50 FRENCH PROFILES

which she belonged by her age and education.
As it seems impossible, from other sources of
information, to believe that Madame Calandrini
was what is commonly thought to be an amiable
woman, we take from Aisse's praise of her some-
thing of the same impression that we obtain from
Madame de Sevigne's affectionate addresses to
Madame de Grignan. Indeed, the opening letter
of Aisse's series, with its indescribable tone of the
seventeenth century, reads so much like one of the
Sevigne's letters to her daughter that one wonders
whether the semblance can be wholly accidental.
There is a childish archness in the way in which
Aisse jests about all her own adorers — the suscep-
tible abb^s, and the councillors whose neglected
passion has comfortably subsided into friendship.
There are little picturesque touches — the black
spaniel yelping in his lady's lap, and upsetting the
coffee-pot in his eagerness to greet a new-comer.
There are charming bits of self-portraiture : " I
used to flatter myself that I was a little philosopher,
but I never shall be one in matters of sentiment."
It is all so youthful, so girlish, that we have to
remind ourselves that the author of such a passage
as the following was in her thirty-third year : —

" I spend my days in shooting little birds ; this
does me a great deal of good. Exercise and dis-
traction are excellent remedies for the vapours.
The ardour of the chase makes me walk, although
my feet are bruised ; the perspiration that this
exercise causes is good for me. I am as sun-
burned as a crow ; you would be frightened if you
saw me, but I scarcely mind it. How happy should

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 51

I be if I were still with you ! I would willingly
give a pint of my blood if we could be together at
this moment."

Here Aisse anticipates by a year or two Matthew
Green's famous " Fling but a stone, the giant dies."
She has told Madame Calandrini everything. The
Chevalier is away in Perigord, which adds to her
vapours ; but his letters breathe the sweetest con-
stancy. She would like to send them to Geneva,
but she dares not ; they are too full of her own
praises. She has been to see the first performance
of a new comedy, Pyrame et Thisbe, and giggles
over its disastrous fate. This gives us firm ground
in dating this first letter, for this comedy, or rather
opera, was played on the 17th of October, 1726.
Nothing could be more gay or sparkling than
Aiss^'s tone.

But soon there comes a change. We find that
she is not happy in the Hotel Ferriol. Her friend
and foster-brother, Comte d'Argental, who lived on
until 1788 to be the last survivor of her circle, is
away "with his sweetheart in the Enchanted
Island," and she has his room while hers is being
refurnished. But it will cost her one hundred
pistoles, for Madame de Ferriol makes her pay for
everything. The subjects which she writes about
in all light-heartedness are extraordinary. She
cannot resist, from sheer ebullience of mirth, copy-
ing out a letter of amazing impudence written by
a certain officer of dragoons to the bishop of his
diocese. Can she or can she not continue to
know the beautiful brazen Madame de Parabere,
whose behaviour is of a lightness, but oh 1 of such

52 FRENCH PROFILES

a lightness. Yet " her carriage is always at my
service, and don't you think it would be ridiculous
not to visit her at all ?" If one desires a marvel-
lous tale of the ways and the manners of the great
world under Louis XV., there is the astounding
story of Madame la Princesse de Bournonville,
and how she was publicly engaged to marry the
Due de Ruffec fifteen minutes after her first hus-
band's death ; it is told, with perfect calmness, in
Aiss6's best manner. The Prince was one of
Aiss^'s numerous rejected adorers ; she rejoices
that he has left her no compromising legacy.
There is a certain affair, on the loth of January,
1727, "which would make your hair stand on
end ; but it really is too infamous to be written
down." A wonderful world, so elegant and so
debased, so enthusiastic and so cynical, so full of
beauty and so full of corruption, that we find no
name but Louis Quinze to qualify its paradoxes.

In her earlier letters A'iss6 reveals herself as a
patron of the stage, and a dramatic critic of marked
views. Her foster-brothers, Pont-de-Veyle and
Argental, were deeply stage-stricken ; the " En-
chanted Island " of the latter seems to have been
situated somewhere in that ocean, the Theatre de
rOp6ra. Aiss6 threw herself with heart and soul into
the famous rivalry between the two operatic stars
of Paris ; she was all for the enchanting Lemaure,
and when that public favourite wilfully retired to
private life Aiss6 found that the Pellissier " fait
horriblement mal." She tells with infinite zest a
rather scurrilous story of how a certain famous
Jansenist canon, seventy years of age, fearing to

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 53

die without having ever seen a dramatic perfor-
mance, dressed himself up in his deceased grand-
mother's garments and made his appearance in the
pit, creating, by his incredible oddity of garb and
feature, such a sensation that the actor Armand
stopped playing, and desired him, amid the
shrieks of laughter of the audience, to decamp as
fast as possible. Voltaire vouches for the absolute
truth of this anecdote. But before Aiss6 begins
to lose the gaiety of her spirits it may be well to
let her give in her own language, or as near as I
can reach it, a sample of her powers as an artist
in anecdote.

" A little while ago there happened a little
adventure which has made a good deal of noise.
I will tell you about it. Six weeks ago Isez, the
surgeon [one of the most eminent practitioners of
his time] received a note, begging him, at six
o'clock on the afternoon of the next day, to be in
the Rue du Pot-de-Fer, close to the Luxembourg.
He did not fail to be there ; he found waiting for
him a man, who conducted him for a few steps,
and then made him enter a house, shutting the
door on the surgeon, so as, himself, to remain in
the street. Isez was surprised that this man did
not at once take him where he was wanted. But
the portier of the house appeared, and told him
that he was expected on the first floor, and asked
him to step up, which he did. He opened an
ante-chamber all hung with white ; a lackey, made to
be put in a picture, dressed in white, nicely curled,
nicely powdered, and with a pouch of white hair
and two dusters in his hand, came to meet him, and

54 FRENCH PROFILES

told him that he must have his shoes wiped. After
this ceremony, he was conducted into a room also
hung with white. Another lackey, dressed like the
first, went through the same ceremony with the
shoes ; he was then taken into a room where every-
thing was white, bed, carpet, tapestry, fauteuils,
chairs, tables and floor. A tall figure in a night-cap
and a perfectly white dressing-gown, and a white
mask, was seated near the fire. When this kind of
phantom perceived Isez, he said to him, * I have the
devil in my body,' and spoke no more ; for three-
quarters of an hour he did nothing but put on and
pull off six pairs of white gloves which he had on
a table by his side. Isez was frightened, but he
grew more so when, glancing round the room, he
saw several fire-arms ; he was taken with such a
trembling that he was obliged to sit down for fear
of falling. At last, to break the silence, he asked
the figure in white what was wanted of him,
because he had an engagement, and his time be-
longed to the public. The white figure dryly
replied, ' What does it matter to you, if you are
paid well ? ' and said nothing more. Another
quarter of an hour passed in silence ; at last the
phantom pulled the bell-rope. The two white
lackeys reappeared ; the phantom asked for ban-
dages, and told Isez to draw five pounds of blood."
We must spoil the story by finishing it abruptly.
Isez bleeds the phantom not in the arm, on
account of the monstrous quantity of blood, but in
the foot, a very beautiful woman's foot, apparently,
when he gets to the last of six pairs of white silk
stockings. He is presently, after various other

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 55

adventures, turned out of the mysterious house,
and nobody, not even the King himself, can tell
what it all means.

But very soon the picture of A'iss^'s life begins
to be clouded over. In the spring of 1727, she is
in a peck of troubles. The periodical reduction
of the State annuities, which had been carried out
once more during the preceding winter by the new
Minister of Finance, had brought misery to many
gentlefolks of France. In Aiss6's early letters, she
and her acquaintances appear much as Irish land-
lords do now ; in her latest letters they remind
us of what these landlords would be if the National
party realised its dream. The Chevalier does not
seem to have been a sufferer personally ; he had
not much to lose, but we find him sympathising
with Aisse, and drawing up an appealing letter for
her to send to the Cardinal de Fleury. Aiss6
begins to feel the shadows falling across her future.
If ever she marries, she says, she will put into the
contract a clause by which she retains the right to
go to Geneva whenever she likes, for she longs to
tell her troubles to Madame Calandrini. And thus
is first sounded the mournful key to which we soon
become accustomed : —

" Every day I see that there is nothing but virtue
that is any good for this world and the next. As
for myself, who have not been lucky enough to
behave properly, but who respect and admire
virtuous people, the simple wish to belong to the
number attracts to me all sorts of flattering things ;
the pity which every one shows me [for her money
losses, doubtless], almost prevents me from being

S6 FRENCH PROFILES

miserable. I have just 2000 francs of income at
most left. My jewels and my diamonds are sold."

The result of her sudden poverty appears to
have been that the Chevalier d'Aydie, sorely against
his inclination, but actuated by a generous impulse,
offered to marry her. She was not less generous
than he, and almost Quixotically rejected what
would have been her greatest satisfaction. To
Madame Calandrini, who was plainly one of those
who urged her to accept this act of restitution, the
orphan-mother answers thus : —

"Think, Madame, of what the world would say
if he married a nobody, and one who depended
entirely on the charity of the Ferriol family.
No ; I love his fame too much, and I have myself
at the same time too much pride, to allow him to
commit such an act of folly. He would be sure
to repent of having followed the bent of his absurd
passion, and I could not survive the pain of having
made him wretched, and of being myself no longer
loved."

The Chevalier, unable to live in Paris without
being at her side, fled for a five months' exile to
the parental chateau in Perigord. Aiss6 had
expressed a mild surprise that he could not con-
trive to be more calm, but their discussions had
always ended in a joke. Yet it is plain that all
these circumstances made her regard life more
seriously than she had ever done before. In her
next letter (August, 1727) we learn how miserable
a home the Hotel Ferriol had now become for
her. " The mistress of this house," she says, " is
much more difficult to live with than the poor

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 57

Ambassador was." As for the Chevalier, he had
scarcely reached Perigueux, when he forgot all
about the months he wished to spend in the
country, and hastened back to Paris to be near
Aiss^. The latter writes, in her prim way, " I
admit I was very agreeably surprised to see him
enter my room yesterday. How happy I should
be if I could only love him without having to
reproach myself for it ! " It is plain, in spite of
the always modest, and now timid way in which
she writes, that her moral worth and delicate
judgment were estimated at their true value even
by the frivolous women who surrounded her.
The Duchess of Fitz-James asks her advice as to
whether she shall or shall not accept the hand of
the Due d'Aumont. The dissolute Madame de
Tencin cannot forgive or forget Aisse's tacit dis-
approval of her conduct. The gentler, but not
less naughty Madame de Parabere purrs around
her like a cat, exquisitely assiduous not entirely
to lose the esteem of one whose position in the
world can have offered nothing to such a person-
age, but by whose intelligence and sympathetic
goodness she could not help being fascinated.
In recording all this, without in the least being
aware of it, Aiss6 gives us an impression of her
own simple sweetness as of a touchstone by
which radically evil natures were distinguished
from those whose voluntary abasement was not
the sign of a complete corruption of spirit.

We are made to feel in Aisse's letters, that, with-
out being in any degree a blue-stocking, she was
eager to form her own impression on the various

58 FRENCH PROFILES

intellectual questions of the hour. Gullivers
Travels had only been published in England in
the autumn of 1726 ; in the spring of 1727 Aisse
had read it, in Desfontaine's translation, knew
that it was the work of Swift, and praised it in the
very same terms that the world has since agreed
to bestow upon it. Destouches seems to have
been a friend of hers, but when in the same year
she went to see his new comedy Le Philosophe
Marie, she was not blinded by friendship. "It is
a very charming comedy," she wrote, " full of
sentiment, full of delicacy ; but it does not possess
the genius of Moliere." Nor is she less judicious
in what she says about the masterpiece of another
friend, the Abb6 Prevost d'Exiles. She writes in
October, 1728, "We have a new book here
entitled Me'moires d'un Homme de Qualite retire du
Monde, it is not worth much, except one hundred
and ninety pages which make one burst out
crying." These one hundred and ninety pages
were that immortal supplement to a dull book
which we call Manon Lescaut, over which as many
tears are shed nowadays as were dropped a
century and a half ago. It is said by those who
have read Provost's forgotten romance, Histoire
dune Grecque Moderne, published long afterwards
in 1 74 1; that it contains a full-length portrait of
the author's old friend Aiss6. It might be amusing
to compare this with Voltaire's portrait of her
chevalier in Addatde du Guesclin.

She was evidently a centre of light and activity.
The young woman with whom, at all events during
certain periods, Bolingbroke corresponded by every

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 59

post, could be no commonplace person. Voltaire
vouches for her exact and independent knowledge
of events. When Madame Calandrini is anxious
to know how a certain incident at court will turn
out, Aisse says, " You shall know before the
people who make the Gazette do," and her letters
differ from the poet Gray's, which otherwise they
often curiously resemble, that she seems to know
at first hand the class of news that Gray only
repeats. She sometimes shows her first-hand
knowledge by her very inaccuracy. She gives,
for instance, a long account, which we follow
with breathless interest, of the death of Adrienne
Lecouvreur, the event, probably, which moved
Paris more vehemently than any other during the
year 1730. A'iss6 directly charges the young
Duchesse de Bouillon with the murder of the
actress, and supports her charge with an amaz-
ing array of horrible details. The affair was
mysterious, and Aisse was evidently minutely
informed ; yet Voltaire, in whose arms Adrienne
Lecouvreur died, declares that her account is not
the true one. On one point her knowledge of
her contemporaries is very useful to us. The
priceless correspondence of Madame du Deffand
makes the latter, as an old woman, an exceedingly
life-like figure, but we know little of her early life ;
Ai'sse's sketches of her, therefore, and to say the
truth, cruelly penetrating analysis of her character
at the age of thirty, are most valuable. The
Madame du Deffand we know seems a wiser
woman than Aiss^'s friend ; but the fact is that
many of these witty Frenchwomen only became

6o FRENCH PROFILES

tolerable, like remarkable vintages, when they were
growing a little crusted.

Among the brightest sections of Aiss^'s corres-
pondence are those in which she speaks of her
high-spirited and somewhat dissolute foster-
brothers, Pont-de-Veyle and D'Argental. These
two men were sowing their wild oats very hard,
in the fashion of the day, and although they were
passing the solemn age of thirty, the sacks seemed
inexhaustible. But so far as regarded Aisse, their
conduct was all that was chivalrous, all that was
honourably fraternal. Pont-de-Veyle she calls an
angel, but it was D'Argental whom she loved the
most, and nothing is more touching than an
account she gives, with the naivete of a child, of
a quarrel she had with him. This quarrel lasted
eight days, and Aiss6 kept her letter open until
she could add, in a postscript, the desired infor-
mation that, she having drunk his health at dinner
and afterwards kissed him, they have made it up
without any formal explanation. " Since then,"
she adds in that tone of hers which makes the
eyes of a middle-aged citizen of perfidious Albion
quite dim after a hundred and fifty years, " Since
then we have been a great deal together."

In 1728 she had need of all the kindness she
could get. The Chevalier was so ill in June that
she was obliged to face the prospect of his death.
" Duty, love, inquietude, and friendship, are for
ever troubling my thoughts and my body ; I am
in a cruel agitation ; my body is giving way, for
I am overwhelmed with vapours and with grief ;
and, if any misfortune should happen to that man,

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 6i

I feel I should not be able to endure the horrible
sorrow of it. He is more attached to me than
ever ; he encourages me to perform my duties.
Sometimes I cannot help telling him, that if he
gets any worse it will be impossible for me to
leave him ; and then he scolds me." The dread-
ful condition of genteel poverty in which the
Ferriol family were now living, did not tend to
make Aiss6's home a bed of roses. In the winter
of 1728 these famous people of quaHty were
"dying of hunger." There was not, that is to
say, as much food upon their table as their
appetites required, and Aiss6 expected to share
the fate of the horse whose master gave him one
grain less of oats each day until he died from
starvation. In this there was of course a little
playful exaggeration, but her poverty weighed
heavily on Aiss6. She had scarcely enough money
for her daily wants, and envied the Chevalier,
who was saving that he might form a dowry for
the little daughter at Sens, the '^ pauvre petite " in
the convent, after whom Aiss6's heart yearned,
and whom she might but very rarely visit as a
stranger.

She spent the autumn of 1729 at Pont-de-
Veyle, the country seat of the Ferriol family, a
chateau between Macon and Bourg. She took
advantage of this neighbourhood to Switzerland,
and paid the long-promised visit to Madame
Calandrini in Geneva. The incident was a moment-
ous one in the history of her soul. She came
back more uneasy, more irresolute than ever, and
in deep depression of spirits. Her first instinct.

62 FRENCH PROFILES

on being left to her own thoughts again, was to
enter a convent, but Madame Calandrini did not
encourage this idea, and A'isse soon relinquished
it. She saw, herself, that duty called her to stay
with Madame de Ferriol, who was now growing
an invalid. Before leaving Geneva Madame
Calandrini had made a solemn attempt to per-
suade her to conclude her dubious relations with
the Chevalier. She tried to extract a promise
from Aiss6 that she would either marry D'Aydie
or cease to see him. But it is easy for comfort-
able matrons in their own boudoirs to urge a line
of conduct ; it is less simple for the unfortunate
to carry out these maxims in the hard light of
day. Aiss6 wrote : " All that I can promise you
is that nothing shall be spared to bring about one
or other of these things. But, Madame, it may
cost me my life." Such words are lightly said ;
but in Aiss^'s case they came from the heart.
She made the sacrifice, and it did cost her her
life. She attempted to melt the severe censor at
Geneva by extracts from the Chevalier's letters,
and finally she made an appeal which goes straight
to our sympathy. " How can I cut to the quick
a violent passion, and the tenderest and firmest
friendship ? Add to all this, gratitude : it is
frightful ! Death would not be worse ! How-
ever, since you wish me to make an effort, I will
do so." Conscience and the Calandrini were
inexorable.

In the dull house at Pont-de-Veyle Aiss6 was
thrown upon her own consciousness more than in
Paris. She gives us a picture of her dreary

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 63

existence. The Archbishop of Lyons, who was
Madame de Ferriol's brother, was the only intelli-
gent companion she had, and he was locked up
all day with Jesuit priests. The young Ferriols
were in Paris ; their mother, jealous, pietistic, and
peevish, wore Aiss6 out with ennui. It was in this
tension of the nervous system, this irritation and
depression of spirits, that on her way back to
Paris in November she paid a stolen visit to Sens
to see her little daughter. The letter in which
she describes the interview is simply heartrending.
The little delicate child, with an exquisite instinct,
clung to this unknown friend, and when at last
Aiss6 had to say farewell, her daughter — whom
she must not call her daughter — wrung the
mother's heart with mingled anguish and delight
by throwing her arms round her neck and crying
out, " I have no father or mother ; please, you be
my mother, for I love you as much as if you
really were ! " Aiss6 could not tear herself away ;
she remained a fortnight at the convent, more
unhappy than happy, and so afflicted in spirits
that she positively had to take to her bed. The
little " Miss Black " waited upon her with a child's
enthusiasm, refusing to play with her companions,
and lavishing her caresses upon her. At last the
poor mother forced herself to depart, fearing lest
she should expose her secret by her emotion.
She made her way to Paris, where she found the
Chevalier waiting for her, and all her good resolu-
tions were shattered by the passionate joy of his
welcome. She did not know what to do nor
where to turn.

64 FRENCH PROFILES

In the beginning of 1730 the Chevalier had
another dangerous illness, and A'iss^ was obliged
to postpone the crisis. He got well and she was
so happy that she could not but postpone it
a little longer. Slowly, as she herself perceived,
her bodily strength began to waste away under
the agitations of her conscience. We may pass
over the slow progress of the spiritual com-
plaint, which took more than three years to
destroy her healthy constitution. We must push
on to the end. In 1732 her health gave serious
alarm to all those who surrounded her. That
few of her friends suspected the real state of the
case, nor the hidden griefs that were destroying
her, is proved among other things by a little
copy of verses which has been preserved in the
works of a great man. Voltaire, who made a
joke of his own supposed passion for A'iss^, sent
her in 1732 a packet of ratafia, to relieve a
painful symptom of her complaint, and he accom-
panied it by a flippant versicle, which may thus
be rendered : —

" Hence ! Through her veins like subtle anguish fleet !
Change to desires the snows that thro' them roll !
So may she feel the heat
That burns within my soul."

But the women about her knew that she was
dying. The Parab^re to whom we may forgive
much, because she loved Aiss6 so well, fluttered
around her with pathetic tenderness ; and we find
her forcing upon her friend the most beautiful of
her personal possessions, a splendid box of crimson

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 6s

jasper. Even Madame de Tencin, whom she had
always kept at arm's length, and who had rewarded
her with aversion, startled her now with expres-
sions and proofs of affection. Madame de Ferriol
herself, with her sharp temper and her ugly
speeches, urged upon her the attentions of a Jan-
senist confessor. The Chevalier, understanding at
last that he was about to lose her, was distracted
with anxiety, and hung around the room until the
ladies were put to their wits' end to get rid of him.
In her next letter, written about Christmas of
1732, Aiss6 expresses herself thus : —

" I have to be very careful how I deal with you
know whom. He has been talking to me about a
certain matter as reasonably and affectionately as
possible. All his goodness, his delicate way of
thinking, loving me for my own self, the interest
of the poor little one, to whom one could not give
a position, all these things force me to be very
careful how I deal with him. For a long time
I have been tortured with remorse ; the carrying
out of this would sustain me. If the Chevalier
does not keep to what he has promised, I will see
him no more. You see, Madame, what my resolu-
tions are ; I will keep to them. But they will
probably shorten my life."

The explanation of this passage seems to be that
the Chevalier, having put off marriage so long,
was anxious not to break his vows for a merely
sentimental union, that could last but a few weeks.
She had extracted, it would seem, a sort of pro-
mise from him, but he did not keep it, and Aiss6
died unmarried.

E

66 FRENCH PROFILES

In her last hours Aisse became completely
devote, but not to such an extent as to be unable
to see the humour of sending such light ladies as
Madame de Parabere and Madame du Deffand
through the length and breadth of Paris to search
for a director to undertake her conversion. At
last these inexperienced emissaries discovered a
Pere Boursault, who was perhaps of their world,
for he was the son of the dramatist, the enemy of
Moliere ; from him Aisse received the consolations
of religion. A few days before she died she wrote
once more to Madame Calandrini, and these are
the last words which we possess from the pen of
Ai'ss^ : —

" I say nothing to you about the Chevalier.
He is in despair at seeing me so ill. You
never witnessed a passion so violent, more delicacy,
more sentiment, more greatness and generosity. I
am not anxious about the poor little one ; she has
a friend and protector who loves her tenderly.
Good-bye, dear Madame ; I am too weak to write
any more. It is still infinitely sweet to me to think
of you ; but I cannot yield to this happiness without
tears, my dear friend. The life I have led has been
very wretched. Have I ever had a moment's
enjoyment ? I could not be happy alone ; I was
afraid to think ; my remorse has never once left
me since the instant when I began to have my
eyes open to my misconduct. Why should I
be alarmed at my soul being separated, since I am
persuaded that God is all good, and that the
moment when I begin to enjoy happiness will be
that in which I leave this miserable body ? "

MADEMOISELLE AISSE 67

On the 14th of March, 1733, Charlotte Elizabeth
Aiss6, spinster, aged about forty years, was buried
in the chapel of the Ferriol family, in the Church
of St. Roch, in Paris.

1887.

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS

Brief and unobtrusive as was the volume of Letlres
Portugaises published in Paris in 1669, it exercised
an influence on the sentimental literature of Europe
which was very extraordinary, and to which we
have not yet ceased to be subject. Since the
revival of learning there had been no collection of
documents dealing with the experiences of emotion
in which an element of Renaissance feeling had
not shown itself in some touch of rhetoric, in some
flower of ornament, in some trick of language that
concealed what it desired to expose. The Portu-
guese Letters, slight as they were, pleased in-
stantly and universally because they were entirely
modern. The seventeenth century, especially in
France, had cultivated epistolary literature with
care, even with too much care. There had been
letter-writers by profession, and the value of their
correspondence has been weighed and found want-
ing. Even in England, where the French were
held up as models of letter-writing, there were not
wanting critics. Howell wrote in 1625 : —

" Others there are among our next transmarine
neighbours eastward, who write in their own lan-
guage, but their style is so soft and easy that their
letters may be said to be like bodies of loose flesh
without sinews ; they have neither joints of art
nor arteries in them. They have a kind of simper-

68

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 69

ing and lank hectic expression, made up of a
bombast of words and finical affected compliments
only. I cannot well away with such fieasy stuff,
with such cobweb compositions, where there is no
strength of matter — nothing for the reader to carry
away with him that may enlarge the notions of
his soul."

We may be quite sure that Howell had Balzac
in his eye when he wrote this passage, and to
Balzac presently succeeded Voiture. To the quali-
ties of Voiture's famous correspondence, to its
emptiness, flatness, and rhetorical elegance, signi-
fying nothing and telling us nothing, M. Gaston
Boissier has lately dedicated a very amusing page
of criticism. Even in the middle of the seven-
teenth century the French were conscious of their
deficiency as letter-writers, and were anxious to
remove it. Mademoiselle de Scudery, who was as
awkward as the best of them, saw that girls ought to
know how to express their feelings briefly, plainly,
and sincerely. In the depths of the wilderness of
Clelie may still be found rules for letter-writing.
But the time was not quite ripe, and it is notice-
able that it was just before the publication of
the Portuguese Letters that Mademoiselle, in the
agonies of her grotesque passion, turned over the
pages of Corneille for phrases which might express
the complex emotions of her heart. If she had
waited a few months a manual of the tender
passion would have lain at her hand. At all
events, the power to analyse the feelings in simple
language, to chronicle the minute symptoms of
emotion without rhetoric, closely succeeds the

70 FRENCH PROFILES

great success of these letters ; nor is it unworthy
of notice that they appear to have exercised an
instant influence on no less a personage than
Madame de Sevigne, who alludes to them certainly
twice, if not oftener, and whose great epoch of
letter - writing, following upon the marriage of
Madame de Grignan, begins with this very year,
1669. In England the influence of the Porht-
guese Letters, as we shall presently see, was
scarcely less sudden than decisive. That we in
England needed such an influence on our letter-
writers is not to be questioned, although the faults
of English correspondence were not those of the
admirers of Voiture and Balzac. The French
needed to throw off a rhetorical insipidity ; the
English were still in the toils of the ornamental
allusiveness of the Renaissance. We find such a
sentence as the following, written by Mrs. Penrud-
dock, in 1655, on the night before her husband's
execution, in a letter which has been preserved just
because it seemed direct, tender, and sincere ; —

"Those dear embraces which I yet feel and
shall never lose, being the faithful testimonies of
a loving husband, have charmed my soul to such
a reverence of your remembrance, that, were it
possible, I would, with my own blood, cement
your dead limbs to live again, and (with re-
verence) think it no sin to rob Heaven a little
longer of a martyr."

Such persons as Mrs. Penruddock never again
on such occasions as this wrote in this particular
manner, when Europe had once read the Portu-
guese Letters. The secret of saying what was in

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 71

the heart in a straightforward way was discovered,
and was at once adopted by men and women a
hundred times more accompHshed and adroit than
the Canoness of Beja.

A romantic and mysterious story had quite as
much to do with the success of the Portuguese
Letters as any directness in their style. In
January 1669 a Httle duodecimo of 182 pages,
entitled simply Lettres Portugaises, was issued by
Barbin, the leading Paris publisher. The Letters
were five in number ; they were neither signed nor
addressed, and there was no indication of date or
place. A prefatory note stated that they were a
translation of certain Portuguese letters written to
a gentleman of quality who had been serving in
Portugal, and that the publisher did not know the
name of the writer. He abstained from saying
that he knew to whom they were addressed. In-
ternal evidence showed that the writer was a nun
in a Portuguese convent, and that she had been
forsaken, after an impassioned episode, by a
French cavalry officer who had loved and had
ridden away. He had passed, at the head of
his regiment, through the narrow streets of the
town where she lived, like the hero of a Border
ballad, not a bowshot from her bower-eaves, and
she had leaned over her balcony, for a fatal
instant, and all was lost and won. The little
book was read and continued to be read ; edition
after edition was called for, and in 1678 the letters
were stated to be written by " le Chevalier de
C. . . ." Saint Simon and Duclos each informed
the world that the male personage was the Marquis

72 FRENCH PROFILES

of Chamilly, long afterwards Marshal of France,
and a mighty warrior before the Roi-Soleil. But
no indiscretion of memoir-writers gave the slightest
information regarding the lady. All that appeared
was that her name was Mariana and that her
chamber-window looked across to the only place
mentioned in the letters — Mertola, a little town
on the right bank of the Guadiana. But in 1810
Boissonade, in a copy of the first edition, found a
note in a contemporary hand, stating in French
that the letters were written by Mariana Alca-
forada, a nun in a convent at Beja, in the pro-
vince of Alem-Tejo.

Beja, the theatre of the Portuguese Letters^ is
a small mediaeval city, perched on a hill in the
midst of the vast fertile plain of central Portugal,
and boasting to this day a ring of walls and a
lofty citadel, which make it a beacon from all parts
of the surrounding province. What the Marquis
of Chamilly was doing at Beja may now be ex-
plained, especially as, owing to the recent re-
searches of M. Beauvois, we can for the first time
follow him with some exactness. The French
were holding a very equivocal position with regard
to Portugal. The Queen of Portugal was a French
princess, and the court of Lisbon was full of
Frenchmen, but Louis XIV. did not find it con-
venient to give Don Alfonso his open support.
The fact was that Mazarin, anxious to meet the
Spaniards half-way, had sacrificed Portugal in the
negotiations of the He des Faisans. He had no
intention, however, of really leaving his old allies
to the tender mercies of Madrid, and he secretly

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 73

encouraged the Portuguese to fight for their inde-
pendence. The Spaniards had no sooner seen
France sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees, late in
1659, than they threw themselves on the frontier
of Portugal, and a guerilla war began that lasted
for nine years. All France could openly do was
to permit her own recently disbanded foreign
auxiliaries to take up service with the King of
Portugal ; and as a general for these somewhat
dubiously constituted troops, the Count of Schom-
berg offered peculiar advantages, as a Huguenot
and a citizen of Heidelberg. Schomberg arrived
late in 1660, and from this time forward success
leaned to the side of Portugal. M. Beauvois has
discovered that it was not until 1663 that a young
cavalry officer of great promise accompanied the
non- official envoy of France, Ablancourt, to the
court of Lisbon. This young soldier was Noel
Bouton, then known under the title of Count of
St. L6ger-sur-Dheune, who had already, although
only twenty-six years of age, seen a great deal of
service in the field. He was the eleventh child of
a fine old Burgundy noble, who had trained him
to arms. In 1656 he had been taken prisoner at
the siege of Valenciennes, and had attracted the
notice of the king by a succession of gallant ex-
ploits. He is the hero, though in a most unheroic
light, of the Portuguese Letters.

His first mission to Portugal seems to have
been diplomatic ; but on the 30th of April 1664,
being at Estremoz, on the Spanish frontier, and
in the heart of the fighting, he received from
Schomberg the command of a regiment of cavalry,

74 FRENCH PROFILES

and at once took his place in the forefront of the
work in hand. His name is henceforth connected
with the httle victories of this obscure and pro-
vincial war, the results of which, none the less,
were highly important to Portugal. The theatre
of the campaign was the hilly district lying between
the Douro and that part of the Guadiana which
flows westward before its course changes at Jura-
menha. Chamilly is first mentioned with glory
for his part in the ten days' siege of Valenga-de-
Alcantara, in Spain, in June 1664. A month
later he helped to defeat the Spaniards under the
walls of Castello Rodrigo, a mountain fastness in
the valley of the Douro. By this victory the in-
dependence of Northern Portugal was secured.
All through 1665 Chamilly and his dragoons
hovered around Badajos, winning laurels in June
at the great battle of Villa Vi90sa ; and in October,
in the flight on Badajos, after the victory of Rio
Xevora. The war now sank to a series of marches
and countermarches, diversified by a few skirmishes
between the Tagus and Badajos. But in September
1667, after the Count of St. L6ger, who is now
Marquis of Chamilly, has been more than three
years in Portugal, we find him for the first time
distinguishing himself in the plains of southern
Alam-Tejo by an attack on the Castle of Ferreira,
a few miles from Beja. It is scarcely too much
to conjecture that it was either while advancing
on, or more probably while returning from
Ferreira, that he passed under the balcony of the
Franciscan convent of the Conception, and won
the heart of the susceptible canoness. So long

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 75

as the war was being prosecuted with ardour
Chamilly could have had no time for such a
liaison, but all the troubles of the Portuguese were
practically over when Ferreira fell. Six months
later, on the 13th of February, 1668, peace was
proclaimed, and Spain accepted the independence
of Portugal.^

A glance at the map will show the importance
of these dates and names in judging the authen-
ticity of the letters of Mariana. Without them
the critics of those letters have been left with no
basis for conjecturing when or how, between 1661
and 1668, the Portuguese nun and the French
officer met and parted. We now see that for the
first arduous years of the campaign the young
Frenchman was not near Beja, but that he may
well have spent the last six months of his cam-
paigning in peace within or beside its walls. One
or two otherwise meaningless phrases in the
letters are now easily explicable ; and the pro-
bability that the story, as tradition has sketched it
for us, is mainly correct, becomes vastly greater.
Before considering what these expressions are,

^ The important sequence of facts here given with regard to the
military record of Chamilly in Portugal has never been used before
in any critical examination of the Portuguese Letters. That I am
able to give it is owing to the kindness of my friend, M. Jusserand,
who has pointed out to me a very learned memoir on the Chamilly
family, full of fresh facts, buried by a Burgundian historian, M. E.
Beauvois, in the transactions for 1884 of a local society, the " Soci^t^
d'Histoire " of Beaune. I think I never saw so valuable a contribution
to history concealed with so successful a modesty. I am the more
anxious to express my debt to M. Beauvois for his facts, in that I
wholly disagree with his conclusions when he comes to deal with the
Porttigtuse Letters,

76 FRENCH PROFILES

however, it may be best to take the Letters them-
selves into our hands.

It is with some trepidation that I confess that,
in my judgment, the central fact on which the
chronicle of the Portuguese Letters hangs has
hitherto been overlooked by all their editors and
critics. As the Letters were published without
dates, without indications of place or address,
they took a sequence which has ever since been
religiously adhered to. But reading them through
very carefully — as Mark Pattison used to say all
books should be read, pencil in hand — I had
come to the conclusion that this order was not
merely incorrect, but fatal, if persevered in, to
any historic credence in the Letters as a whole.
The fourth has all the appearance of being the
earliest in date, and M. Beauvois' discoveries
make this almost certain. We must understand
that all the five letters are the successive appeals
of a forsaken woman, who repeats her expressions'
of love and lamentation without much indication of
scene or season. But some such indication may,
by reading the text with great care, be discovered.
The fourth letter, which I believe to be the first,
opens thus abruptly : —

" Your lieutenant tells me that a storm forced
you to put into port in the kingdom of Algarve.
I am afraid that you must have greatly suffered on
the sea, and this fear has so occupied me that I
have thought no more about all my own troubles.
Are you quite sure that your lieutenant takes
more interest than I do in all that happens to
you ? Why then do you keep him better in-

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 77

formed ? And, finally, why have you not written
to me ? I am very unfortunate if you found no
opportunity of writing to me before you started,
and I am still more so if you did find one without
using it to write to me. Your injustice and your
ingratitude are extreme, yet I should be in despair
if they brought you misfortune."

The tone of this is angry and indignant, but it
is not the tone of a woman who considers herself
abandoned. She has evidently parted with her
lover unwillingly, and with suspicion, but she
does not resign the right to scold him. More-
over, it is noticeable that he has but just started,
and that he had hardly put to sea before he was
driven into a port in Algarve. Not a critic of the
Portuguese Letters has known what to make of
this latter point, for Algarve is the strip running
along the extreme south coast of Portugal, and no
ship leaving Lisbon for France could possibly be
driven into ports that look right across into Africa.
But as we now see Chamilly slowly descending
the frontier from the Douro to Beja, and as we
presently find Mariana overwhelmed with emotion
at the sight of the road to Mertola, we have but
to look again at the map to observe that Mertola
would be naturally the first stage in a journey
continued south to the mouth of the Guadiana,
which is navigable from that town onwards. On
reaching the sea Chamilly would take ship, and
would most naturally be driven by the first storm
into some port of Algarve, from which the news
would promptly be brought back to Beja. When
we find the Portuguese nun speaking of some

78 FRENCH PROFILES

early confidences as made " five or six months
ago," and when we recollect that the capture of
Ferreira took place five months before the peace
with Spain, we can hardly doubt that the events
upon which the Letters are founded took place
between September 1667 and February 1668,
soon after which latter date Chamilly doubtless
made an excuse for setting forth for France.
Thus a series of minute expressions in this so-called
fourth letter — expressions hitherto meaningless or
misleading — are shown to be of vital importance
in testifying to the genuineness of the corre-
spondence.

Another fragment from this same letter will help
to complete the picture of Chamilly's desertion : —

" You have taken advantage of the excuses
which you had for going back to France. A ship
was starting. Why did you not let her start ?
Your family had written to you. Do you not
know what persecutions I have endured from
mine ? Your honour compelled you to forsake
me. Have I been so solicitous about my honour ?
You were forced to go to serve your king. If all
that is said of him be true, he has no need of your
help, and he would have excused you. I should
have been only too happy had we passed our lives
together ; but since a cruel absence had to divide
us, it seems to me that I ought to be satisfied in
knowing that I am not faithless to you. Indeed,
for all the world contains would I not commit so
base an action. What ! have you known the
depths of my heart and my affection, and have
yet been able to persuade yourself to abandon me

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 79

for ever, and to expose me to the terror of believ-
ing that you will for the future only think of me to
sacrifice the memory of me to some new passion ! "

The freedom with which this cloistered lady
and her foreign lover met has been objected to as
improbable. But the manners of Portugal in the
seventeenth century gave to women of the religious
orders a social freedom denied to ordinary wives
and daughters. In the Me'moires of Ablancourt,
whom Chamilly attended on his first mission to
Lisbon, we read of royal parties of pleasure at the
Convent of Santa Speranza, where the nuns and
courtiers mingled in theatrical representations
before the king and queen. Another con-
temporary account admits that the French and
English were so much beloved in Portugal that
some liberty was allowed to them beyond what a
Portuguese gentleman might indulge in. It is
easy to see that if convents might without scandal
be opened to men in social intercourse, it is not
probable that they would be closed to a brilliant
foreign ally fresh from Villa Vigosa or Ferreira.
But we must again allow Mariana Alcaforada to
tell her own tale : —

" Every one has noticed the entire change in
my mood, my manners, and my person. My
mother has spoken to me about it, with bitterness
at first, and then with a certain kindliness. I do
not know what I said to her in reply ; I fancy
I must have confessed everything to her. The
strictest of the nuns here are sorry to see what a
condition I am in ; they even treat me on account
of it with some consideration and some tender-

8o FRENCH PROFILES

ness. Everybody is touched at my love, and
you alone remain perfectly indifferent, writing
me only cold letters, full of repetitions ; half the
paper is not filled, and you are rude enough to
let me see that you are dying with impatience to
be done writing. Dofia Brites has been persecut-
ing me these last days to get me to leave my
room ; and fancying that it would amuse me, she
took me for a turn on the balcony from which
one has a view of Mertola ; 1 went with her, and
at once a cruel memory came back to me, a
memory which kept me weeping all the remainder
of the day. She brought me back, and I threw
myself on my bed, where I could but reflect a
thousand times over how little chance there was
of my ever being cured. Whatever is done to
solace me augments my suffering, and in the
remedies themselves I find intimate reasons why
I should be wretched. I have often seen you
pass that spot with an air that charmed me, and
I was on that balcony on that fatal day when I
first began to feel the symptoms of my ill-starred
passion. I fancied that you wished to please me,
although you did not know me. I persuaded
myself that you had noticed me among all the
ladies that were with me. 1 imagined that when
you drew rein, you were well pleased that 1 should
have a better sight of you, and that I should
admire your skill and how graceful you looked on
horseback. I was surprised to notice that I was
frightened when you took your horse through a
difficult place ; the fact is that 1 was taking a
secret interest in all your actions."

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 8i

We see that he wrote to her at first, although
not from that port of Algarve, in which he had
thought of nothing but business. It does not
appear that after this he ever wrote again, nor as
her memory loses its sharpness does she ever, after
this first letter, regain the same clearness of re-
miniscence. We may quote once more from this,
the most interesting of the famous five. It is
thus that Mariana closes her pathetic appeal : —

" I want to have the portraits of your brother
and of your sister-in-law. Whatever is anything to
you is very dear to me, and I am wholly devoted
to what concerns you. I have no will of my own
left. There are moments in which it seems to me
that I should be humble enough to serve her
whom you love. . . . An officer has been wait-
ing for this letter for a long time ; I had made up
my mind to write it in such a way that you may
not be disgusted when you receive it, but I see
I have made it too extravagant. I must close it.
Alas ! it is out of my power to do so. I seem to
be talking to you when I write to you, and you
become a little more present to me then. . . .
The officer who is to take this letter reminds me
for the fourth time that he wishes to start. What
a hurry he is in ! He, no doubt, is forsaking
some unhappy lady in this country. Farewell !
it is harder for me to finish my letter than it was
for you to abandon me, perhaps for ever."

The remaining letters give fewer indications of
date and sequence than the fourth, nor are they
so picturesque. But the reader will not seek the
Portuguese Letters, as he seeks the Me'moires of

F

82 FRENCH PROFILES

Madame de Motteville, or even the correspond-
ence of Madame de Sevign^, mainly for sparkling
incident and the pretty details of contemporary
life. The value of these epistles rests in their
sincerity as a revelation of the heart. Poor
Mariana had no inclination to describe the daily
life of her fellow-nuns or the intrigues of society
in Beja. She has been deceived, the man she
loves is absent, and as she weeps without cessa-
tion, she cannot help confessing to herself that
she does not expect to see him back again.

" I resigned my life to you," she says in the
so-called first letter, " as soon as I saw you, and I
feel some pleasure now in sacrificing to you what
you will not accept. A thousand times a day I
send my sighs out after you ; they search for you
everywhere, and for all reward of so much dis-
quietude what do they bring me back but too
sincere a warning from my evil fortune, which is
too cruel to suffer me to deceive myself, and
which says to me every moment. Cease, cease,
unfortunate Mariana ! vainly thou dost consume
thyself, vainly dost seek a lover whom thou shalt
never see again, who has crost the ocean to
escape from thee, who is now in France in the
midst of pleasures, who gives no single moment to
the thought of thy sufferings, and who can well
dispense with all these thy needless transports."

She will not, however, yet admit that she is
wholly deserted. She has received a letter from
him, and though its tone was so far from respond-
ing to her own that it threw her beside herself for
three hours, it has re-awakened her hopes.

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 83

"Can you ever be contented by a passion less
ardent than mine ? You will, perhaps, find else-
where more beauty (although you used to tell me
that I was beautiful enough) but you will never
find so much love again, and all the rest is
nothing. Do not fill out your letters with need-
less matter, and you may save yourself the trouble
of reminding me to remember you. I cannot
forget you, and I cannot forget, too, that you
made me hope that you would come back to me
for awhile. Ah ! why will you not spend all your
life here ? Were it possible for me to quit this
wretched cloister, I would not stay in Portugal to
see whether you performed your promises. I
would not count the cost, but would fly to seek
you, to follow you, to love you. I dare not
persuade myself that this will be ; I will not
nourish such a hope (though there might be
pleasure in delusion), for since I am doomed to
be unhappy, I will have no feelings inconsistent
with my lot."

The violent and wretched tone of the " Letters "
culminates in the third, which is unsurpassed as a
revelation of the ingenious self-torture of a sensi-
tive mind brooding upon its own despair. The
women of Paris were astonished to read such
pages as the following, where complex emotions
which they had often experienced or imagined,
but had never been able to formulate, suddenly
found perfectly direct and limpid expression : —

" I cannot persuade myself to wish that you
may no longer be thinking about me ; and, indeed,
to speak sincerely, I am furiously jealous of what-

84 FRENCH PROFILES

ever may give you happiness, and of all that may
touch your heart and your tastes in France. I do
not know why I write to you. I see well enough
that you will only pity me, and I do not wish for
your pity. I am very angry with myself when I
reflect upon all that I have sacrificed for you. I
have exposed myself to the rage of my relatives,
to the severity of the laws of this country against
nuns, and to your ingratitude, which appears to
me the greatest of all misfortunes. Yet, all the
while, I am conscious that my remorse is not
sincere, and that for the love of you I would with
all my heart run into far greater dangers than any
of these."

The extraordinary and at that time the unique
merit of the Portuguese nun, as a letter-writer, lies
in the fact that, in the full tempest and turmoil of
her passion, she never yields to the temptation of
giving herself up to rhetoric, or rather that whenever
she does make a momentary concession to this habit
of her age, she doubles on herself immediately, and
is the first to deprecate such false flowers of speech.
She knows that her letters are too long, although
she cannot keep them within bounds. It is part
of the torture of her spirit that she recognises
better than any monitor from without could teach
her, that her lamentations, reproaches, and
entreaties are as little calculated as a material
flood of tears would be to revive the fire upon a
hearth of sunken embers. As she clamours at
the door of memory, and makes the air resound
with her importunity, she is sane enough to be
aware all the while that these are no seductions

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 85

by which a weary heart may be refreshed and
re-awakened ; yet is she absolutely powerless to
moderate her own emotion. The result is poignant
to the last degree ; and from the absence of all, or
almost all, surrounding local colour of incident or
tradition, the spectacle of this distress moves and
excites the reader in somewhat the same fashion
as the loud crying of an unseen figure out-of-doors
in the darkness of the night may move the helpless
sympathy of one who listens from a window.

Nothing more is known of this shadowy
Mariana Alcaforada, but the author of her mis-
fortunes figures long and gloriously in French
history. His fatuity, if not his heartlessness, in
allowing her letters to be immediately printed, is
a blot upon his humanity in our eyes, but seems
to have abated his magnificence not a whit among
his contemporaries. It would be idle to inquire
by what means the letters came into the hands of
a publisher. In 1690, upon the death of the
translator, it was admitted that they had been
turned out of Portuguese into excellent French
by Pierre Girardin de Guilleragues, a "Gascon
gourmand," as Saint-Simon calls him, immortalised
moreover by Boileau, in a graceful couplet, as
being —

" Born master of all arts a court can teach,
And skilled alike in silence and in speech."

It was Guilleragues who said of Pelisson that
" he abused the permission that men have to be
ugly." He was patronised by Madame de Main-
tenon and died French ambassador to the Porte

86 FRENCH PROFILES

in 1689. To Guiileragues is attributed the com-
position of the Portuguese Letters by those who
seek to deny that Mariana Alcaforada ever existed.
But in their own day no one doubted that
the actors in this Httle drama were real persons.
Chamilly is described by Saint-Simon as a tall,
heavy man, extremely good-natured and gallant
in fight, although to listen to and to look at,
giving little suggestion that he could ever have
inspired so romantic a passion as that revealed
by the Portuguese Letters. To this there is an
obvious reply, that Saint-Simon only knew Cha-
milly in his mature years, and that there is no
reason why a heavy dragoon should not have
been very attractive to a Portuguese maiden at
twenty-six and yet seem most unattractive at forty-
six to the wittiest of memoir-writers. To the
Portuguese nun he undoubtedly behaved disgrace-
fully ill, and not at all like a Christian gentleman ;
but we must remember that his own age judged
such bad deeds as peccadillos in the free cam-
paign of love and war. Chamilly's subsequent
career was unquestionably glorious. He fought
the Turks in Candia, he commanded the troops of
the Electors of Cologne and of Munster, he won
deathless laurels at the famous siege of Grave ;
and, finally, after twenty-five campaigns, he ended
as Marshal of France, and married a wife who
was, as we may smile maliciously to read in our
Saint-Simon, " singularly ugly."

The success of the Portuguese Letters was
attested not merely by the multitude of successive
editions of the text, but by the imitations and

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 87

continuations which were foisted upon a credulous
public. Only seven months after the original
publication there appeared a second part contain-
ing seven letters, with the same date, 1669, on the
title-page. These did not, however, pretend to be
written by Mariana, but by a Portuguese lady of
quality. The style was very different, as the
publisher admitted, and the letters bear every
stamp of artifice and fiction. They were, how-
ever, greedily accepted as genuine, and the " Dame
Portugaise" took her place beside the "Religieuse."
The temptation to prolong the romance was irre-
sistible, and there was immediately published a
pamphlet of " Replies," five in number, supposed
to be sent by the French officer to the Portuguese
nun in answer to each of her letters. This came
from a Parisian press ; but the idea of publishing
the officer's letters had occurred simultaneously to
a provincial bookseller, and still in the same year,
1669, there appeared at Grenoble a volume of
New Repliesy six in number, the first being not
properly a reply, but an introductory letter. This
last publication openly professes to be fiction.
The editor states in the preface that being " neither
a girl, nor a nun, nor even perhaps in love," he
cannot pretend to express the sentiments of the
heart with the genuine vigour of the original
letters ; but that, as Aulus Sabinus ventured to
reply to certain of the heroic epistles of Ovid,
though with so little success as merely to heighten
the lustre of those originals, so he hopes by these
inventions, and a va&XQJeu d esprit^ to increase the
admiration of readers for Mariana's genuine

88 FRENCH PROFILES

correspondence. All this is very honest and very
legitimate, but so eager were the ladies of the
seventeenth century to be deluded that this
preface of the guileless editor was taken to
be a mere mystification, and the Grenoble New
Replies were swallowed like the rest. Some idea
of the popularity of the Portuguese Letters may be
gained, not merely from the vogue of these
successive imitations, but from the fact that
M. Eugene Asse, the latest and best of Mariana's
editors, has described no fewer than sixteen
editions of the Letters themselves, issued before
the close of the seventeenth century, a list which
would seem to be very far indeed from being
complete.

Rousseau was the first to start the idea that the
Portuguese Letters were written by a man. He
went upon no external evidence, but on subtle
and in truth very fanciful arguments regarding
the point of view taken by the writer. No one
else has seriously questioned their authenticity,
until quite recently, when M. Beauvois, a Bur-
gundian antiquary, has endeavoured to destroy
our faith in the existence of the Portuguese Nun.
This gentleman is an impassioned admirer of the
exploits of the Marquis of Chamilly, and it is not
difficult to perceive that his wish to discredit the
" Letters " is due to his desire to whitewash the
character of his hero, blackened for the present,
at all events to modern eyes, by the cruel abandon-
ment of this poor religious lady in the Beja con-
vent. This critic goes to the opposite extreme,
and allows himself to speak of Mariana's letters

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 89

as " the obsessions of a Maenad." Many of M.
Beauvois's acute objections are met by the re-
arrangement of the letters which I have suggested
above, and particularly by the fact that the fourth
of them should certainly stand the first. After a
careful examination of his criticism, and particu-
larly in the light of the important historical dates,
with regard to Chamilly's record in the Portuguese
war, which M. Beauvois has himself brought for-
ward, I for one am more persuaded than ever
that the outline of the story as we know it is true,
and that the letters, or something Portuguese
which was very like them, were actually sent
after the rascally belldtre when he made his way
back to France in 1668. Bare as the letters are,
there are nevertheless little touches of detail here
and there, little inexplicable allusions, such as a
real correspondence would possess, and such as
no forger would introduce. It would be tedious
in this place to dwell jminutely on this sort of
evidence, but a single example may be given. In
one passage the nun writes, " Ah ! how I envy
the happiness of Emmanuel and of Francisque.
Why am not I always with you, as they are ! "
Nothing more is said of these beings. We are
left to conjecture whether they were fellow-
officers, or servants, or dogs, or even perhaps
parrots. A forger would scarcely leave two
meaningless names in the body of his text with-
out some indication of his idea. The sincerity,
moreover, of the style and sentiments is extra-
ordinary, and is observed to great advantage by
comparing the various continuations and replies

90 FRENCH PROFILES

with the five original letters. To suppose the first
little volume of 1669 to be a deliberate fiction
would be to land us in the more serious difficulty
of discovering in its inventor a great imaginative
creator of emotional romance. The hero-worship
of M. Beauvois has not convinced me that
Mariana never gazed across the olives and oranges
to Mertola, nor watched the cavalcade of her false
dragoon file down into the gorge of the Guadiana.
The French critics have not taken any interest
in the influence of the Portuguese Letters in Eng-
land. Yet translations and imitations of these
letters became very numerous in this country
before the close of the seventeenth century. The
earliest version which I have been able to trace
is that of Sir Roger L'Estrange, published as a
very tiny little book of Five Love Letters from a
Nun to a Cavalier, in 1678 (December 28, 1677).
In a short preface to the reader, the translator
says, " These five letters are here at your service.
You will find in them the lively image of an
extravagant and an unfortunate passion, and that
a woman may be flesh and blood in a cloister
as well as in a palace." This translation of
L'Estrange's went on being reprinted for fifty
years, and was attended on its successful course
from one toilet to another by a variety of imita-
tions, the liveliest of which is attributed to the
pen of the vivacious Major Richardson Pack.
From the first the Portuguese Letters were not
presented to the women of England as literature,
but as models of sincere letter-writing, and hence
they escaped mention in our solemn handbooks of

A NUN'S LOVE LETTERS 91

bibliography and literary history. But their in-
fluence was extraordinary, and by the time that
the Spectator had come into existence, and Richard
Steele was sitting over his wine, " the slave of
beauty," writing out of his heart to Mary Scurlock,
the men and women of England had learned the
lesson which the nun of Beja was betrayed to
teach them, and they could say in plain, straight-
forward sentences exactly what it was in their
souls to express to one another, without any sort
of trope or rhetorical ornament.

1888.

JULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLY

Those who can endure an excursion into the
backwaters of Hterature may contemplate, neither
too seriously nor too lengthily, the career and
writings of Barbey d'Aurevilly. Very obscure in
his youth, he lived so long, and preserved his force
so consistently, that in his old age he became, if
not quite a celebrity, most certainly a notoriety.
At the close of his life — he reached his eighty-first
year — he was still to be seen walking the streets or
haunting the churches of Paris, his long, sparse
hair flying in the wind, his fierce eyes flashing
about him, his hat poised on the side of his head,
his famous lace frills turned back over the cuff of
his coat, his attitude always erect, defiant, and for-
midable. Down to the winter of 1 888 he preserved
the dandy dress of 1840, and never appeared but
as M. de Pontmartin has described him, in black
satin trousers, which fitted his old legs like a glove,
in a flapping, brigand wideawake, in a velvet waist-
coat, which revealed diamond studs and a lace
cravat, and in a wonderful shirt that covered the
most artful pair of stays. In every action, in every
glance, he seemed to be defying the natural decay
of years, and to be forcing old age to forget him
by dint of spirited and ceaseless self-assertion. He
was himself the prototype of all the Brassards and

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 93

Misnilgrands of his stories, the dandy of dandies,
the mummied and immortal beau.

His intellectual condition was not unlike his
physical one. He was a survival — of the most
persistent. The last, by far the last, of the Roman-
tiques of 1835, Barbey d'Aurevilly lived on into
an age wholly given over to other aims and ambi-
tions, without changing his own ideals by an iota.
He was to the great men who began the revival,
to figures like Alfred de Vigny, as Shirley was to
the early Elizabethans. He continued the old tra-
dition, without resigning a single habit or prejudice,
until his mind was not a whit less old-fashioned
than his garments. Victor Hugo, who hated him,
is said to have dedicated an unpublished verse to
his portrait : —

" Barbey d'Aurevilly, formidable imbecile,"

But imbecile was not at all the right word. He
was absurd ; he was outrageous ; he had, per-
haps, by dint of resisting the decrepitude of his
natural powers, become a little crazy. But im-
becility is the very last word to use of this mutin-
ous, dogged, implacable old pirate of letters.

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly was born near Valognes

(the " V "which figures in several of his stories)

on the 2nd of November 1808. He liked to re-
present himself as a scion of the bluest nobility of
Normandy, and he communicated to the makers
of dictionaries the fact that the name of his direct
ancestor is engraved on the tomb of William the
Conqueror. But some have said that the names
of his father and mother were never known, and

94 FRENCH PROFILES

others (poor d'Aurevilly !) have set him down as
the son of a butcher in the village of Saint-Sauveur-
le-Vicomte. He was at college with Maurice de
Gu^rin, and quite early, about 1830 apparently,
he became personally acquainted with Chateau-
briand. His youth seems to be wrapped up in
mystery ; according to one of the best informed
of his biographers, he vanished in 1831, and was
not heard of again until 1851. To these twenty
years of alleged disappearance, one or two remark-
able books of his are, however, ascribed. It appears
that what is perhaps the most characteristic of all
his writings, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell,
was written as early as 1842 ; and in 1845 a very
small edition of it was printed by an admirer of
the name of Trebutien, to whose affection d'Aure-
villy seems to have owed his very existence. It is
strange that so little is distinctly known about a
man who, late in life, attracted much curiosity and
attention. He was a consummate romancer, and
he liked to hint that he was engaged during early
life in intrigues of a corsair description. The truth
seems to be that he lived, in great obscurity, in the
neighbourhood of Caen, probably by the aid of
journalism. As early as 1825 he began to publish ;
but of all the productions of his youth, the only
one which can now be met with is the prose
poem of Amatde'e, written, I suppose, about 1835 ;
this was published by M. Paul Bourget as a curi-
osity immediately after Barbey d'Aurevilly's death.
Judged as a story, Amatde'e is puerile ; it describes
how to a certain poet, called Somegod, who dwelt
on a lonely cliff, there came a young man alto-

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 95

gether wise and stately named Altai, and a frail
daughter of passion, who gives her name to the
book. These three personages converse in magni-
ficent language, and, the visitors presently depart-
ing, the volume closes. But an interest attaches
to the fact that in Somegod {Quelque Dieu /) the
author was painting a portrait of Maurice de
Gu^rin, while the majestic Altai is himself.
The conception of this book is Ossianic ; but the
style is often singularly beautiful, with a mar-
moreal splendour founded on a study of Chateau-
briand, and, perhaps, of Goethe, and not without
relation to that of Gu^rin himself.

The earliest surviving production of d'Aurevilly,
if we except Amai'dee, is L Amour Impossible, a
novel published with the object of correcting the
effects of the poisonous Le'lia of George Sand.
Already, in this crude book, we see something of
the Barbey d'Aurevilly of the future, the Dandy-
Paladin, the Catholic Sensualist or Diavolist, the
author of the few poor thoughts and the sonorous,
paroxysmal, abundant style. I forget whether it
is here or in a slightly later novel that, in hastily
turning the pages, I detect the sentiment, " Our
forefathers were wise to cut the throats of the
Huguenots, and very stupid not to burn Luther."
The late Master of Balliol is said to have asked a
reactionary undergraduate, "What, Sir ! would you
burn, would you burn ? " If he had put the question
to Barbey d'Aureyilly, the scented hand would have
been laid on the cambric bosom, and the answer
would have been, "Certainly I should." In the
midst of the infidel society and literature of the

96 FRENCH PROFILES

Second Empire, d'Aurevilly persisted in the most
noisy profession of his entire loyalty to Rome,
but his methods of proclaiming his attachment
were so violent and outrageous that the Church
showed no gratitude to her volunteer defender.
This was a source of much bitterness and recrimi-
nation, but it is difficult to see how the author of
Le Pretre Marie and Une Histoire sans Nom could
expect pious Catholics to smile on his very peculiar
treatment of ecclesiastical life.

Barbey d'Aurevilly undertook to continue the
work of Chateaubriand, and he gave his full
attention to a development of the monarchical
neo-catholicism which that great inaugurator had
sketched out. He was impressed by the beauty
of the Roman ceremonial, and he determined to
express with poetic emotion the mystical majesty
of the symbol. It must be admitted that, although
his work never suggests any knowledge of or sym-
pathy with the spiritual part of religion, he has a
genuine appreciation of its externals. It would be
difficult to point to a more delicate and full im-
pression of the solemnity which attends the crepus-
cular light of a church at vespers than is given in
the opening pages of A un Diner dAihees. In
L Ensorceleey too, we find the author piously follow-
ing a chanting procession round a church, and ejacu-
lating, " Rien n'est beau comme cet instant solennel
des c^r^monies catholiques." Almost every one of
his novels deals by preference with ecclesiastical
subjects, or introduces some powerful figure of a
priest. But it is very difficult to believe that his
interest in it all is other than histrionic or pheno-

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 97

menal. He likes the business of a priest, he Hkes
the furniture of a church, but there, in spite of his
vehement protestations, his piety seems to a candid
reader to have begun and ended.

For a humble and reverent child of the Catholic
Church, it must be confessed that Barbey d'Aure-
villy takes strange liberties. The mother would
seem to have had little control over the caprices of
her extremely unruly son. There is scarcely one
of these ultra-catholic novels of his which it is
conceivable that a pious family would like to see
lying upon its parlour table. The Devil takes a
prominent part in many of them, for d'Aurevilly's
whim is to see Satanism everywhere, and to con-
sider it matter of mirth ; he is like a naughty boy,
giggling when a rude man breaks his mother's
crockery. He loves to play with dangerous and
forbidden notions. In I^ Pretre Marie (which, to
his lofty indignation, was forbidden to be sold in
Catholic shops) the hero is a renegade and inces-
tuous priest, who loves his own daughter, and
makes a hypocritical confession of error in order
that, by that act of perjury, he may save her life,
as she is dying of the agony of knowing him to
be an atheist. This man, the Abb6 Sombreval, is
bewitched, is possessed of the Devil, and so is
Ryno de Marigny in Une Vieille Maitresse, and Las-
th^nie de Ferjol in Une Histoire sans Norn. This is
one of Barbey d'Aurevilly's favourite tricks, to
paint an extraordinary, an abnormal condition of
spirit, and to avoid the psychological difficulty by
simply attributing it to sorcery. But he is all
the time rather amused by the wickedness than

G

98 FRENCH PROFILES

shocked at it. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime — the
moral of which is that people of a certain grandeur
of temperament can be absolutely wicked with
impunity — he frankly confesses his partiality for
" la plaisanterie 16gerement sacrilege," and all the
philosophy of d'Aurevilly is revealed in that rash
phrase. It is not a matter of a wounded con-
science expressing itself with a brutal fervour, but
the gusto of conscious wickedness. His mind is
intimately akin with that of the Neapolitan lady,
whose story he was perhaps the first to tell, who
wished that it only were a sin to drink iced
sherbet. Barbey d'Aurevilly is a devil who may
or may not believe, but who always makes a point
of trembhng.

The most interesting feature of Barbey d'Aure-
villy's temperament, as revealed in his imaginative
work, is, however, his pre-occupation with his own
physical life. In his youth, Byron and Alfieri were
the objects of his deepest idolatry ; he envied their
disdainful splendour of passion ; and he fashioned
his dream in poverty and obscurity so as to make
himself believe that he was of their race. He was
a Disraeli — with whom, indeed, he has certain re-
lations of style — but with none of Disraeli's social
advantages, and with a more inconsequent and
violent habit of imagination. Unable, from want
of wealth and position, to carry his dreams into
effect, they became exasperated and intensified,
and at an age when the real dandy is settling
down into a man of the world, Barbey d'Aurevilly
was spreading the wings of his fancy into the
infinite azure of imaginary experience. He had

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 99

convinced himself that he was a Lovelace, a Lauzun,
a Brummell, and the philosophy of dandyism filled
his thoughts far more than if he had really been
able to spend a stormy youth among marchionesses
who carried, set in diamonds in a bracelet, the
ends of the moustaches of viscounts. In the
novels of his maturity and his old age, therefore,
Barbey d'Aurevilly loved to introduce magnificent
aged dandies, whose fatuity he dwelt upon with
ecstasy, and in whom there is no question that he
saw reflections of his imaginary self. No better
type of this can be found than that Vicomte de
Brassard, an elaborate, almost enamoured, portrait
of whom fills the earlier pages of what is else a
rather dull story, Le Rideau Cramoisi. The very
clever, very immoral tale called Le Plus Bel Amour
de Don Juan — which relates how a superannuated
but still incredibly vigorous old beau gives a
supper to the beautiful women of quality whom
he has known, and recounts to them the most
piquant adventure of his life — is redolent of this
intense delight in the prolongation of enjoyment
by sheer refusal to admit the ravages of age. Al-
though my space forbids quotation, I cannot resist
repeating a passage which illustrates this horrible
fear of the loss of youth and the struggle against
it, more especially as it is a good example of
d'Aurevilly's surcharged and intepid style : —

" II n'y avait pas la de ces jeunesses vert tendre,
de ces petites demoiselles qu'execrait Byron, qui
sentent la tartelette et qui, par la tournure, ne
sont encore que des 6pluchettes, mais tons 6t6s
splendides et savoureux, plantureux automnes,

loo FRENCH PROFILES

6panouissements et plenitudes, seins eblouissants
battant leur plein majestueux au bord decouvert
des corsages, et, sous les camees de I'^paule nue,
des bras de tout galbe, mais surtout des bras
puissants, de ces biceps de Sabines qui ont lutt6
avec les Romains, et qui seraient capables de
s'entrelacer, pour I'arreter, dans les rayons de la
roue du char de la vie."

This obsession of vanishing youth, this intense
determination to preserve the semblance and colour
of vitality, in spite of the passage of years, is,
however, seen to greatest advantage in a very
curious book of Barbey d'Aurevilly's, in some
aspects, indeed, the most curious which he has left
behind him, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell.
This is really a work of his early maturity, for it
was printed in a small private edition so long ago
as 1845. It was not published, however, until
1 86 1, when it may be said to have introduced its
author to the world of France. Later on he wrote
a curious study of the fascination exercised over
La Grande Mademoiselle by Lauzun, Un Dandy
d'avant les Dandys, and these two are now published
in one volume, which forms that section of the
immense work of d'Aurevilly which best rewards
the curious reader.

Many writers in England, from Thomas Carlyle
in Sartor Resartus to our ingenious young forger
of paradoxes, Mr. Max Beerbohm, have dealt
upon that semi-feminine passion in fatuity, that
sublime attention to costume and deportment,
which marks the dandy. The type has been, as
d'Aurevilly does not fail to observe, mainly an

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY loi

English one. We point to Beau Nash, to Byron,
to Lord Yarmouth, to Sheridan, and, above all,
" k ce Dandy royal, S. M. Georges IV. ;" but the
star of each of these must pale before that of
Brummell. These others, as was said in a different
matter, had " other preoccupations," but Brummell
was entirely absorbed, as by a solemn mission, by
the conduct of his person and his clothes. So far,
in the portraiture of such a figure, there is nothing
very singular in what the French novelist has skil-
fully and nimbly done, but it is his own attitude
which is so original. All other writers on the
dandies have had their tongues in their cheeks.
If they have commended, it is because to be pre-
posterous is to be amusing. When we read that
"dandyism is the least selfish of all the arts," we
smile, for we know that the author's design is
to be entertaining. But Barbey d'Aurevilly is
doggedly in earnest. He loves the great dandies
of the past as other men contemplate with ardour
dead poets and dead musicians. He is seriously
enamoured of their mode of life. He sees nothing
ridiculous, nothing even limited, in their self-con-
centration. It reminds him of the tiger and of the
condor ; it recalls to his imagination the vast,
solitary forces of Nature ; and when he contem-
plates Beau Brummell, his eyes fill with tears of
nostalgia. So would he have desired to live ;
thus, and not otherwise, would he fain have
strutted and trampled through that eighteenth
century to which he is for ever gazing back with
a fond regret. "To dress one's self," he says,
" should be the main business of life," and with

IC2 FRENCH PROFILES

great ingenuity he dwells upon the latent but
positive influence which dress has had on men
of a nature apparently furthest removed from its
trivialities ; upon Pascal, for instance, upon Buffon,
upon Wagner.

It was natural that a writer who delighted in
this patrician ideal of conquering man should have
a limited conception of life. Women to Barbey
d'Aurevilly were of two varieties — either nuns or
amorous tigresses ; they were sometimes both in
one. He had no idea of soft gradations in society:
there were the tempestuous marchioness and her
intriguing maid on one side ; on the other,
emptiness, the sordid hovels of the bourgeoisie.
This absence of observation or recognition of life
d'Aurevilly shared with the other Romantiques,
but in his sinister and contemptuous aristocracy
he passed beyond them all. Had he lived to be-
come acquainted with the writings of Nietzsche,
he would have hailed a brother-spirit, one who
loathed democracy and the humanitarian temper
as much as he did himself. But there is no
philosophy in Barbey d'Aurevilly, nothing but a
prejudice fostered and a sentiment indulged.

In referring to Nicholas Nickleby, a novel which
he vainly endeavoured; to get through, d'Aurevilly
remarks : " I wish to write an essay on Dickens,
and at present I have only read one hundred
pages of his writings. But I consider that if
one hundred pages do not give the talent of a man,
they give his spirit, and the spirit of Dickens is
odious to me." "The vulgar Dickens," he calmly
remarks in Journalistes et Pole'mistes, and we laugh

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 103

at the idea of sweeping away such a record of
genius on the strength of a chapter or two misread
in Nicholas Nickleby. But Barbey d'Aurevilly was
not Dickens, and it really is not necessary to
study closely the vast body of his writings. The
same characteristics recur in them all, and the
impression may easily be weakened by vain repeti-
tion. In particular, a great part of the later life
of d'Aurevilly was occupied in writing critical
notices and studies for newspapers and reviews.
He made this, I suppose, his principal source of
income ; and from the moment when, in 1851, he
became literary critic to Le Pays to that of his
death, nearly forty years later, he was incessantly
dogmatising about literature and art. He never
became a critical force, he was too violent and,
indeed, too empty for that ; but a pen so brilliant
as his is always welcome with editors whose design
is not to be true, but to be noticeable, and to
escape '• the obvious." The most cruel of Barbey
d'Aurevilly's enemies could not charge his criticism
with being obvious. It is intensely contentious
and contradictory. It treats all writers and artists
on the accepted nursery principle of " Go and see
what baby's doing, and tell him not to." This is
entertaining for a moment ; and if the shower of
abuse is spread broadly enough, some of it must
come down on shoulders that deserve it. But the
" slashing " review of yester-year is dismal reading,
and it cannot be said that the library of reprinted
criticism to which d'Aurevilly gave the general
title of Les (Euvres et les Hommes is very enticing.
He had a great contempt for Goethe and for

I04 FRENCH PROFILES

Sainte-Beuve, in whom he saw false priests con-
stantly leading the public away from the true
principle of literary expression, " le couronnement,
la gloire et la force de toute critique, que je
cherche en vain." A very ingenious writer, M.
Ernest Tissot, has paid Barbey d'Aurevilly the
compliment of taking him seriously in this matter,
and has written an elaborate study on what his
criterium was. But this is, perhaps, to inquire too
kindly. I doubt whether he sought with any very
sincere expectation of finding ; like the Persian
sage, "he swore, but was he sober when he
swore ? " Was he not rather intoxicated with his
self-encouraged romantic exasperation, and de-
termined to be fierce, independent, and uncom-
promising at all hazards ? Such are, at all events,
the doubts awakened by his indignant diatribes,
which once amused Paris so much, and now
influence no living creature. Some of his dicta,
in their showy way, are forcible. " La critique a
pour blason la croix, la balance et la glaive ; "
that is a capital phrase on the lips of a reviewer,
who makes himself the appointed Catholic censor
of worldly letters, and is willing to assume at once
the cross, the scales, and the sword. More of the
hoof peeps out in this : " La critique, c'est une
intrepidity de I'esprit et du caract^re." To a
nature like that of d'Aurevilly, the distinction
between intrepidity and arrogance is never clearly
defined.

It is, after all, in his novels that Barbey
d'Aurevilly displays his talent in its most interest-
ing form. His powers developed late ; and per-

BA.RBEY D'AUREVILLY 105

haps the best constructed of all his tales is Une
Histoire sans Nom, which dates from 1882, when he
was quite an old man. In this, as in all the rest,
a surprising narrative is well, although extremely
leisurely, told, but without a trace of psychology.
It was impossible for d'Aurevilly to close his stories
effectively ; in almost every case, the futility and
extravagance of the last few pages destroys the
effect of the rest. Like the Fat Boy, he wanted to
make your flesh creep, to leave you cataleptic
with horror at the end, but he had none of
Poe's skill in producing an effect of terror.
In Le Rideau Cramoisi (which is considered, I
cannot tell why, one of his successes) the heroine
dies at an embarrassing moment, without any dis-
ease or cause of death being suggested — she
simply dies. But he is generally much more
violent than this ; at the close of A un Diner
cCAthe'es, which up to a certain point is an
extremely fine piece of writing, the angry parents
pelt one another with the mummied heart of their
only child ; in Lc Dessous des Cartes, the key of all
the intrigue is discovered at last in the skeleton of
an infant buried in a box of mignonette. If it is
not by a monstrous fact, it is by an audacious feat
of anti-morality, that Barbey d'Aurevilly seeks to
harrow and terrify our imaginations. In Le Bon-
heur dans le Crime, Hauteclaire Stassin, the woman-
fencer, and the Count of Savigny, pursue their
wild intrigue and murder the Countess slowly, and
then marry each other, and live, with youth far
prolonged (d'Aurevilly's special idea of divine
blessing), without a pang of remorse, without a

io6 FRENCH PROFILES

crumpled rose-leaf in their felicity, like two
magnificent plants spreading in the violent
moisture of a tropical forest.

On the whole, it is as a writer, pure and simple,
that Barbey d'Aurevilly claims most attention.
His style, which Paul de Saint-Victor (quite in his
own spirit) described as a mixture of tiger's blood
and honey, is full of extravagant beauty. He has
a strange intensity, a sensual and fantastic force,
in his torrent of intertwined sentences and pre-
posterous exclamations. The volume called Les
DiaholiqueSj which contains a group of his most
characteristic stories, published in 1874, may be
recommended to those who wish, in a single
example, compendiously to test the quality of
Barbey d'Aurevilly. He has a curious love of
punning, not for purposes of humour, but to
intensify his style : " Quel oubli et quelle oubliette "
{Le Dessous des Cartes), " boudoir fleur de pecher
ou de peche " [Le Plus bel Amour), " renoncer a
I'amour malpropre, mais jamais a I'amour propre"
i^A un Diner d'Athe'es). He has audacious phrases
which linger in the memory : " Le Profil, c'est
r^cueil de la beaut6 " [Le Bonheur dans le Crime) ;
" Les verres a champagne de France, un lotus qui
faisait [les Anglais] oublier les sombres et reli-
gieuses habitudes de la patrie ; " " Elle avait I'air
de monter vers Dieu, les mains toutes pleines de
bonnes oeuvres " {Memoranda).

That Barbey d'Aurevilly will take any prominent
place in the history of literature is improbable.
He was a curiosity, a droll, obstinate survival.
We like to think of him in his incredible dress.

BARBEY D'AUREVILLY 107

strolling through the streets of Paris, with his
clouded cane like a sceptre in one hand, and in
the other that small mirror by which every few
minutes he adjusted the poise of his cravat, or the
studious tempest of his hair. He was a wonderful
old fop or beau of the forties handed down to the
eighties in perfect preservation. As a writer he
was fervid, sumptuous, magnificently puerile; I
have been told that he was a superb talker, that
his conversation was like his books, a flood of
paradoxical, flamboyant rhetoric. He made a
gallant stand against old age, he defied it long
with success, and when it conquered him at last,
he retired to his hole like a rat, and died with
stoic fortitude, alone, without a friend to close his
eyelids. It was in a wretched lodging high up in
a house in the Rue Rousselet, all his finery cast
aside, and three melancholy cats the sole mourners
by his body, that they found, on an April morn-
ing of 1889, the ruins of what had once been
Barbey d'Aurevilly.

1897.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

After spending the summer, as usual, in his
country place at Champrosay, Alphonse Daudet
came back no more to winter in those historic
rooms in the Rue de Belchasse where all the world
had laid at his feet the tribute of its homage and
curiosity. His growing infirmities had made the
mounting of five flights of stairs finally intolerable
to him. He took an apartment on the first floor.
No. 41, Rue de I'Universite, which was far better
suited to his condition, and here, in excellent spirits,
charmed with the change, and eager for the spring
to blossom in the surrounding gardens, he was
proposing to receive his friends at Christmas. But
another guest long since due, but not at that
moment expected, knocked first at the door of the
still unfinished house. On the evening of Decem-
ber 16, 1897, while he was chatting gaily at the
dinner-table in company with his wife and children,
Alphonse Daudet uttered a cry and fell back in his
chair. His sons flew for a doctor, but in vain ;
the end had come — the terrible spectre so long
waited, so mysteriously dreaded for its attendant
horrors of pain and intolerable decay, had appeared
alone, and in the guise of a beneficent angel. The
last page of Ma Douleur, when it comes into our
hands, will be the record, by another voice than

ALPHONSE DAUDET 109

Daudet's, of a death as peaceful and as benign in
all its circumstances as death can be.

I

It is not possible to discuss the character of
Alphonse Daudet without some consideration of
his personal conditions. In every page of his
brilliant, variegated, emotional books, ever trem-
bling into tears or flashing into laughter, the writer
is present to the mind of the instructed reader.
Few men have been born with a keener appetite
for life or an aptitude for more intense enjoyment.
Daudet was of the tribe of those who, as Keats
says, " burst joy's grape against their palate fine."
It is highly possible that, with this temperament
and a southern habit of life, advancing years might
have tended to exaggerate in him the tumult of the
senses ; he might have become a little gross, a
little noisy. But fortune willed it otherwise, and
this exquisite hedonist, so amorous of life and
youth, was refined and etherialised by a mysterious
and wasting anguish. It was about the close of
1 88 1 that, while engaged in writing Sapho,
Daudet became conscious of sudden thrills of
agonising pain in his limbs, which attacked him
unexpectedly, and lacerated every part of his frame
in turn. From this time forth, he was never free
from the terror of the pang, and he once used
a phrase regarding it, which awakens a vision of
Prometheus stretched on Caucasus. " La souf-
france, chez moi," he said, " c'est un oiseau qui se
pose partout, tantot ici, tantot la."

no FRENCH PROFILES

It will be remembered that when Daudet pub-
lished L' ^vange'liste in 1883, he dedicated it to
Charcot. It was that great master of diagnosis
who detected in what the family physician had
supposed to be neuralgia the first symptoms of
that malady of the spinal cord to which the
novelist now slowly succumbed. The ravages of
this terrible disease, while they gradually affected
more and more completely his powers of loco-
motion, spared all the functions of the head. Since
the completion of Sapho, it is true, there has
been apparent a flagging in Daudet's constructive
power ; but this need not be attributed to disease.
In agility of conversation, in refinement of style,
in alertness and lucidity of mind, Daudet showed
to the last hour no observable decline. His cour-
age, on the other hand, his heroic resignation and
patience were qualities that raised him to a sort of
moral sublimity. They would have done credit to
the most placid of northerners, but as the orna-
ment of a Provencal in early middle life, the blood
in whose veins was quicksilver, they were exquisite
and astonishing. There are not many finer pictures
in the cabinet of modern literary history than that
of Alphonse Daudet waiting to be racked with
anguish from moment to moment, a shawl wrapped
round his poor knees, lifting the ivory lines of his
face with rapture to the beauty of a flower, or
pouring from his delicate lips a flood of wit and
tenderness and enthusiasm. It carries the thought
back to Scarron, who " souffrit mille fois la mort
avant que de perdre la vie ; " and the modern
instance, while no less brave, is of a rarer beauty.

ALPHONSE DAUDET iii

These physical considerations are so important,
they form so essential a part of our conception of
Daudet and of Daudet's conception of literature,
that they cannot be passed over, even in a brief
outline of his place in the world of writers. He
was not one of those who shrink from being contem-
plated. His work was not objective as regarded
his own person, it was intensely — one had almost
said it was exclusively — subjective. Large portions
of his fiction are nothing more nor less than
selected autobiography, and he had no scruple in
letting this be perceived. He took in later life to
writing prefaces to his old novels, explaining the
conditions in which they were composed. He
published Trente Ans de Paris in 1882 ; what
it was not quite convenient that he should nar-
rate himself was confessed by M. Ernest Daudet,
in Mon Frere et Mot. The early writings of
Alphonse Daudet, up to Fromont Jeune et Risler
Aine at least, resolve themselves, it is plain, into
autobiography. His only long romance of the
early period, Le Petit Chosej begins with the
sentence "Je suis n^ le 13 Mai 18 — , dans une
ville du Languedoc." So speaks the hero, and
presently, we calculate from facts recorded, that
18 — stands for 1840. Well, Alphonse Daudet
was born at Nimes on May 31, 1840. This
changing of 31 into 13 is very characteristic; an
analogous alteration is often the only one which
the author makes in turning reality into a novel.

The drawback of such a practice is that in
reading the charming works of Alphonse Daudet's
first thirty-five years, we are divided in allegiance

112 FRENCH PROFILES

between the artist and the man. This is the
danger of the autobiographical method when
carried to so great an extreme, and confessed so
openly. The poor little hero of Petit Chose flying
from his tormentors, comes up to Paris in a pair of
india-rubber goloshes, having no shoes, and the
author makes very happy and pathetic use of this
little incident. I remember, however, being much
annoyed (I hardly know why) by discovering, as
I read Mon Frere et Mot, that Alphonse really
did come up to Paris thus, in goloshes, but with-
out shoes. By some perversity of temper, I felt
vexed that a real person should have plagiarised
from the invented history of Petit Chose, and
to this day I think it would have been better if this
piece of personal history had not been unveiled by
M. Ernest Daudet. But as a family the Daudets
are unsurpassed in the active way in which they
take their musical-box to pieces, the result being
that we scarcely know, at last, whether the music
was the primary object, or was merely secondary
to the mechanical ingenuity. This is a doubt
which never enhances our pleasure in the fine
arts.

The self-consciousness which coloured all the
manifestations of the mind of Alphonse Daudet
had much to do with his pathos, his really very
remarkable command over our tears. There is no
recent French writer with whom we weep so easily,
and the reason, without doubt, is to be found in
his own aptitude for weeping. If his nature were
harder, if he were not so sorry for himself, we
should not be so sorry for his creations. The

ALPHONSE DAUDET 113

intense and sincere sensibility of Daudet disarms
the nerves ; there is no resisting his pathos. When
he chooses to melt his audience he can scarcely
be heard for their sobbing. I am bound to say
that I think he sometimes carries this sensibility to
an illegitimate extreme ; it makes, for instance, a
great part of Jack too painful for endurance.
In this otherwise admirable book the author
becomes like the too emotional attorney, Baines
Carew, in the Bab Ballads ; he seems to " lie
flat upon the floor, convulsed with sympathetic
sob," until the reader, bent on pleasure, " toddles
off next door," and gives the case to M. de
Maupassant or M. Bourget.

Yet this pathetic sensibility, if occasionally pushed
to excess, has been one of the most vivid of the
qualities which have endeared Alphonse Daudet
to thousands of readers. He has a sense of the
hysterical sadness of life, the melancholy which
arises in the breast without cause at some common-
place conjunction of incidents, the terror of vague
future ill, the groundless depressions and faint fore-
bodings which strike men and women like the
vision of a spectre at noon-day. Of these neurotic
fallacies Daudet is a master ; he knows how to
make us shudder with the pictures of them, as,
consummately, in Avec Trots Milk Cent Francs.
Pure melodious pathos, produced by the careful
balance of elements common to all human frailty,
and harmonised by a beautiful balance of style,
we discover frequently in the Contes du Lundi,
in the Alsatian stories, and everywhere in Jack.
To the last, a novel in Alphonse Daudet's hands

H

114 FRENCH PROFILES

was apt to be, what he calls one of his great
books, " un livre de piti6, de colere et d'ironie,"
and the irony and anger were commonly founded
upon the pity. In particular, Le Petit Chose is
all pity : the arrival of the telegram that the boy
is afraid to deliver, the extreme lachrymosity of
Jacques, the agony of the pion in sound of the keys
of M. Viot (a species of educational Mr. Carker),
the fate of Mme. Eyssette taking refuge among her
stingy provincial relations — almost every incident
in this very pretty book is founded upon the
exercise of slightly exaggerated sensibility. The
author's voice trembles as he tells the tale ; when
he laughs, as every now and then he does so
gaily, we give a sigh of relief, for we were
beginning to fear that he would break down
altogether.

II

From this dangerous facility in telling a tale of
tears about himself Alphonse Daudet was delivered
by developing a really marvellous talent for ex-
patiating on the external and decorative side of
life. Out of the wreckage of his experimental
writings he has saved for us the Letires de mon
Moulin and the Contes Choisis which contain,
with Le Petit Chose, all that needs trouble the
general reader, although the amateur of litera-
ture examines with interest (and finds entirely
Daudesque) those early volumes of verse, Les
Amoureuses, of 1857, and La Double Con-
version of 1 86 1. But Lettres de mon Moulin
is the one youthful book of A. Daudet which the

ALPHONSE DAUDET 115

most hurried student of modern French Hterature
cannot afford to overlook. In its own way, and
at its best, there is simply nothing that surpasses
it. A short story of mediaeval court life better
than La Mule du Pape has not been told. It
is not possible to point to an idyll of pastoral
adventure of the meditative class more classic in
its graceful purity than Lcs £toiles. As a
masterpiece of picturesque and ironic study of the
life of elderly persons in a village, Les Vieux
stands where " Cranford " stands, since sheer per-
fection knows neither first nor last. There are
Corsican and Algerian sketches in this incompar-
able volume ; but those which rise to the memory
first, and are most thoroughly characteristic, are
surely those which deal with country life and legend
in the dreamy heart of Provence. " Dance and
Provencal song and sunburnt mirth" — that is
what we recall when we think of the Lettres de
mon Moulin.

From his ruined mill at Fortvielle, " situated in
the valley of the Rhone, in the very heart of
Provence, on a hillside clothed with pine-trees and
green oaks, the said mill, deserted for more
than twenty years and incapable of grinding, as
appeareth from the wild vines, mosses, rosemaries,
and other parasitic growths which climb to the
ends of its sails," from this mill, honourably leased
at Pamp^rigouste, in presence of two witnesses,
Francet Mamai, fife-player, and Louiset, called Le
Quique, cross-bearer to the White Penitents,
Alphonse Daudet writes to his friends, or records
a story, as the whim takes him. He recounts

ii6 FRENCH PROFILES

legends that illustrate the habits and prejudices of
the folks around. He visits the poet Mistral, he
accompanies local sportsmen on their walks, he
spends his nights with the customs officers. Some-
times, to gain intenser nawete, to get closer still to
the heart of things, he borrows the voice of a goat,
of a partridge, of a butterfly. And the main object
of it all is to render the external impression of this
Proven9al life more delicately, more radiantly,
more intimately than has ever been done before.

It is very difficult to analyse the skill with
which Daudet contrives to produce this sense
of real things seen intensely through the bright-
coloured atmosphere of his talent. His economy
of words in the best examples of this branch of his
work is notable. The curious reader of his little
story, "The Beacon of the Bloody Isles," may
ask himself how it would be possible to enhance
the mysterious dazzlement caused by the emerging
of the writer from the dark winding stairs up into
the blaze of light exhibited above : —

" En entrant j'6tais 6bloui. Ces cuivres, ces
stains, ces r^flecteurs de m^tal blanc, ces murs de
cristal bomb6 qui tournaient avec des grands cercles
bleuatres, tout ce miroitement, tout ce cliquetis
de lumi^res, me donnait un moment de vertige."

What could be more masterly than that ? It is
said in the fewest possible words, yet so that an
impression, in a high degree bewildering and com-
plex, is accurately presented to us. Scarcely less
marvellous is the interior, in Les Vt'eux, where,
under the miraculous influence of the Life of
St. Irenaeus, read aloud by a little pensioner in

ALPHONSE DAUDET 117

a blue blouse, not the old gentleman and lady
only, but the canaries in their cage, the flies on
the pane, and all the other elements of still life
are plunged in deepest sleep at noon. And of
the fantasia about Valencia oranges in the winter
streets of Paris, and of the scene in "The Two
Inns," which every one has praised, and of the
description of the phantom visitors who come un-
invited to supper with M. Majesty, and of the series
of idyllic vignettes " en Camargue," what shall be
said ? — the enumeration of Alphonse Daudet's suc-
cesses in this direction becomes a mere catalogue.
It is particularly to be observed that with his in-
cessant verbal invention, we are conscious of no
strain after effect. Daudet is never pretentious,
and it requires some concentration of mind, some
going backward over the steps of his sentences, to
perceive what a magic of continual buoyancy it is
that has carried us along with so swift a precision.
When Alphonse Daudet began to write in Paris,
a new set of critical ideas and creative aspirations
were setting the young men in motion. In poetry,
the example of Baudelaire in noting impressions,
and in widening the artistic repertory, was having
an electrical influence, while Daudet and Zola,
in conjunction with those elder brethren of theirs,
Flaubert and the Goncourts, were endeavouring
to make of the practice of novel-writing some-
thing more solid, brilliant, and exact than had
been attempted before. This is no place to touch
on what will eventually occupy the historian of
literature, Alphonse Daudet's place in the ranks of
the naturalists. But it is important to note that he

ii8 FRENCH PROFILES

possessed one quality denied to his distinguished
friends, denied even to Flaubert, namely, his grace-
ful rapidity. As M. Jules Claretie said of him the
other day, he was " un realiste ail6," and he was
preserved from the dulness and pedestrian jog-trot
of prosy naturalism by this winged lightness of his,
this agility in sensation, and illuminating prompti-
tude in expression. His hand was always light,
among the tribe of those who never knew when
to stop. Daudet could not fall into the error of
Zola in his "symphonies of odours," nor destroy
the vitality of a study like Cheriey as Edmond de
Goncourt did, by the pedantic superfetation of
documentary evidence. He was a creature of the
sun and wind, like the cicala that the Greek poets
sung of, intoxicated with a dew-drop, and flinging
itself impetuously into the air, while it struck
melody from its wings with its own flying feet.

HI

Thus palpitating with observation, thus, as he
himself said, " hypnotise par la realite," filled to the
brim of his quivering nature by the twin sources
of pictorial and of moral sensitiveness, seeing and
feeling with almost abnormal intensity, his sails
puffed out with the pride of life and the glory
of visual sensation, Daudet prepared himself by
a myriad experiments for the true business of his
career. After a somewhat lengthy and arduous
apprenticeship as an observer of nature and of
himself, armed with those little green books of
notes, those cahiers of which we have heard

ALPHONSE DAUDET 119

so much, he set out to be a great historian
of French manners in the second half of the
nineteenth century. In 1874 he made a notable
sensation with Fromont Jeune et Risler Aim, and,
almost simultaneously with Jack. But these were
immediately excelled by Le Nahab (1877), a tren-
chant satire of the Second Empire and the Third
Republic. Then followed, in a very different key,
that extremely delicate study of the dynastic idea
in bankruptcy, which he called Les Rot's en Exil
(1879). Daudet had built up an edifice of fiction
about his old patron, the Due de Morny, in Le
Nabab; he returned to politics in Numa Roumesian
(1881), and crystallised his invention round the
legend of Gambetta. This book, in my judgment,
marked the apogee of Alphonse Daudet's genius;
never again, so it seems to me, did he write a
novel quite so large, quite so masterly in all its
parts, as Numa Roumestan. But L' Evangeliste
(1883), a satiric picture of fanatical Protestantism,
had brilliant parts, and a great simplicity of action ;
while in Sapho (1884), which M. Jules Lemaitre
has called " simplement la * Manon Lescaut ' de
ce si^cle," Daudet produced an elaborate study of
that obsession of the feminine, which is so dear to
our Gallic neighbours. The consensus of French
criticism, I think, puts Sapho, where I venture to
put Numa Roumestan, at the head of Daudet's
novels. After this came L'Immoriel (1888), Rose
et Ninette (1892), even later stories, never quite
without charm, but steadily declining in imagina-
tion and vitality, so that the books on which
Daudet bases his claim to be regarded as a great

I20 FRENCH PROFILES

novelist are seven, and they range from Jack to
Sapho, culminating as I most obstinately hold, in
Numa Roumestan.

In looking over these seven extraordinary books,
which we read in succession at their first appear-
ance with an enthusiasm that may have carried
the critical faculty away, we are conscious of the
brilliant and solid effect which they still produce.
They stand midway between the rigidly naturalistic
and the consciously psychological sets of novels
which France has seen flourish during the last
twenty-five years, and on the whole, perhaps, they
are standing the test of time better than either.
The moment we were fairly launched, so long
ago, upon the narrative of Fromont Jeune et Risler
Aim, as soon as we became acquainted with " the
blooming and sonorous Delobelle," as Mr. Henry
James so happily calls him, when, again, a very
little later, we were introduced to all the flatulent
humbugs of the Maison Moronval in Jack, we
acknowledged that here was come at last a great
French novelist, with whom the Anglo-Saxon reader
could commune with unspeakable delight. This
meridional, who cared so little for England, who
could never read an English sentence, seemed from
a certain limited point of view to run in the very
channel of British fiction. He has been called
(alas ! poor man, it was a thorn in his flesh !) the
French Dickens, but he has aspects in which he
seems Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope as well,
even Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.
A whole repertory of such parallelisms might be
drawn out, if we examined Daudet not wisely but
too well.

ALPHONSE DAUDET 121

The truth seems to be that, with all his violent
southern colour and temperament, his pathos, his
humour, his preference for the extravagant and
superficial parts of character and conduct had a
greater resemblance to the English than to the
French tradition of invented narrative. This is
true of works written before Alphonse Daudet
could possibly have touched an English story.
We talk of his affinity to Dickens, but that relation
is much more strongly marked in Le Petit Chose
than in any of Daudet's mature works. In the
very beginning of that story, the formidable rage
of M. Eyssette, and the episode of Annou who
marries in desperation because she has lost her
" place," are more like pure Dickens than any-
thing in Fromont Jeune. It is quite certain, from
what he has protested over and over again (and
did he not fight poor M. Albert Delpit that he
might seal his protest in blood ?), that Daudet's
knowledge of all English literature, the works of
Dickens included, was extremely exiguous. You
could probably have drawn it through the eye of a
needle without crushing it. It remains true, none
the less, that in his idea of how to entertain by a
novel, how to write a thrilling story of pity, anger,
and irony, he came much nearer than any other
Frenchman to the English standpoint. When we
add to this the really extraordinary chastity and
delicacy of his language, the tact with which, even
in a book like Sapho, he avoids all occasion of
offence, and has therefore been a well of pure and
safe delight to thousands of young Englishwomen,
it is not to be wondered at that the non-critical

122 FRENCH PROFILES

class of British readers look upon Alphonse
Daudet as the most sympathetic of Continental
novelists. He is certainly the one who offers
them the smallest chance of springes and pitfalls
along their innocent pathway.

In his great novels, the art of Daudet is seen in
his arrangement and adaptation of things that he
has experienced, not in his invention. He was
never happy when he detached himself from the
thing absolutely observed and noted. For most
readers, I suppose, the later chapters of L^ Petit
Chose are ruined by the absurd episode of Irma
Borel, the Creole, a figure laboriously invented a la
Paul de Kock, with no faint knowledge of any
actual prototype. It is interesting to compare
this failure with the solid success of the portrait
of Sapho fifteen years later, when Daudet had
made himself acquainted with this type of woman,
and had noted her characteristics with his mature
clairvoyance. Even in his more purely fantastic
creations, surely, the difference between what
Daudet has seen and has not seen is instantly felt.
What a distinction there is between Tartarin in
Tarascon, in Algeria, on the Righi — where Daudet
had accompanied him — and Tartarin in the South
Seas, where his creator had to trust to books and
fancy ! I am inclined to push this so far as even
to question the value of Wood's Town, a story
which many admirers of Daudet have signalled for
special eulogy. This is a tale of a peninsula
somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, where a tropic
city is built, at first with success, but only to be
presently overwhelmed by the onset of the virgin

ALPHONSE DAUDET 123

forest, which defies all the exertions of the inhabi-
tants ; lianas are flung from roof to roof, the
municipal buildings are roped to one another by
chains of prickly-pear, yuccas pierce the floors
with their spines, and fig-trees rend the walls
apart ; at last the population has to take flight in
ships, the masts of which are already like forest-
trees, so laden are they with parasitic vegetation.
The whole forms a fine piece of melodramatic
extravagance, but one feels what an infinitely
truer, and, therefore, infinitely more vivid picture
of such a scene Mr. Cable could have written in
the days when he was still interested in The
Grandissimes and Mme. Delphine.

IV

In all the creations of Daudet, as we have said,
the fountain of tears lies very close to the surface.
There is, however, one eminent exception, and it is
possible that this, in its sunny gaiety, its unruffled
high spirits, may eventually outlast the remainder.
All his life through, Daudet was fascinated by the
mirthful side of southern exaggeration. He set
himself to invent a figure which should unite all
the qualities of the meridional, a being in whom
the hallucination of adventurous experiences should
be carried to its drollest excess. The result was
pure frolic : the Prodigious Feats of Tartarin de
Tarascon (1872). Tartarin the boaster, the
mighty hunter before the Lord, " le roi des
chasseurs de casquettes," has bragged so long
and so loudly that even Tarascon demands con-

124 FRENCH PROFILES

firmation. And so he sets forth, and at Algiers he
shoots a lion — an old, tame, blind lion that has
been taught to hold a platter in its mouth and
beg at the doors of mosques. He returns to
Tarascon, still boasting, and bringing with him a
mangy camel, "which has seen me shoot all my
lions." He reposes again on the confidence of
Tarascon. Then in 1885, Tartar in sets forth
anew, this time to climb the Alps, being President
of the Tarascon Alpine Club, and once more forced
to prove his prowess. Glorious are his incred-
ible ascents and accidental adventures. After
a thousand farcical drolleries, gulled and gulling,
back he comes to Tarascon, with its blinding dust
and its blinding sunlight, to the country where it
is too bright and too hot to attempt to tell the
truth. Still later, Daudet made an effort to carry
a colony from Tarascon to the shores of the Pacific
Ocean ; but this time he was less vivacious and
more cynical. For sheer fun and merriment, the
two earlier books about Tartarin remain, however,
unexcelled. There is nothing else like them in
recent French literature, and those who object to
Daudet's other stories here confess themselves
disarmed. Tarascon itself, the little dry town on
the Rhone, meanwhile accentuates the joke and
adds to it by an increasing exasperation against
the great man of letters who has made its tragi-
comical exaltations so ridiculous and famous. I
have but recently made the personal observation
that it is impossible to purchase the works of
Daudet in the book-shops of the still-indignant
Tarascon.

ALPHONSE DAUDET 125

Two years before his death M. Alphonse Daudet
paid his first and only visit to London, accom-
panied by his entire family — by his whole sniala,
as he said, like an Arab sheikh. Those who were
privileged to meet him then for the first time
were astonished at the inconsistences of his
physical condition. To see Daudet struggling
with infinite distress up a low flight of stairs was
to witness what seemed the last caducity of a
worn-out frame. But his lower limbs only were
paralysed ; and once seated at table, and a little
rested after the tortures of locomotion, a sort of
youth reblossomed in him. Under the wild locks
of hair, still thick though striped with grey, the
eyes preserved their vivacity — large and liquid
eyes, intermittently concentrated in the effort to
see distinctly, now floating in a dream, now
focussed (as it were) in an act of curiosity. The
entire physical and phenomenal aspect of Alphonse
Daudet in these late years presented these contra-
dictions. He would sit silent and almost motion-
less ; suddenly his head, arms, and chest would
be vibrated with electrical movements, the long
white fingers would twitch in his beard, and then
from the lips a tide of speech would pour — a
flood of coloured words. On the occasion when
I met him at dinner, I recollect that at dessert,
after a long silence, he was suddenly moved to
describe, quite briefly, the melon-harvest at Nimes
when he was a boy. It was an instance, no doubt,
of the habitual magic of his style, sensuous and

126 FRENCH PROFILES

pictorial at its best ; in a moment we saw before
us the masses of golden-yellow and crimson and
sea-green fruit in the little white market-place,
with the incomparable light of a Provenfal morn-
ing bathing it all in crystal. Every word seemed
the freshest and the most inevitable that a man
could possibly use in painting such a scene, and
there was not a superfluous epithet.

This little apologue about the melons took us
back to the Daudet with whom we first made ac-
quaintance, the magician of the Lettres de mon Moulin.
That aged figure, trembling with the inroads of
paralysis, became in a flash our charming friend.
Petit Chose, sobbing under the boughs of the
pomegranate for a blood-red flower to remind
him of his childish joys. Those loose wisps of
hair had been dark clusters of firm curls around
the brows of the poet of Les Amoureuses. It was
pleasant for one fated \o see this beloved writer
only in the period of his decay to feel thus that
the emblems of youth were still about him. The
spirit had not surrendered to the sad physical
decline, and so, for all its distressing obviousness,
the latter did not produce an overpowering
sensation of melancholy. It emphasised the
impression one had formed in reading his books :
with Daudet all the ideas were concrete and
positive. He had no thought, properly speaking,
but only a ceaseless flow of violent and pictorial
observations, as intense as they were volatile.
These had to be noted down in haste as they
arrived, or else a fresh sensation would come and
banish them for ever. He was an impressionist

ALPHONSE DAUDET 127

painter, the colours on whose palette were words of
an indescribable abundance, variety, and exactitude.

For some years, it is hardly to be questioned
that Alphonse Daudet was the leading novelist of
the world. From 1877, when he published Le
Nabab, to 1881, when he reached the apex of his
glory in Numa Roumestan, he had no rival. That
was a position which it was impossible that he
should retain.

It is too early to attempt to fix the position
which Alphonse Daudet will hold in French
literature. In spite of the extraordinary pro-
fessional manifestation produced immediately after
his death in Paris, it was easy to see that he no
longer stood in the affections of unprejudiced
readers quite where he did. In 1888 it would
have required considerable courage to suggest
that Daudet was not in the very first rank of
novel-writers ; in 1898, even the special pleading
of friendship scarcely urged so much as this. It
is inevitable, if we subject Daudet to the only test
which suits his very splendid and honourable
career, that we should hesitate in placing him
with the great creative minds. His beautiful talent
is dwarfed when we compare it with Balzac, with
Tourgenieff, with Flaubert, even with Maupassant.
He is vivacious, brilliant, pathetic, exuberant, but
he is not subtle ; his gifts are on the surface. He
observes rather than imagines ; he belongs to the
fascinating, but too often ephemeral class of
writers who manufacture types, and develop what
the Elizabethans used to call "humours." And
this he does, not by an exercise of fancy, not by a

128 FRENCH PROFILES

penetrating flash of intuition, but as a " realist,"
as one who depends on Httle green books of notes,
and docketed bundles of pieces justificatives.

But we need not be ungracious and dwell on
these shortcomings in a genius so charming, so
intimately designed to please. Whether his figures
were invented or noted, they live brilliantly in our
memories. Who will lose the impression, so
amazingly vivid, left by the " Cabecilla " in the
Contes Choisis, or by Les Femmes d' Artistes, '' ce livre
si beau, si cruel," as Guy de Maupassant called it ?
Who will forget the cunning, timid Jansoulet as he
came out of Tunis to seek his fortune in Paris ?
Who the turbulent Numa Roumestan, or that
barber's block, the handsome Valmajour, with his
languishing airs and his tambourine ? Who Queen
Fr6d6rique when she discovers that the diamonds
of lUyria are paste ? and who Mme. Ebsen in
her final interview with Eline ? The love of life,
of light, of the surface of all beautiful things, the
ornament of all human creations, illuminates the
books of Alphonse Daudet. The only thing he hated
was the horrible little octopus-woman, the Fanny
Legrand or Sidonie Chebe, who has no other object
or function than to wreck the lives of weak young
men. To her, perhaps, he is cruel ; she was hardly
worth his steel. But everything else he loves to
contemplate ; even when he laughs at Tarascon
he loves it ; and in an age when the cynical and
the sinister take so wide a possession of literature,
our thanks are eternally due to a man who built
up for us a world of hope and light and benignity.

THE SHORT STORIES OF ZOLA

It is by his huge novels, and principally by those
of the Rougon-Macquart series, that Zola is known
to the public and to the critics. Nevertheless, he
found time during the forty years of his busy
literary career to publish about as many small
stories, now comprised in four separate volumes.
It is natural that his novels should present so very
much wider and more attractive a subject for
analysis that, so far as I can discover, even in
France no critic has hitherto taken the shorter
productions separately, and discussed Zola as a
maker of conies. Yet there is a very distinct
interest in seeing how such a thunderer or
bellower on the trumpet can breathe through
silver ; and, as a matter of fact, the short stories
reveal a Zola considerably dissimilar to the author
of Nana and of La Terre — a much more optimistic,
romantic, and gentle writer. If, moreover, he
had nowhere assailed the decencies more severely
than he does in these thirty or forty short stories,
he would never have been named among the
enemies of Mrs. Grundy, and the gates of the
Palais Mazarin would long ago have been opened
to receive him. It is, indeed, to a lion with his
mane en papilloies that I here desire to attract the
attention of English readers ; to a man-eating

X29 J

I30 FRENCH PROFILES

monster, indeed, but to one who is on his best
behaviour and blinking in the warm sunshine of
Provence.

I

The first pubHc appearance of Zola in any form
was made as a writer of a short story. A southern
journal. La Provence, published at Aix, brought
out in 1859 a little conte entitled La Fee Amoureuse.
When this was written, in 1858, the future novelist
was a student of eighteen, attending the rhetoric
classes at the Lyc^e St. Louis ; when it was
printed, life in Paris, far from his delicious South,
was beginning to open before him, harsh, vague,
with a threat of poverty and failure. La Fee
Amoureuse may still be read by the curious in the
Contes a Ninon. It is a fantastic little piece, in the
taste of the eighteenth-century trifles of Cr^billon
or Boufflers, written with considerable care in an
over-luscious vein — a fairy tale about an enchanted
bud of sweet marjoram, which expands and
reveals the amorous fay, guardian of the loves of
Prince Lois and the fair Odette. This is a moon-
light-coloured piece of unrecognisable Zola, indeed,
belonging to the period of his lost essay on " The
Blind Milton dictating to his Elder Daughter,
while the Younger accompanies him upon the
Harp," a piece which many have sighed in vain
to see.

He was twenty when, in i860, during the course
of blackening reams of paper with poems a la
Mussetf he turned, in the aerial garret, or lantern
above the garret of 35 Rue St. Victor, to the

ZOLA 131

composition of a second story — Le Carnet de Danse.
This is addressed to Ninon, the ideal lady of all
Zola's early writings — the fleet and jocund virgin
of the South, in whom he romantically personifies
the Provence after which his whole soul was
thirsting in the desert of Paris. This is an
exquisite piece of writing — a little too studied, per-
haps, too full of opulent and voluptuous adjectives ;
written, as we may plainly see, under the influence
of Th^ophile Gautier. The story, such as it is, is
a conversation between Georgette and the pro-
gramme-card of her last night's ball. What
interest Le Carnet de Danse possesses it owes to the
style, especially that of the opening pages, in
which the joyous Provengal life is elegantly de-
scribed. The young man, still stumbling in the
wrong path, had at least become a writer.

For the next two years Zola was starving, and
vainly striving to be a poet. Another " belvedere,"
as Paul A16xis calls it, another glazed garret above
the garret, received him in the Rue Neuve St.
Etienne du Mont. Here the squalor of Paris was
around him ; the young idealist from the forests
and lagoons of Provence found himself lost in a
loud and horrid world of quarrels, oaths, and dirt,
of popping beer-bottles and yelling women. A
year, at the age of two-and-twenty, spent in this
atmosphere of sordid and noisy vice, left its mark
for ever on the spirit of the young observer. He
lived on bread and coffee, with two sous' worth of
apples upon gala days. He had, on one occasion,
even to make an Arab of himself, sitting with
the bed-wraps draped about him, because he had

132 FRENCH PROFILES

pawned his clothes. All the time, serene and
ardent, he was writing modern imitations of
Dante's Divina Commedia, epics on the genesis of
the world, didactic hymns to Religion, and love-
songs by the gross. Towards the close of 1861
this happy misery, this wise folly, came to an
end ; he obtained a clerkship in the famous
publishing house of M. Hachette.

But after these two years of poverty and hard-
ship he began to write a few things which were
not in verse. Early in 1862 he again addressed
to the visionary Ninon a short story called Le
Sang. He confesses himself weary, as Ninon
also must be, of the coquettings of the rose and
the infidelities of the butterfly. He will tell her
a terrible tale of real life. But, in fact, he is
absolutely in the clouds of the worst romanticism.
Four soldiers, round a camp-fire, suffer agonies of
ghostly adventure, in the manner of Hofmann or
of Petrus Borel. We seem to have returned to
the age of 1830, with its vampires and its ghouls.
Simpltce, which comes next in point of date, is
far more characteristic, and here, indeed, we find
one talent of the future novelist already developed.
Simplice is the son of a worldly king, who despises
him for his innocence ; the prince slips away into
the primeval forest and lives with dragon-flies and
water-lilies. In the personal life given to the forest
itself, as well as to its inhabitants, we have some-
thing very like the future idealisations in L'Abbe
Mouret, although the touch is yet timid and the
flashes of romantic insight fugitive. Simplice is
an exceedingly pretty fairy story, curiously like

ZOLA 133

what Mrs. Alfred Gatty used to write for senti-
mental English girls and boys : it was probably
inspired to some extent by George Sand.

On a somewhat larger scale is Les Voleurs el
I'Ane, which belongs to the same period of com-
position. It is delightful to find Zola describing
his garret as " full of flowers and of light, and so
high up that sometimes one hears the angels talk-
ing on the roof." His story describes a summer
day's adventure on the Seine, an improvised picnic
of strangers on a grassy island of elms, a siesta
disturbed by the somewhat stagey trick of a fan-
tastic coquette. According to his faithful bio-
grapher, Paul Alexis, the author, towards the
close of 1862, chose another lodging, again a
romantic chamber, overlooking this time the whole
extent of the cemetery of Montparnasse. In this
elegiacal retreat he composed two short stories,
Sceur des Pauvres and Celle qui m'aime. Of
these, the former was written as a commission
for the young Zola's employer, M. Hachette, who
wanted a tale appropriate for a children's news-
paper which his firm was publishing. After read-
ing what his clerk submitted to him, the publisher
is said to have remarked, " Vous etes un r6volt6,"
and to have returned him the manuscript as
" too revolutionary." Sasur des Pauvres is a tire-
some fable, and it is difficult to understand why
Zola has continued to preserve it among his
writings. It belongs to the class of semi-realistic
stories which Tolstoi has since then composed
with such admirable skill. But Zola is not happy
among saintly visitants to little holy girls, nor

134 FRENCH PROFILES

among pieces of gold that turn into bats and rats
in the hands of selfish peasants. Why this ano-
dyne little religious fable should ever have been
considered revolutionary, it is impossible to con-
ceive.

Of a very different order is Celle qui niaime,
a story of real power. Outside a tent, in the
suburbs of Paris, a man in a magician's dress
stands beating a drum and inviting the passers-by
to enter and gaze on the realisation of their
dreams, the face of her who loves you. The
author is persuaded to go in, and he finds himself
in the midst of an assemblage of men and boys,
women and girls, who pass up in turn to look
through a glass trap in a box. In the description
of the various types, as they file by, of the aspect
of the interior of the tent, there is the touch of a
new hand. The vividness of the study is not
maintained ; it passes off into romanesque ex-
travagance, but for a few moments the attentive
listener, who goes back to these early stories, is
conscious that he has heard the genuine accent of
the master of Naturalism.

Months passed, and the young Proven9al seemed
to be making but little progress in the world. His
poems definitely failed to find a publisher, and for
a while he seems to have flagged even in the pro-
duction of prose. Towards the beginning of 1864,
however, he put together the seven stories which I
have already mentioned, added to them a short
novel entitled Aventures du Grand Sidoine, pre-
fixed a fanciful and very prettily turned address
A Ninon, and carried o£f the collection to a new

ZOLA 135

publisher, M. Hetzel. It was accepted, and issued
in October of the same year. Zola's first book
appeared under the title of Contes a Ninon. This
volume was very well received by the reviewers,
but ten years passed before the growing fame of
its author carried it beyond its first edition of one
thousand copies.

There is no critical impropriety in consider-
ing these early stories, since Zola never allowed
them, as he allowed several of his subsequent
novels, to pass out of print. Nor, from the point
of view of style, is there anything to be ashamed
of in them. They are written with an uncertain
and an imitative, but always with a careful hand,
and some passages of natural description, if a little
too precious, are excellently modulated. What is
really very curious in the first Contes a Ninon is the
optimistic tone, the sentimentality, the luscious
idealism. The young man takes a cobweb for his
canvas, and paints upon it in rainbow-dew with a
peacock's feather. Except, for a brief moment,
in Celle qui maimer there is not a phrase that
suggests the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart
novels, and it is an amusing circumstance that,
while Zola has not only been practising, but very
sternly and vivaciously preaching, the gospel of
Realism, this innocent volume of fairy stories
should all the time have been figuring among his
works. The humble student who should turn from
the master's criticism to find an example in his
writings, and who should fall by chance on the
Contes a Ninon, would be liable to no small distress
of bewilderment.

136 FRENCH PROFILES

II

Ten years later, in 1874, Zola published a second
volume of short stories, entitled Nouveaux Contes a
Ninon. His position, his literary character, had in
the meantime undergone a profound modification.
In 1874 he was no longer unknown to the public
or to himself. He had already published four of
the Rougon - Macquart novels, embodying the
natural and social history of a French family
during the Second Empire. He was scandalous
and famous, and already bore a great turbulent
name in literature and criticism. The Nouveaux
Conies a Ninon, composed at intervals during that
period of stormy evolution, have the extraordinary
interest which attends the incidental work thrown
off by a great author during the early and noisy
manhood of his talent. After 1864 Zola had
written one unsuccessful novel after another, until
at last, in Therese Raquin, with its magnificent study
of crime chastised by its own hideous after-gust,
he produced a really remarkable performance.
The scene in which the paralytic mother tries to
denounce the domestic murderers was in itself
enough to prove that France possessed one
novelist the more.

This was late in 1867, when M. Zola was in his
twenty-eighth year. A phrase of Louis Ulbach's,
in reviewing Therese Raquin, which he called '• lit-
t^rature putride," is regarded as having started the
question of Naturalism, and M. Zola who had not,
up to that time, had any notion of founding a
school, or even of moving in any definite direc-

ZOLA 137

tion, was led to adopt the theories which we
identify with his name during the angry dispute
with Ulbach. In 1865 he had begun to be drawn
towards Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and to
feel, as he puts it, that in the salons of the Parnas-
sians he was growing more and more out of his
element " among so many impenitent romantiques."
Meanwhile he was for ever feeding the furnaces of
journalism, scorched and desiccated by the blaze
of public life, by the daily struggle for bread.
He was roughly affronting the taste of those who
differed from him, with rude hands he was thrust-
ing out of his path the timid, the dull, the old-
fashioned. The spectacle of these years of Zola's
life is not altogether a pleasant one, but it leaves
on us the impression of a colossal purpose pursued
with force and courage. In 1871 the first of the
Rougon-Macquart novels appeared, and the author
was fairly launched on his career. He was writ-
ing books of large size, in which he was endea-
vouring to tell the truth about modern life with
absolute veracity, no matter how squalid, or ugly,
or venomous that truth might be.

But during the whole of this tempestuous decade
Zola, in his hot battlefield of Paris, heard the
voice of Ninon calling to him from the leafy
hollows, from behind the hawthorn hedges, of
his own dewy Provence — the cool Provence of
earliest flowery spring. When he caught these
accents whistling to his memory from the past,
and could no longer resist answering them, he
was accustomed to write a little contey light and
innocent, and brief enough to be the note of a

138 FRENCH PROFILES

caged bird from indoors answering its mate in the
trees of the garden. This is the real secret of
the utterly incongruous tone of the Nouveaux Contes
when we compare them with the Cure'e and Made-
leine Fe'rat of the same period. It would be utterly
to misunderstand the nature of Zola to complain,
as Pierre Loti did the other day, that the coarse-
ness and cynicism of the naturalistic novel, the
tone of a ball at Belleville, could not sincerely
co-exist with a love of beauty, or with a nostalgia
for youth and country pleasures. In the short
stories of the period of which we are speaking,
that poet who dies in most middle-aged men
lived on for Zola, artificially, in a crystal box
carefully addressed " a Ninon la-bas," a box into
which, at intervals, the master of the Realists
slipped a document of the most refined ideality.

Of these tiny stories — there are twelve of them
within one hundred pages — not all are quite
worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too
much in Les Epaules de la Marquise, and M.
Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent
devote of quality more successfully than Zola did
in Le Jeilne. But most of them are very
charming. Here is Le Grand Michu, a study
of gallant, stupid boyhood ; here Les Paradis
des Chats, one of the author's rare escapes into
humour. In Le Forgeron, with its story of the
jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and
happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very
thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a pro-
found criticism of life. Le Petit Village is in-
teresting to us here, because, with its pathetic

ZOLA 139

picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of
Zola's studies of war. In other of these stories
the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty
Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown
fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of ren-
dezvous under the wings of the larks, of moonlight
strolls in the bosquets of a chateau. In every
one, without exception, is absent that tone of
brutality which we associate with the notion of
Zola's genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral
sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment.

The volume of Nouveaux Contes a Ninon closes
with a story which is much longer and consider-
ably more important than the rest. Les Quatre
Joiirnees de Jean Gourdon deserves to rank
among the very best things to which Zola has
signed his name. It is a study of four typical
days in the life of a Proven9al peasant of the
better sort, told by the man himself. In the first
of these it is spring : Jean Gourdon is eighteen
years of age, and he steals away from the house of
his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may
meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of
the broad Durance, His uncle follows and cap-
tures him, but the threatened sermon turns into a
benediction, the priestly malediction into an im-
passioned song to the blossoming springtide. Babet
and Jean receive the old man's blessing on their
betrothal.

Next follows a day in summer, five years later ;
Jean, as a soldier in the Italian war, goes through
the horrors of a battle and is wounded, but not
dangerously, in the shoulder. Just as he marches

I40 FRENCH PROFILES

into action he receives a letter from Uncle Lazare
and Babet, full of tender fears and tremors ; he
reads it when he recovers consciousness after the
battle. Presently he creeps off to help his ex-
cellent colonel, and they support one another till
both are carried off to hospital. This episode,
which has something in common with the Sevas-
topol of Tolstoi, is exceedingly ingenious in its
observation of the sentiments of a common man
under fire.

The third part of the story occurs fifteen years
later. Jean and Babet have now long been mar-
ried, and Uncle Lazare, in extreme old age, has
given up his cure, and lives with them in their
farm by the river. All things have prospered
with them save one. They are rich, healthy,
devoted to one another, respected by all their
neighbours ; but there is a single happiness lack-
ing— they have no child. And now, in the high
autumn splendour — when the corn and the grapes
are ripe, and the lovely Durance winds like a
riband of white satin through the gold and purple
of the landscape — this gift also is to be theirs.
A little son is born to them in the midst of the
vintage weather, and the old uncle, to whom life
has now no further good thing to offer, drops
painlessly from life, shaken down like a blown leaf
by his excess of joy, on the evening of the birthday
of the child.

The optimistic tone has hitherto been so con-
sistently preserved, that we must almost resent the
tragedy of the fourth day. This is eighteen years
later, and Jean is now an elderly man. His son

ZOLA 141

Jacques is in early manhood. In the midst of
their felicity, on a winter's night, the Durance
rises in spate, and all are swept away. It is
impossible, in a brief sketch, to give an impression
of the charm and romantic sweetness of this little
masterpiece, a veritable hymn to the Ninon of
Provence ; but it raises many curious reflections
to consider that this exquisitely pathetic pastoral,
with all its gracious and tender personages, should
have been written by the master of Naturalism,
the author of Germinal and of Pot-Bouille.

Ill

In 1878, Zola, who had long been wishing for
a place whither to escape from the roar of Paris,
bought a little property on the right bank of the
Seine, between Poissy and Meulan, where he built
himself the house which he inhabited to the last,
and which he made so famous. Medan, the village
in which this property is placed, is a very quiet
hamlet of less than two hundred inhabitants, abso-
lutely unillustrious, save that, according to tradition,
Charles the Bold was baptized in the font of its
parish church. The river lies before it, with its
rich meadows, its poplars, its willow groves ; a
delicious and somnolent air of peace hangs over
it, though so close to Paris. Thither the master's
particular friends and disciples soon began to
gather : that enthusiastic Boswell, Paul Alexis ;
Guy de Maupassant, a stalwart oarsman, in his
skiff, from Rouen ; others, whose names were
soon to come prominently forward in connection

142 FRENCH PROFILES

with that naturalistic school of which Zola was the
leader.

It was in 1880 that the little hamlet on the
Poissy Road awoke to find itself made famous by
the publication of a volume which marks an epoch
in French literature, and still more in the history of
the short story. Les Soirees de Me'dan was a mani-
festo by the naturalists, the most definite and the
most defiant which had up to that time been made.
It consisted of six short stories, several of which
were of remarkable excellence, and all of which
awakened an amount of discussion almost unpre-
cedented. Zola came first with L Attaque du
Moulin, which is rather a short novel than a
genuine conie. The next story was Boule de Suif,
a veritable masterpiece in a new vein, by an
entirely new novelist, a certain M. Guy de Mau-
passant, thirty years of age, who had been pre-
sented to Zola, with warm recommendations, by
Gustave Flaubert. The other contributors were
M. Henri Ceard, who also had as yet published
nothing, a man who seems to have greatly im-
pressed all his associates, but who has done little
or nothing to justify their hopes ; M. Joris Karel
Huysmans, older than the rest, and already some-
what distinguished for picturesque, malodorous
novels ; M. Leon Hennique, a youth from Guade-
loupe, who had attracted attention by a very odd
and powerful novel. La De'voue'e, the story of an
inventor who murders his daughter that he may
employ her fortune on perfecting his machine ;
and finally, the faithful Paul Alexis, a native, like
Zola himself, of Aix in Provence, and full of the

ZOLA 143

perfervid extravagance of the South. The thread
on which the whole book is hung is the supposition
that these stories are brought to M6dan to be read
of an evening to Zola, and that he leads off by
telling a tale of his own.

Nothing need be said here, however, of the
works of those disciples who placed themselves
under the flag of M6dan, and little of that story in
which, with his accustomed bonhomie of a good
giant, Zola accepted their comradeship and con-
sented to march with them. 77!^ Attack on the
Mill is very well known to English readers, who,
even when they have not met with it in the origi-
nal, have been empowered to estimate its force
and truth as a narrative. Whenever Zola writes
of war, he writes seriously and well. Like the
Julien of his late reminiscences, he has never loved
war for its own sake. He has little of the mad
and pompous chivalry of the typical Frenchman
in his nature. He sees war as the disturber, the
annihilator; he recognises in it mainly a destructive,
stupid, unintelligible force, set in motion by those
in power for the discomfort of ordinary beings, of
workers like himself. But in the course of three
European wars — those of his childhood, of his
youth, of his maturity — he has come to see
beneath the surface, and in La Debacle he almost
agrees with our young Jacobin poets of one hun-
dred years ago, that Slaughter is God's daughter.

In this connection, and as a commentary on
The Attack on the Mill, I would commend to
the earnest attention of readers the three short
papers entitled Trois Guerres. Nothing on the

144 FRENCH PROFILES

subject has been written more picturesque, nor, in
its simple way, more poignant, than this triple chain
of reminiscences. Whether Louis and Julien ex-
isted under those forms, or whether the episodes
which they illustrate are fictitious, matters little or
nothing. The brothers are natural enough, de-
lightful enough, to belong to the world of fiction,
and if their story is, in the historical sense, true, it
is one of those rare instances in which fact is better
than fancy. The crisis under which the timid
Julien, having learned the death of his spirited
martial brother, is not broken down, but merely
frozen into a cold soldierly passion, and spends
the remainder of the campaign — he, the poet, the
nestler by the fireside, the timid club-man — in
watching behind hedges for Prussians to shoot or
stab, is one of the most extraordinary and most
interesting that a novelist has ever tried to describe.
And the light that it throws on war as a disturber
of the moral nature, as a dynamitic force explod-
ing in the midst of an elaborately co-related
society, is unsurpassed, even by the studies which
Count Lyof Tolstoi has made in a similar direction.
It is unsurpassed, because it is essentially without
prejudice. It admits the discomfort, the horrible
vexation and shame of war, and it tears aside the
conventional purple and tinsel of it ; but at the
same time it admits, not without a sigh, that even
this clumsy artifice may be the only one available
for the cleansing of the people.

ZOLA 145

IV

In 1883, Zola published a third volume of short
stories, under the title of the opening one, Le
Capitaine Burle. This collection contains the
delicate series of brief semi-autobiographical essays
called Aux Champs, little studies of past impression,
touched with a charm which is almost kindred to
that of Robert Louis Stevenson's memories. With
this exception, the volume consists of four short
stories, and of a set of little death-bed anecdotes,
called Comment on Meiirt. This latter is hardly in
the writer's best style, and suffers by suggesting the
immeasurably finer and deeper studies of the same
kind which the genius of Tolstoi has elaborated.
Of these little sketches of death, one alone, that
of Madame Rousseau, the stationer's wife, is quite
of the best class. This is an excellent episode
from the sort of Parisian life which Zola under-
stands best, the lower middle class, the small and
active shopkeeper, who just contrives to be re-
spectable and no more. The others seem to be
invented rather than observed.

The four stories which make up the bulk of this
book are almost typical examples of Zola's mature
style. They are worked out with extreme care,
they display in every turn the skill of the practised
narrator, they are solid and yet buoyant in style,
and the construction of each may be said to be
faultless. It is faultless to a fault ; in other words,
the error of the author is to be mechanically
and inevitably correct. It is difficult to define
wherein the over-elaboration shows itself, but in

K

146 FRENCH PROFILES

every case the close of the story leaves us sceptical
and cold. The denouement is too brilliant and con-
clusive, the threads are drawn together with too
much evidence of preoccupation. The impression
is not so much of a true tale told as of an extra-
ordinary situation frigidly written up to and
accounted for. In each case a certain social
condition is described at the beginning, and a
totally opposite condition is discovered at the end
of the story. We are tempted to believe that the
author determined to do this, to turn the whole
box of bricks absolutely topsy-turvy. This dis-
regard of the soft and supple contours of nature,
this rugged air of molten metal, takes away from
the pleasure we should otherwise legitimately
receive from the exhibition of so much fancy,
so much knowledge, so many proofs of obser-
vation.

The story which gives its name to the book,
Le Capiiaine Burle, is perhaps the best, because
it has least of this air of artifice. In a military
county town, a captain, who lives with his anxious
mother and his little pallid, motherless son, sinks
into vicious excesses, and pilfers from the regiment
to pay for his vices. It is a great object with the
excellent major, who discovers this condition, to
save his friend the captain in some way which
will prevent an open scandal, and leave the child
free for ultimate success in the army. After try-
ing every method, and discovering that the moral
nature of the captain is altogether too soft and too
far sunken to be redeemed, as the inevitable hour
of publicity approaches, the major insults his friend

ZOLA 147

in a caf6, so as to give him an opportunity of fight-
ing a duel and dying honourably. This is done,
and the scandal is evaded, without, however, any
good being thereby secured to the family, for the
little boy dies of weakness and his grandmother
starves. Still, the name of Burle has not been
dragged through the mud.

Zola has rarely displayed the quality of humour,
but it is present in the story called La FUe a
Coqueville. Coqueville is the name given to a
very remote Norman fishing-village, set in a gorge
of rocks, and almost inaccessible except from the
sea. Here a sturdy population of some hundred
and eighty souls, all sprung from one or other of
two rival families, live in the condition of a tiny
Verona, torn between contending interests. A
ship laden with liqueurs is wrecked on the rocks
outside, and one precious cask after another comes
riding into Coqueville over the breakers. The
villagers, to whom brandy itself has hitherto been
the rarest of luxuries, spend a glorious week of per-
fumed inebriety, sucking splinters that drip with
b^n^dictine, catching noyau in iron cups, and
supping up curagao from the bottom of a boat.
Upon this happy shore chartreuse flows like cider,
and trappistine is drunk out of a mug. The rarest
drinks of the world — Chios mastic and Servian
sliwowitz, Jamaica rum and arrack, ere me de
moka and raki drip among the mackerel nets
and deluge the seaweed. In the presence of this
extraordinary and fantastic bacchanal all the dis-
putes of the rival families are forgotten, class
prejudices are drowned, and the mayor's rich

148 FRENCH PROFILES

daughter marries the poorest of the fisher-sons
of the enemy's camp. It is very amusingly and
very picturesquely told, but spoiled a little by
Zola's pet sin — the overcrowding of details, the
theatrical completeness and orchestral big-drum
of the final scene. Too many barrels of liqueur
come in, the village becomes too universally
drunk, the scene at last becomes too Lydian for
credence.

In the two remaining stories of this collection
-—Pour une Nuit d' Amour and L'Inondation —
the fault of mechanical construction is still
more plainly obvious. Each of these narratives
begins with a carefully accentuated picture of a
serene life : in the first instance, that of a timid
lad sequestered in a country town ; in the second,
that of a prosperous farmer, surrounded by his
family and enjoying all the delights of material
and moral success. In each case this serenity is
but the prelude to events of the most appalling
tragedy — a tragedy which does not merely strike
or wound, but positively annihilates. The story
called L' Inondatiofif which describes the results
of a bore on the Garonne, would be as pathetic
as it is enthralling, exciting, and effective, if the
destruction were not so absolutely complete, if the
persons so carefully enumerated at the opening of
the piece were not all of them sacrificed, and, as
in the once popular song called "An 'Orrible Tale,"
each by some different death of peculiar ingenuity.
As to Pour une Nuit d'Amour, it is not needful
to do more than say that it is one of the most
repulsive productions ever published by its author,

ZOLA 149

and a vivid exception to the general innocuous
character of his short stories.

No little interest, to the practical student of
literature, attaches to the fact that in L'lnonda-
tion Zola is really re-writing, in a more elaborate
form, the fourth section of his Jean Gourdon.
Here, as there, a farmer who has lived in the
greatest prosperity, close to a great river, is
stripped of everything — of his house, his wealth,
and his family — by a sudden rising of the waters.
It is unusual for an author thus to re-edit a work,
or tell the same tale a second time at fuller length,
but the sequences of incidents will be found to be
closely identical, although the later is by far the
larger and the more populous story. It is not
uninteresting to the technical student to compare
the two pieces, the composition of which was
separated by about ten years.

Finally, in 1884, Zola published a fourth col-
lection, named, after the first of the series, Nats
Micoulin. This volume contained in all six stories,
each of considerable extent. I do not propose
to dwell at any length on the contents of this
book, partly because they belong to the finished
period of naturalism, and seem more like castaway
fragments of the Rougon-Macquart epos than like
independent creations,, but also because they clash
with the picture I have sought to draw of an
optimistic and romantic Zola returning from time
to time to the short story as a shelter from his

I50 FRENCH PROFILES

theories. Of these tales, one or two are trifling
and passably insipid ; the Parisian sketches called
Nantas and Madame Neigon have little to be said
in favour of their existence. Here Zola seems
desirous to prove to us that he could write as
good Octave Feuillet, if he chose, as the author of
Monsieur de Cantors himself. In Les Coquillages de
M. Chabre, which I confess I read when it first
appeared, and have now re-read with amusement,
we see the heavy Zola endeavouring to sport as
gracefully as M. de Maupassant, and in the same
style. The impression of buoyant Atlantic seas
and hollow caverns is well rendered in this most
unedifying story. Na'is Micoulin, which gives its
name to the book, is a disagreeable tale of seduc-
tion and revenge in Provence, narrated with the
usual ponderous conscientiousness. In each of
the last mentioned the background of landscape
is so vivid that we half forgive the faults of the
narrative.

The two remaining stories in the book are
more remarkable, and one of them, at least, is of
positive value. It is curious that in La Mori
d' Olivier Be'cailles and Jacques Damour Zola should
in the same volume present versions of the Enoch
Arden story, the now familiar episode of the man
who is supposed to be dead, and comes back to
find his wife re-married. Olivier B^caille is a
poor clerk, lately arrived in Paris with his wife ;
he is in wretched health, . and has always been
subject to cataleptic seizures. In one of these he
falls into a state of syncope so prolonged that
they believe him to be dead, and bury him. He

ZOLA 151

manages to break out of his coffin in the cemetery,
and is picked up fainting by a philanthropic
doctor. He has a long illness, at the end of
which he cannot discover what has become of his
wife. After a long search, he finds that she has
married a very excellent young fellow, a neigh-
bour ; and in the face of her happiness, Olivier
B6caille has not the courage to disturb her. Like
Tennyson's "strong, heroic soul," he passes out
into the silence and the darkness.

The exceedingly powerful story called Jacques
Damour treats the same idea, but with far greater
mastery, and in a less conventional manner.
Jacques Damour is a Parisian artisan, who be-
comes demoralised during the siege, and joins the
Commune. He is captured by the Versailles
army, and sentenced to penal servitude in New
Caledonia, leaving a wife and a little girl behind
him in Paris. After some years, in company with
two or three other convicts, he makes an attempt
to escape. He, in fact, succeeds in escaping,
with one companion, the rest being drowned
before they get out of the colony. One of the
dead men being mistaken for him, Jacques
Damour is reported home deceased. When, after
credible adventures, and at the declaration of the
amnesty, he returns to Paris, his wife and daughter
have disappeared. At length he finds the former
married to a prosperous butcher in the Batignolles,
and he summons up courage, egged on by a
rascally friend, to go to the shop in midday and
claim his lawful wife. The successive scenes in
the shop, and the final one, in which the ruddy

152 FRENCH PROFILES

butcher, sure of his advantage over this squalid
and prematurely wasted ex-convict, bids F^licie
take her choice, are superb. Zola has done
nothing more forcible or life-like. The poor old
Damour retires, but he still has a daughter to
discover. The finale of the tale is excessively
unfitted for the young person, and no serious
critic could do otherwise than blame it. But, at
the same time, I am hardened enough to admit
that I think it very true to life and not a little
humorous, which, I hope, is not equivalent to a
moral commendation. We may, if we like, wish
that Zola had never written Jacques Damour, but
nothing can prevent it from being a superbly
constructed and supported piece of narrative,
marred by unusually few of the mechanical faults
of his later work.

The consideration of the optimistic and some-
times even sentimental short stories of Zola helps
to reveal to a candid reader the undercurrent of
pity which exists even in the most " naturalistic "
of his romances. It cannot be too often insisted
upon that, although he tried to write books as
scientific as anything by Pasteur or Claude Bernard,
he simply could not do it. His innate romanticism
would break through, and, for all his efforts, it
made itself apparent even when he strove with the
greatest violence to conceal it. In his contes he
does not try to fight against his native idealism,
and they are, in consequence, perhaps the most
genuinely characteristic productions of his pen
which exist.

1892.

FERDINAND FABRE

On the nth of February 1898, carried off by
a brief attack of pneumonia, one of the most
original of the contemporary writers of France
passed away almost unobserved. All his life
through, the actions of Ferdinand Fabre were
inopportune, and certainly so ambitious an author
should not have died in the very central heat of
the Zola trial. He was just going to be elected,
moreover, into the French Academy. After
several misunderstandings and two rebuffs, he
was safe at last. He was standing for the chair
of Meilhac, and " sur de son affaire." For a very
long while the Academy had looked askance at
Fabre, in spite of his genius and the purity of his
books. His attitude seemed too much like that
of an unfrocked priest ; he dealt with the world
of religion too intimately for one who stood quite
outside. Years ago. Cardinal Perraud is reported
to have said, " I may go as far as Loti — but as
far as Fabre, never ! " Yet every one gave way
at last to the gentle charm of the C^venol novelist.
Taine and Renan had been his supporters ; a
later generation, MM. Hal6vy, Claretie, and Jules
Lemaitre in particular, were now his ardent
friends. The Cardinals were appeased, and the
author of L'Abbe Tigrane was to be an Immortal
at last. Ferdinand Fabre would not have been

154 FRENCH PROFILES

himself if he had not chosen that moment for the
date of his decease. All his life through he was
isolated, a little awkward, not in the central
stream ; but for all that his was a talent so
marked and so individual that it came scarcely
short of genius. Taine said long ago that one
man, and one man only, had in these recent years
understood the soul of the average French priest,
and that one man was Ferdinand Fabre. He
cared little for humanity unless it wore a cassock,
but, if it did, his study of its peculiarities was
absolutely untiring. His books are galleries of
the portraits of priests, and he is to French fiction
what Zurbaran is to Spanish painting.

I

Ferdinand Fabre was born in 1830 at B^darieux,
in the H^rault, that department which lies between
the southern masses of the C^vennes Mountains
and the lagoons of the Mediterranean. This is
one of the most exquisite districts in France ; just
above Bddarieux, the great moors or garrigues
begin to rise, and brilliant little rivers, the Orb and
its tributaries, wind and dash between woodland
and meadow, hurrying to the hot plains and the
fiery Gulf of Lyons. But, up there in the Espin-
ouze, all is crystal-fresh and dewy-cool, a mild
mountain-country positively starred with churches,
since if this is one of the poorest it is certainly one
of the most pious parts of France. This zone of
broken moorland along the north-western edge of
the H^rault is Fabre's province ; it belongs to him

FERDINAND FABRE 155

as the Berry belongs to George Sand or Dorset-
shire to Mr. Hardy. He is its discoverer, its
panegyrist, its satirist. It was as little known to
Frenchmen, when he began to write, as Pata-
gonia ; and in volume after volume he has made
them familiar with its scenery and its population.
For most French readers to-day, the Lower
C^vennes are what Ferdinand Fabre has chosen to
represent them.

When the boy was born, his father was a suc-
cessful local architect, who had taken advantage
of a tide of prosperity which, on the revival of the
cloth-trade, was sweeping into B^darieux, to half-
rebuild the town. But the elder Fabre was
tempted by his success to enter into speculations
which were unlucky ; and, in particular, a certain
too ambitious high-road (often to be mentioned in
his son's novels), between Agde on the sea and
Castres on the farther side of the mountains,
completed his ruin. In 1842, when the boy was
twelve, the family were on the brink of bankruptcy.
His uncle, the Abb6 Fulcran Fabre, priest of the
neighbouring parish of Camplong, offered to take
Ferdinand to himself for awhile. In Ma Vocation
the novelist has given an enchanting picture of
how his uncle fetched him on foot, and led him,
without a word, through almond plantations
thronged with thrushes and over brawling water-
courses, till they reached an open little wood in
sight of the moors, where Ferdinand was allowed
to feast upon mulberries, while Uncle Fulcran
touched, for the first time, on the delicate question
whether his little garrulous nephew had or had not

156 FRENCH PROFILES

a call to the priesthood. Uncle Fulcran Fabre is
a type which recurs in every novel that Ferdinand
afterwards wrote. Sometimes, as in Mon Oncle
Ce'lestin, he has practically the whole book to him-
self ; more often he is a secondary character.
But he was a perpetual model to his nephew, and
whenever a naif, devoted country priest or an
eccentric and holy professor of ecclesiastical his-
tory was needed for foreground or background, the
memory of Uncle Fulcran was always ready.

The " vocation " takes a great place in all the
psychological struggles of Ferdinand Fabre's
heroes. It offers, indeed, the difficulty which
must inevitably rise in the breast of every generous
and religious youth who feels drawn to adopt the
service of the Catholic Church. How is he to
know whether this enthusiasm which rises in his
soul, this rapture, this devotion, is the veritable
and enduring fragrance of Lebanon, the all-needful
odor suavitatis ? This doubt long harassed the
breast of Ferdinand Fabre himself. In that poor
country of the C^vennes, to have the care of a
parish, to be sheltered by a presbytere — by a par-
sonage or manse, as we should say — is to have
settled very comfortably the problem of subsist-
ence. The manse will shelter a mother, at need a
sister or an aged father ; it reconstructs a home
for such a shattered family as the Fabres were
now. Great, though unconscious, pressure was
therefore put upon the lad to make inevitable his
" vocation." He was sent to the Little Seminary
at St. Pons de Thomi^res, where he was educated
under M. I'Abb^ Dubreuil, a man whose ambitions

FERDINAND FABRE 157

were at once lettered and ecclesiastical, and who,
although Director of the famous Academic des
Jeux Floraux, eventually rose to be Archbishop of
Avignon.

During this time, at the urgent request of his
uncle at Camplong, Ferdinand Fabre kept a daily
journal. It was started in the hope that cultivat-
ing the expression of pious sentiments might make
their ebullition spontaneous, but the boy soon
began to jot down, instead of pious ejaculations,
all the external things he noticed : the birds in the
copses, the talk of the neighbours, even at last the
oddities and the disputes of the excellent clergy-
men his schoolmasters. When the Abb6 Fulcran
died in 1871, his papers were burned and most of
Ferdinand's journals with them ; but the latest and
therefore most valuable cahier survived, and is the
source from which he extracted that absorbingly
interesting fragment of autobiography. Ma Vocation.
This shows us why, in spite of all the pressure of
his people, and in spite of the entreaties of his
amiable professors at the Great Seminary of Mont-
pellier, the natural man was too strong in
Ferdinand Fabre to permit him to take the final
vows. In his nineteenth year, on the night of the
23rd of June 1848, after an agony of prayer, he
had a vision in his cell. A great light filled the
room ; he saw heaven opened, and the Son of
God at the right hand of the Father. He ap-
proached in worship, but a wind howled him out
of heaven, and a sovereign voice cried, " It is not
the will of God that thou shouldst be a priest."
He rose up, calm though broken-hearted ; as soon

158 FRENCH PROFILES

as morning broke, without hesitation he wrote his
decision to his family, and of the " vocation " of
Ferdinand Fabre there was an end.

There could be no question of the sincerity of
a Hfe so begun, although from the very first there
may be traced in it an element of incompatibility,
of gaucherte. Whatever may be said of the clerical
novels of Fabre, they are at least built out of a
loving experience. And, in 1889, replying to
some accuser, he employed words which must be
quoted here, for they are essential to a comprehen-
sion of the man and his work. They were
addressed to his wife, diledce uxori, and they take a
double pathos from this circumstance. They are
the words of the man who had laid his hand to
the plough, and had turned away because life was
too sweet : —

" Je ne suis pas alle a I'Eglise de propos d61ib6r6
pour la peindre et pour la juger, encore moins
pour faire d'elle metier et marchandise ; I'Eglise
est venue a moi, s'est impos6e a moi par la force
d'une longue fr^quentation, par les Amotions
poignantes de ma jeunesse, par un gout tenace de
mon esprit, ouvert de bonne heure a elle, a elle
seule, et j'ai 6crit tout de long de I'aune, naive-
ment. . . . Je demeurais confine dans mon coin
6troit, dans mon 'diocese,' comme aurait dit
Sainte-Beuve. . . . De la une s6rie de livres sur
les desservants, les cur^s, les chanoines, les
6v^ques."

But if the Church was to be his theme and his
obsession, there was something else in the blood
of Ferdinand Fabre. There was the balsam- laden

FERDINAND FABRE 159

atmosphere of the great moorlands of the
Cevennes. At first it seemed as though he were
to be torn away from this natural perfume no less
than from the odour of incense. He was sent,
after attemping the study of medicine at Mont-
pellier, to Paris, where he was articled as clerk to
a lawyer. The oppression of an office was intoler-
able to him, and he broke away, trying, as so
many thousands do, to make a living by journalism,
by the untrained and unaccomplished pen. In
1853 he published the inevitable volume of verses,
Les Feuilles de Lierre. It seemed at first as if these
neglected ivy-leaves would cover the poor lad's
coffin, for, under poverty and privation, his health
completely broke down. He managed to creep back
to B^darieux, and in the air of the moors he soon
recovered. But how he occupied himself during
the next eight or ten years does not seem to have
been recorded. His life was probably a very idle
one ; with a loaf of bread and a cup of wine
beneath the bough, youth passes merrily and
cheaply in that delicious country of the Herault.

In the sixties he reappeared in Paris, and at
the age of thirty-two, in 1862, he brought out his
first novel, Les Courbezon : Scenes de la Vie Cle'ri-
cale. George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life had
appeared a few years earlier ; the new French
novelist resembled her less than he did Anthony
Trollope, to whom, with considerable clairvoy-
ance, M. Am^d^e Pichot immediately compared
him. In spite of the limited interests involved
and the rural crudity of the scene — the book was
all about the life of country priests in the

i6o FRENCH PROFILES

C^vennes — Les Courbezon achieved an instant suc-
cess. It was crowned by the French Academy,
it was praised by George Sand, it was carefully
reviewed by Sainte-Beuve, who called the author
" the strongest of the disciples of Balzac."
Ferdinand Fabre had begun his career, and was
from this time forth a steady and sturdy con-
structor of prose fiction. About twenty volumes
bear his name on their title-pages. In 1883 he
succeeded Jules Sandeau as curator of the Mazarin
Library, and in that capacity inhabited a pleasant
suite of rooms in the Institute, where he died.
There are no other mile-stones in the placid road-
way of his life except the dates of the most im-
portant of his books: Le Chevrier, 1867; L Abbe
Tigrane, 1873 ; Barnabe, 1875 ; Mon Oncle Celestin,
1881 ; Lucifer, 1884 ; and UAbbe Roitelety 1890.
At the time of his death, I understand, he was at
work on a novel called Le Bercail, of which only a
fragment was completed. Few visitors to Paris
saw him ; he loved solitude and was shy. But he
is described as very genial and smiling, eager to
please, with a certain prelatical unction of manner
recalling the Seminary after half a century of
separation.

II

The novels of Ferdinand Fabre have one signal
merit : they are entirely unlike those of any other
writer ; but they have one equally signal defect —
they are terribly like one another. Those who
read a book of his for the first time are usually

FERDINAND FABRE i6i

highly delighted, but they make a mistake if they
immediately read another. Criticism, dealing
broadly with Ferdinand Fabre, and anxious to
insist on the recognition of his great merits, is wise
if it concedes at once the fact of his monotony. Cer-
tain things and people — most of them to be found
within five miles of his native town — interested
him, and he produced fresh combinations of these.
Without ever entirely repeating himself, he pro-
duced, especially in his later writings, an unfor-
tunate impression of having told us all that before.
Nor was he merely monotonous ; he was unequal.
Some of his stories were much better constructed
and even better than others. It is therefore need-
less, and would be wearisome, to go through the
list of his twenty books here. I shall merely
endeavour to present to English readers, who are
certainly not duly cognisant of a very charming
and sympathetic novelist, those books of Fabre's
which, I believe, will most thoroughly reward
attention.

By universal consent the best of all Fabre's
novels is L! Abbe Tigrane, Candidal a la Papaute.
It is, in all the more solid and durable qualities
of composition, unquestionably among the best
European novels of the last thirty years. It is as
interesting to-day as it was when it first appeared.
I read it then with rapture, I have just laid it down
again with undiminished admiration. It is so
excellently balanced and moulded that it positively
does its author an injury, for the reader cannot
resist asking why, since L Abbe Tigrane is so
brilliantly constructed, are the other novels of

L

i62 FRENCH PROFILES

Fabre, with all their agreeable qualities, so mani-
festly inferior to it ? And to this question there
is no reply, except to say that on one solitary
occasion the author of very pleasant, characteristic
and notable books, which were not quite master-
pieces, shot up in the air and became a writer
almost of the first class. I hardly know whether
it is worth while to observe that the scene of
L'Abbe Tigrane, although analogous to that which
Fabre elsewhere portrayed, was not identical with
it, and perhaps this slight detachment from his
beloved C^vennes gave the novelist a seeming
touch of freedom.

The historical conditions which give poignancy
of interest to the ecclesiastical novels of Ferdinand
Fabre are the re-assertion in France of the
monastic orders proscribed by the Revolution, and
the opposition offered to them by the parochial
clergy. The battle which rages in these stormy
books is that between Roman and Galilean ambi-
tion. The names of Lacordaire and Lamennais
are scarcely mentioned in the pages of Fabre,^
but the study of their Uves forms an excellent pre-
paration for the enjoyment of stories like L'Abbe
Tigrane and Lucifer. The events which thrilled
the Church of France about the year 1840, the
subjection of the prelates to Roman authority,
the hostility of the Government, the resistance
here and there of an ambitious and headstrong
Gallican — all this must in some measure be recol-

^ I should except the curious anecdote of the asceticism of Lamennais
which is told by the arch-priest Rupert in the sixteenth chapter of
Lucifer.

FERDINAND FABRE 163

lected to make the intrinsic purpose of Fabre's
novels, which Taine had qualified as indispensable
to the historian of modern France, intelligible.
If we recollect Archbishop de Qu61en and his pro-
tection of the Peregrine Brethren ; if we think
of Lacordaire (on the 12th of February 1841)
mounting the pulpit of Notre-Dame in the for-
bidden white habit of St. Dominic ; if we recall
the turmoil which preceded the arrival of Mon-
seigneur Affre at Paris, we shall find ourselves
prepared by historic experience for the curious
ambitions and excitements which animate the
clerical novels of Fabre.

The devout little city of Lormieres, where the
scene of L'Abbe Tigrane is laid, is a sort of clerical
ante-chamber to Paradise. It stands in a wild
defile of the Eastern Pyrenees, somewhere be-
tween Toulouse and Perpignan ; it is not the
capital of a department, but a little stronghold of
ancient religion, left untouched in its poverty and
its devotion, overlooked in the general redistribu-
tion of dioceses. The Abb6 Rufin Capdepont,
about the year 1866, finds himself Vicar-General
of its Cathedral Church of St. Iren^e ; he is a
fierce, domineering man, some fifty years of age,
devoured by ambition and eating his heart out in
this forgotten corner of Christendom. He is by
conviction, but still more by temper, a Gallican of
the Galileans, and his misery is to see the prin-
ciples of the Concordat gradually being swept
away by the tide of the Orders setting in from
Rome. The present bishop of Lormieres, M. de
Roquebrun, is a charming and courtly person,

i64 FRENCH PROFILES

but he is under the thumb of the Regulars, and
gives all the offices which fall vacant to Domini-
cans or Lazarists. He is twenty years older than
Rufin Capdepont, who has determined to succeed
him, but whom every year of delay embitters and
disheartens.

Rufin Capdepont is built in the mould of the
unscrupulous conquerors of life. The son of a
peasant of the Pyrenees and of a Basque-Spanish
mother, he is a creature like a tiger, all sinuosity
and sleekness when things go well, but ready in a
moment to show claws and fangs on the slightest
opposition, and to stir with a roar that cows the
forest. His rude violence, his Gallicanism, the
hatred he inspires, the absence of spiritual unction
— all these make his chances of promotion rarer ;
on the other side are ranked his magnificent in-
tellect, his swift judgment, his absolutely imperial
confidence in himself, and his vigilant activity.
When they remind him of his mean origin, he
remembers that Pope John XXII. was humbly
born hard by at Cahors, and that Urban IV. was
the son of a cobbler at Troyes.

What the episcopate means to an ambitious
priest is constantly impressed on his readers by
Ferdinand Fabre. Yesterday, a private soldier in
an army of one hundred thousand men, the
bishop is to-day a general, grandee of the Holy
Roman Church, received ad limina apostolorum as
a sovereign, and by the Pope as " Venerable
Brother." As this ineffable prize seems slipping
from the grasp of Rufin Capdepont, his violence
becomes insupportable. At school his tyranny

FERDINAND FABRE 165

had gained him the nickname of Tigranes, from
his likeness to the Armenian tyrant king of kings ;
now to all the chapter and diocese of Lormieres
he is I'Abb^ Tigrane, a name to frighten children
with. At last, after a wild encounter, his in-
solence brings on an attack of apoplexy in the
bishop, and the hour of success or final failure
seems approaching. But the bishop recovers,
and in a scene absolutely admirable in execution
contrives to turn a public ceremony, carefully
prepared by Capdepont to humiliate him, into a
splendid triumph. The bishop, still illuminated
with the prestige of this coup, departs for Rome in
the company of his beloved secretary, the Abbe
Ternisien, who he designs shall succeed him in
the diocese. Capdepont is left behind, wounded,
sulky, hardly approachable, a feline monster who
has missed his spring.

But from Paris comes a telegram announcing
the sudden death of Monsieur de Roquebrun, and
Capdepont, as Vicar-General, is in provisional
command of the diocese. The body of the
bishop is brought back to Lormieres, but Capde-
pont, frenzied with hatred and passion, refuses to
admit it to the cathedral. The Abbe Ternisien,
however, and the other friends of the last regime,
contrive to open the cathedral at dead of night,
and a furtive but magnificent ceremony is per-
formed, under the roar of a terrific thunderstorm,
in defiance of the wishes of Capdepont. The
report spreads that not he, but Ternisien, is to be
bishop, and the clergy do not conceal their joy.
But the tale is not true ; Rome supports the strong

i66 FRENCH PROFILES

man, the priest with the iron hand, in spite of his
scandalous ferocity and his Gallican tendencies.
In the hour of his sickening suspense, Capdepont
has acted Hke a brute and a maniac, but with the
dawning of success his tact returns. He excuses
his violent acts as the result of illness ; he humbles
himself to the beaten party, he purrs to his clergy,
he rubs himself like a great cat against the com-
fortable knees of Rome. He soon rises to be
Archbishop, and we leave him walking at night in
the garden of his palace and thinking of the Tiara.
" Who knows ? " with a delirious glitter in his eyes,
" who knows ? "

With VAbbe Tigrane must be read Lucifer,
which is the converse of the picture. In Rufin
Capdepont we see the culmination of personal
ambition in an ecclesiastic who is yet devoted
through the inmost fibres of his being to the
interests of the Church. In the story of Bernard
Jourfier we follow the career of a priest who is
without individual ambition, but inspired by in-
tense convictions which are not in their essence
clerical. Hence Jourfier, with all his virtues,
fails, while Capdepont, with all his faults, succeeds,
because the latter possesses, while the former
does not possess, the " vocation." Jourfier, who
resembles Capdepont in several, perhaps in
too many, traits of character, is led by his in-
domitable obstinacy to oppose the full tide of
the monastic orders covering France with their
swarms. We are made to feel the incumbrance
of the Congregations, their elaborate systems of
espionage, and the insult of their direct appeal to

FERDINAND FABRE 167

Rome over the heads of the bishops. We reaUse
how intolerable the bondage of the Jesuits must
have been to an independent and somewhat
savage Gallican cleric of 1845, and what oppor-
tunities were to be found for annoying and de-
pressing him if he showed any resistance.

The young Abb6 Bernard Jourfier is the grand-
son and the son of men who took a prominent
part in the foundation and maintenance of the
First Republic. Although he himself has gone
into the Church, he retains an extreme pride in
the memory of the Spartans of his family. To
resist the pretensions of the Regulars becomes
with him a passion and a duty, and for expressing
these views, and for repulsing the advances of
Jesuits, who see in him the making of a magni-
ficent preacher, Jourfier is humiliated and hurt by
being hurried from one miserable succursale in
the mountains to another, where his manse is a
cottage in some rocky combe (like the Devonshire
" coomb "). At last his chance comes to him ; he
is given a parish in the lowest and poorest part of
the episcopal city of Mireval. Here his splendid
gifts as an orator and his zeal for the poor soon
make him prominent, though not with the other
clergy popular. His appearance — his forehead
broad like that of a young bull, his great brown
flashing eyes, his square chin, thick neck and in-
comparable voice — would be eminently attractive
if the temper of the man were not so hard and
repellent, so calculated to bruise such softer
natures as come in his way.

The reputation of Jourfier grows so steadily.

i68 FRENCH PROFILES

that the Chapter is unable to refuse him a canon's
stall in the Cathedral of St. Optat. But he is
haunted by his mundane devil, the voice which
whispers that, with all his austerity, chastity, and
elevation of heart, he is not truly called of God
to the priesthood. So he flings himself into
ecclesiastical history, and publishes in successive
volumes a great chronicle of the Church, inter-
penetrated by Gallican ideas, and breathing from
every page a spirit of sturdy independence which,
though orthodox, is far from gratifying Rome.
This history is rapidly accepted as a masterpiece
throughout France, and makes him universally
known. Still he wraps himself in his isolation,
when the fall of the Empire suddenly calls him
from his study, and he has to prevent the citizens
of Mireval from wrecking their cathedral and
insulting their craven bishop. Gambetta, who
knew his father, and values Jourfier himself,
procures that he shall be appointed Bishop of
Sylvanes. The mitre, so passionately desired by
Capdepont, is only a matter of terror and dis-
traction to Jourfier. He is on the point of refus-
ing it, when it is pointed out to him that his
episcopal authority will enable him to make a
successful stand against the Orders.

This decides him, and he goes to Sylvanes to
be consecrated. But he has not yet been pre-
conised by the Pope, and he makes the fatal
mistake of lingering in his diocese, harassing the
Congregations, who all denounce him to the
Pope. At length, in deep melancholy and failing
health, he sets out for Rome, and is subjected to

FERDINAND FABRE 169

all the delays, inconveniences, and petty humilia-
tions which Rome knows how to inflict on those
who annoy her. The Pope sees him, but without
geniality ; he has to endure an interview with the
Prefect of the Congregations, Cardinal Finella, in
which the pride of Lucifer is crushed like a pebble
under a hammer. He is preconised, but in the
most scornful way, on sufferance, because Rome
does not find it convenient to embroil herself with
the French Republic, and he returns, a broken
man, to Sylvan^s. Even his dearest friends, the
amiable and charming trio of Galilean canons,
who have followed him from Mireval, and to
find offices for whom he has roughly displaced
Jesuit fathers, find the bishop's temper intolerable.
His palace is built, like a fortress, on a rocky
eminence over the city, and one wild Christmas
night the body of the tormented bishop is dis-
covered, crushed, at the foot of the cliff, whether
in suicide cast over, or flung by a false delirious
step as he wandered in the rain. This endless
combat with the Church of which he was a
member, had ended, as it was bound to end, in
madness and despair.

As a psychological study Lucifer is more in-
teresting, perhaps, than L'Abbe Tigrane, because
more complex, but it is far from being so admir-
ably executed. As the story proceeds, Jourfier's
state of soul somewhat evades the reader. His
want of tact in dealing with his diocese and with
the Pope are so excessive that they deprive him
of our sympathy, and internal evidence is not
wanting to show that Fabre, having brought his

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Gallican professor of history to the prelacy, did
not quite know what to do with him then. To
make him mad and tumble him over a parapet
seems inadequate to the patient reader, who has
been absorbed in the intellectual and spiritual
problems presented. But the early portions of
the book are excellent indeed. Some of the epi-
sodes which soften and humanise the severity of
the central interest are charming; the career of
Jourfier's beloved nephew, the Abbe Jean Mon-
tagnol, who is irresistibly drawn towards the Jesuits,
and at last is positively kidnapped by them from
the clutches of his terrible uncle; the gentle old
archpriest Rupert, always in a flutter of timidity,
yet with the loyalty of steel ; the Canon Coulazou,
who watches Jourfier with the devotion of a dog
through his long misanthropic trances ; these turn
Luctfer into an enchanting gallery of serious clerical
portraits.

Ill

But there are other faces in the priestly portrait-
gallery which Ferdinand Fabre has painted, and
some of them more lovable than those of Tigrane
and Lucifer. To any one who desires an easy
introduction to the novelist, no book can be more
warmly recommended than that which bears the
title of LAbbe Roitelet, or, as we might put it,
"The Rev. Mr. Wren" (1890). Here we find
ourselves in a variety of those poverty-stricken
mountain parishes, starving under the granite peaks
of the C6vennes, which Fabre was the first writer
of the imagination to explore; groups of squalid

FERDINAND FABRE 171

huts, sprinkled and tumbled about rocky slopes,
hanging perilously over ravines split by tumul-
tuous rivulets that race in uproar down to the
valleys of the Orb or the Tarn. Here we discover,
assiduously but wearily devoted to the service
of these parched communities, the Abb6 Cyprien
Coupiac, called Roitelet, or the Wren, because he
is the smallest priest in any diocese of France.
This tiny little man, a peasant in his simplicity and
his shyness, has one ungovernable passion, which
got him into trouble in his student-days at Mont-
pellier, and does his reputation wrong even among
the rocks of the black Espinouze : that is his in-
fatuation for all kinds of birds. He is like St.
Bonaventure, who loved all flying things that drink
the light, rorem bibentes atque lumen; but he goes
farther, for he loves them to the neglect of his
duties.

Complaints are made of Coupiac's intense devo-
tion to his aviary, and he is rudely moved to a still
more distant parish ; but even here a flight of what
seem to be Pallas's sand-grouse is his ruin. He is
summoned before the bishop at Montpellier, and
thither goes the little trembling man, a mere wren
of humanity, to excuse himself for his quaint and
innocent vice. Happily, the bishop is a man of
the world, less narrow than his subalterns, and
in a most charming scene he comforts the little
ornithological penitent, and even brings him down
from his terrible exile among the rocks to a small
and poor but genial parish in the chestnut wood-
lands among his own folk, where he can be happy.
For a while the Abb6 Coupiac is very careful to

172 FRENCH PROFILES

avoid all Vogelweiden or places where birds do con-
gregate, and when he meets a goldfinch or a
wryneck is most particular to look in the opposite
direction; but in process of time he succumbs,
and his manse becomes an aviary, like its prede-
cessors. A terrible lesson cures the poor little man
at last. An eagle is caught alive in his parish,
and he cannot resist undertaking to cure its broken
wing. He does so, and with such success that he
loses his heart to this enormous pet. Alas ! the
affection is not reciprocated, and one morning,
without any warning, the eagle picks out one of
the abbe's eyes. With some difficulty Coupiac is
safely nursed to health again, but his love of birds
is gone.

However, it is his nature, shrinking from rough
human faces, to find consolation in his dumb
parishioners ; he is conscious to pain of that
"voisinage et cousinage entre I'homme et les
autres animaux" of which Charron, the friend of
Montaigne, speaks. So he extends a fatherly,
clerical protection over the flocks and herds of
Cabrerolles, and he revives a quaint and obso-
lescent custom by which, on Christmas night, the
C6venol cattle are brought to the door of their
parish church to listen to the service, and after-
wards are blessed by the priest. The book ends
with a sort of canticle of yule-tide, in which the
patient kine, with faint tramplings and lowings,
take modestly their appointed part ; and these rites
at the midnight mass are described as Mr. Thomas
Hardy might have described them if Dorchester had
been B^darieux. In the whole of this beautiful

FERDINAND FABRE 173

little novel Ferdinand Fabre is combating what he
paints as a besetting sin of his beloved C6venols —
their indifference and even cruelty to animals and
birds, from which the very clergy seem to be not
always exempt.

To yet another of his exclusively clerical novels
but brief reference must here be made, although
it has been a general favourite. In Mon Oncle
Ce'lestin (1881) we have a study of the entirely
single and tender-hearted country priest — a Ter-
tuUian in the pulpit, an infant out of it, a creature
all compact of spiritual and puerile qualities. His
innocent benevolence leads him blindfold to a de-
plorable scandal, his inexperience to a terrible
quarrel with a rival archaeologist, who drives
C^lestin almost to desperation. His enemies at
length push him so far that they determine the
bishop to suspend him so that he becomes revoque ;
but his health had long been undermined, and he
is fortunate in dying just before this terrible news
can be broken to him. This tragic story is laid
in scenes of extraordinary physical beauty; in no
book of his has Fabre contrived to paint the sublime
and varied landscape of the C^vennes in more de-
Hcious colours. In C^lestin, who has the charge
of a youthful and enthusiastically devoted nephew,
Fabre has unquestionably had recourse to his
recollections of the life at Camplong when he was
a child, in the company of his sainted uncle, the
Abb6 Fulcran.

In the whole company of Ferdinand Fabre's
priests the reader will not find the type which
he will perhaps most confidently await — that,

174 FRENCH PROFILES

namely, of the cleric who is untrue to his vows
of chastity. There is here no Abbe Mouret caught
in the mesh of physical pleasures, and atoning for
his faute in a pinchbeck Garden of Eden. The
impure priest, according to Fabre, is a dream of
the Voltairean imagination. His churchmen are
sternly celibate ; their first and most inevitable
duty has been to conquer the flesh at the price
of their blood; as he conceives them, there is no
place in their thoughts at all for the movements
of a vain concupiscence. The solitary shadow of
the Abbe Vignerte, suspended for sins of this class,
does indeed flit across the background of Lucifer,
but only as a horror and a portent. In some
of these priests, as they grow middle-aged, there
comes that terror of women which M. Anatole
France notes so amusingly in Le Mannequin d'Osier.
The austere Abbe Jourfier trembles in all his limbs
when a woman, even an old peasant-wife, calls him
to the confessional. He obeys the call, but he
would rather be told to climb the snowy peak of
the highest C^vennes and stay there.

To make such characters attractive and enter-
taining is, manifestly, extremely difficult. Fabre
succeeds in doing it by means of his tact, his
exhaustive knowledge of varieties of the clerical
species, and, most of all perhaps, by the intensity
of his own curiosity and interest. His attitude
towards his creations becomes, at critical moments,
very amusing. " The reader will hardly credit what
was his horrible reply," Fabre will say, or " How
can we explain such an extreme violence in our
principal personage ?" He forgets that these people

FERDINAND FABRE 175

are imaginary, and he calls upon us, with eager
complacency, to observe what strange things they
are saying and doing. His vivacious sincerity per-
mits him to put forth with success novel after novel,
from which the female element is entirely excluded.
In his principal books love is not mentioned, and
women take no part at all. Mon Oncle Celestin is
hardly an exception, because the female figures in-
troduced are those of a spiteful virago and a girl
of clouded intelligence, who are merely machines
to lift into higher prominence the sufferings and
the lustrous virtues of the Abb6 Cdestin. Through
the dramatic excitement, the nerve-storm, of L'Abbe
Ttgrane there never is visible so much as the flutter
of a petticoat ; in Lucifer, the interesting and pathetic
chapter on the text Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina
dismisses the subject in a manner which gives no
encouragement to levity. Those who wish to
laugh with Ariosto or to snigger with Aretine
must not come to Ferdinand Fabre. He has not
faith, he pretends to no vocation ; but that reli-
gious life upon which he looks back in a sort
of ceaseless nostalgia confronts him in its purest
and most loyal aspect.

IV

The priest is not absolutely the only subject
which preoccupies Ferdinand Fabre ; he is inter-
ested in the truant also. Wild nature is, in his
eyes, the great and most dangerous rival of the
Seminary, and has its notable victories. One of
the prettiest books of his later years. Monsieur Jean

176 FRENCH PROFILES

(1886), tells how a precocious boy, brought up in
the manse of Camplong — at last Fabre inextricably
confounded autobiography with fiction — is tempted
to go off on an innocent excursion with a fiery-
blooded gipsy girl called Mariette. The whole
novel is occupied by a recital of what they saw
and what they did during their two days' esca-
pade, and offers the author one of those oppor-
tunities which he loves for dealing almost in an
excess of naivete with the incidents of a pastoral
life. Less pretty, and less complete, but treated
with greater force and conviction, is the tale of
Toussaint Galabru (1887), which tells how a good
little boy of twelve years old fell into the grievous
sin of going a-poaching on Sunday morning with
two desperate characters who were more than old
enough to know better. The story itself is nothing.
What is delicious is the reflection of the boy's can-
did and timid but adventurous soul, and the pas-
sage before his eyes of the innumerable creatures
of the woodland. At every step there is a stir
in the oleanders or a flutter among the chestnut-
leaves, and ever and anon, through a break in the
copses, there peep forth against the rich blue
sky the white peaks of the mountains. Toussaint
Galabru is the only book known to me in the
French language which might really have been
written by Richard Jefferies, with some revision,
perhaps, by Mr. Thomas Hardy.

One curious book by Ferdinand Fabre demands
mention in a general survey of his work. It
stands quite apart, in one sense, from his custom-
ary labours ; in another sense it offers the quintes-

FERDINAND FABRE 177

sence of them. The only story which he has
published in which everything is sacrificed to
beauty of form is Le Chevner (1867), which
deserves a term commonly misused, and always
dubious ; it may be called a " prose-poem." In
his other books the style is sturdy, rustic and
plain, with frequent use of patois and a certain
thickness or heaviness of expression. His phrases
are abrupt, not always quite lucid ; there can be no
question, although he protested violently against
the attribution, that Fabre studied the manner of
Balzac, not always to his advantage. But in Le
Chevrier — which is a sort of discouraged Daphnis
and Chloe of the C^vennes — he deliberately com-
posed a work in modulated and elaborate num-
bers. It might be the translation of a poem in
Provencal or Spanish; we seem in reading it to
divine the vanished form of verse.

It is, moreover, written in a highly artificial lan-
guage, partly in C^venol patois, partly in French of
the sixteenth century, imitated, it is evident, from
the style of Amyot and Montaigne. Le Chevrier
begins, in ordinary French, by describing how the
author goes up into the Larzac, a bleak little
plateau that smells of rosemary and wild thyme in
the gorges of the High C^vennes, for the purpose
of shooting hares, and how he takes with him an
elderly goatherd, Eran Erembert, famous for his
skill in sport. But one day the snow shuts them
up in the farmhouse, and Eran is cajoled into
telling his life's history. This he does in the afore-
said mixture of patois and Renaissance French,
fairly but not invariably sustained. It is a story

M

178 FRENCH PROFILES

of passionate love, ill requited. Eran has loved a
pretty foundling, called Felice, but she prefers his
master's son, a handsome ne'er-do-weel, called
Fr6d6ry, whom she marries. Eran turns from her
to Fran9on, a still more beautiful but worthless
girl, and wastes his life with her. Fred^ry dies at
last, and Eran constrains Felice to marry him ; but
her heart is elsewhere, and she drowns herself. It
is a sad, impassioned tale, embroidered on every
page with love of the High C^venol country and
knowledge of its pastoral rites and customs.

The scene is curious, because of its various
elements. The snow, congealing around a neigh-
bouring peak in the Larzac, falls upon the branches
of a date-palm in the courtyard of the farmhouse
at Mirande, and on the peacocks, humped up and
ruffled in its branches. But through all the picture,
with its incongruities of a southern mountain
country, moves the cahrade, the docile flock of
goats, with Sacripant, a noble pedigree billy, at
their head, and these animals, closely attending
upon Eran their herd, seem to form a chorus in
the classico-rustic tragedy. And all the country,
bare as it is, is eminently giboyeiix; it stirs and
rustles with the incessant movement of those living
creatures which Ferdinand Fabre loves to describe.
And here, for once, he gives himself up to the
primitive powers of love ; the priest is kept out of
sight, or scarcely mars the rich fermentation of life
with glimpses of his soutane and his crucifix.

Le Chevrier has never enjoyed any success in
France, where its archaic pastoralism was mis-
apprehended from the first. But it was much

FERDINAND FABRE 179

admired by Walter Pater, who once went so far as
to talk about translating it. The novelist of the
C6vennes had an early and an ardent reader in
Pater, to whom I owe my own introduction to
Ferdinand Fabre. Unfortunately, the only indica-
tion of this interest which survives, so far as I
know, is an article in the privately printed Essays
from the Guardian, where Pater reviews one of
Fabre's weakest works, the novel called Norine
(1889). He says some delicate things about this
idyllic tale, which he ingeniously calls " a sym-
phony in cherries and goldfinches." But what
one would have welcomed would have been a
serious examination of one of the great celibate
novels, L'Abbe Tigrane or Lucifer. The former of
these, I know, attracted Pater almost more than any
other recent French work in fiction. He found,
as Taine did, a solid psychological value in these
studies of the strictly ecclesiastical passions — the
jealousies, the ambitions, the violent and masterful
movements of types that were exclusively clerical.
And the struggle which is the incident of life really
important to Fabre, the tension caused by the
divine " vocation " on the one hand and the cry
of physical nature on the other, this was of the
highest interest to Pater also. He was delighted,
moreover, with the upland freshness, the shrewd
and cleanly brightness of Fabre's country stories,
so infinitely removed from what we indolently
conceive that we shall find in " a French novel."

An English writer, of higher rank than Fabre,
was revealing the C^vennes to English readers just
when the Frenchman was publishing his mountain

i8o FRENCH PROFILES

stories. If we have been reading Le Chevrier^
it will be found amusing to take up again the
Through the Cevennes with a Donkey of Robert Louis
Stevenson. The route which the Scotchman took
was from Le Monastier to Alais, across the north-
eastern portion of the mountain-range, while Fabre
almost exclusively haunts the south-western slopes
in the H^rault. Stevenson brings before us a bleak
and stubborn landscape, far less genial than the
wooded uplands of BMarieux. But in both
pictures much is alike. The bare moors on the
tops of the Cevennes are the same in each case,
and when we read Stevenson's rhapsody on the
view from the high ridge of the Mimerte, it might
well be a page translated from one of the novels
of Ferdinand Fabre. But the closest parallel with
the Frenchman is always Mr. Thomas Hardy,
whom in his rustic chapters he closely resembles
even in style. Yet here again we have the national
advantage, since Fabre has no humour, or exceed-
ingly little.

Fabre is a solitary, stationary figure in the
current history of French literature. He is the
gauche and somewhat suspicious country bumpkin
in the urban congregation of the wits. He has
not a word to say about " schools " and " ten-
dencies " ; he is not an adept in nevrosite d' artiste.
It is odd to think of this rugged C^venol as a con-
temporary of Daudet and Goncourt, Sardou and
Bourget ; he has nothing whatever in common
with them. You must be interested in his affairs,
for he pretends to no interest in yours. Like
Mr. Rudyard Kipling's " Native- Born," Ferdinand

FERDINAND FABRE i8i

Fabre seems to say, " Let a fellow sing of the little
things he cares about " ; and what these are we
have seen. They are found among the winding
paths that lead up through the oleander-marshes,
through the vineyards, through the chestnuts, to
the moorlands and the windy peaks ; they are
walking beside the patient flocks of goats, when
Sacripant is marching at their head ; they are the
poachers and the reapers, the begging friars and
the sportsmen, all the quiet, rude population of
those shrouded hamlets of the H^rault. Most of
all they are those abbes and canons, those humble,
tremulous parish priests and benevolently arrogant
prelates, whom he understands more intimately
than any other author has done who has ever
written. Persuade him to speak to you of these,
and you will be enchanted ; yet never forget that
his themes are limited and his mode of delivery
monotonous.

1898.

A FIRST SIGHT OF VERLAINE

In 1893 the thoughts of a certain pilgrim were a
good deal occupied by the theories and experi-
ments which a section of the younger French
poets were engaged upon. In this country, the
Symbolists and Decadents of Paris had been
laughed at and parodied, but, with the exception
of Mr. Arthur Symons, no English critic had given
their fentatives any serious attention. I became
much interested — not wholly converted, certainly,
but considerably impressed — as I studied, not what
was said about them by their enemies, but what
they wrote themselves. Among them all, there
was but one, M. Mallarme, whom I knew person-
ally ; him I had met, more than twenty years
before, carrying the vast folio of his Manet-Poe
through the length and breadth of London, dis-
appointed but not discouraged. I learned that
there were certain haunts where these later De-
cadents might be observed in large numbers, drawn
together by the gregarious attraction of verse. I
determined to haunt that neighbourhood with a
butterfly-net, and see what delicate creatures with
powdery wings I could catch. And, above all,
was it not understood that that vaster lepidopter,
that giant hawk-moth, Paul Verlaine, uncoiled his
proboscis in the same absinthe-corollas ?

Timidity, doubtless, would have brought the

VERLAINE 183

scheme to nought, if, unfolding it to Mr. Henry
Harland, who knows his Paris Hke the palm of his
hand, he had not, with enthusiastic kindness, offered
to become my cicerone. He was far from sharing
my interest in the Symbolo-decadent movement,
and the ideas of the " poetes abscons comme la
lune " left him a little cold, yet he entered at once
into the sport of the idea. To race up and down
the Boulevard St. Michel, catching live poets in
shoals, what a charming game 1 So, with a beating
heart and under this gallant guidance, I started on
a beautiful April morning to try my luck as an
entomologist. This is not the occasion to speak
of the butterflies which we successfully captured
during this and the following days and nights ; the
expedition was a great success. But, all the time,
the hope of capturing that really substantial moth,
Verlaine, was uppermost, and this is how it was
realised.

As every one knows, the broad Boulevard St,
Michel runs almost due south from the Palais
de Justice to the Gardens of the Luxembourg.
Through the greater part of its course, it is
principally (so it strikes one) composed of restau-
rants and brasseries, rather dull in the daytime,
excessively blazing and gay at night. To the
critical entomologist the eastern side of this street
is known as the chief, indeed almost the only
habitat of poeta symbolans, which, however, occurs
here in vast numbers. Each of the leaders of a
school has his particular cafe, where he is to be
found at an hour and in a chair known to the
habitues of the place. So Dryden sat at Will's and

i84 FRENCH PROFILES

Addison at Button's, when chocolate and ratafia, I
suppose, took the place of absinthe. M. Jean
Mor^as sits in great circumstance at the Restau-
rant d'Harcourt — or he did three years ago — and
there I enjoyed much surprising and stimulating
conversation. But Verlaine — where was he ?
At his caf6, the Fran9ois- Premier, we were told
that he had not been seen for four days. " There
is a letter for him — he must be ill," said Madame;
and we felt what the tiger-hunter feels when the
tiger has gone to visit a friend in another valley.
But to persist is to succeed.

The last of three days devoted to this fascinat-
ing sport had arrived. I had seen Symbolists and
Decadents to my heart's content. I had learned
that Victor Hugo was not a poet at all, and that
M. Vi616-Grififin was a splendid bard ; I had heard
that neither Victor Hugo nor M. Viel6-Griffin had
a spark of talent, but that M. Charles Morice was
the real Simon Pure. I had heard a great many
conflicting opinions stated without hesitation and
with a delightful violence ; I had heard a great
many verses recited which I did not understand
because I was a foreigner, and could not have
understood if I had been a Frenchman. I had
quaffed a number of highly indigestible drinks,
and had enjoyed myself very much. But I had
not seen Verlaine, and poor Mr. Harland was in
despair. We invited some of the poets to dine
with us that night (this is the etiquette of the
"Bou' Mich'") at the Restaurant d'Harcourt, and
a very entertaining meal we had. M. Mor^as was
in the chair, and a poetess with a charming name

VERLAINE 185

decorated us all with sprays of the narcissus poeticus.
I suppose that the company was what is called
" a little mixed," but I am sure it was very lyrical.
I had the honour of giving my arm to a most
amiable lady, the Queen of Golconda, whose
precise rank among the crowned heads of Europe
is, I am afraid, but vaguely determined. The
dinner was simple, but distinctly good ; the chair-
man was in magnificent form, un vrai chef d'ecole,
and between each of the courses somebody in-
toned his own verses at the top of his voice.
The windows were wide open on to the Boule-
vard, but there was no public expression of
surprise.

It was all excessively amusing, but deep down
in my consciousness, tolling like a little bell, there
continued to sound the words, " We haven't seen
Verlaine." I confessed as much at last to the
sovereign of Golconda, and she was graciously
pleased to say that she would make a great effort.
She was kind enough, I believe, to send out a sort
of search-party. Meanwhile, we adjourned to an-
other caf6, to drink other things, and our company
grew like a rolling snowball. I was losing all
hope, and we were descending the Boulevard, our
faces set for home ; the Queen of Golconda was
hanging heavily on my arm, and having formed
a flattering misconception as to my age, was warn-
ing me against the temptations of Paris, when two
more poets, a male and a female, most amiably
hurried to meet us with the intoxicating news that
Verlaine had been seen to dart into a little 'place
called the Caf6 Soleil d'Or. Thither we accord-

i86 FRENCH PROFILES

ingly hied, buoyed up by hope, and our party,
now containing a dozen persons (all poets), rushed
into an almost empty drinking-shop. But no
Verlaine was to be seen. M. Mor^as then col-
lected us round a table, and fresh grenadines were
ordered.

Where I sat, by the elbow of M. Moreas, I was
opposite an open door, absolutely dark, leading
down, by oblique stairs, to a cellar. As I idly
watched this square of blackness I suddenly saw
some ghostly shape fluttering at the bottom of it.
It took the form of a strange bald head, bobbing
close to the ground. Although it was so dim and
vague, an idea crossed my mind. Not daring to
speak, I touched M. Mor6as, and so drew his
attention to it. " Pas un mot, pas un geste,
Monsieur ! " he whispered, and then, instructed
in the guile of his race, insidias Danaiim, the
eminent author of Les Cantilenes rose, making a
vague detour towards the street, and then plunged
at the cellar door. There was a prolonged scuffle
and a rolling downstairs ; then M. Moreas re-
appeared, triumphant ; behind him something
flopped up out of the darkness like an owl, —
a timid shambling figure in a soft black hat, with
jerking hands, and it peeped with intention to
disappear again. But there were cries of " Venez
done, Maitre," and by-and-by Verlaine was per-
suaded to emerge definitely and to sit by me.

I had been prepared for strange eccentricities of
garb, but he was very decently dressed ; he re-
ferred at once to the fact, and explained that this
was the suit which had been bought for him to

VERLAINE 187

lecture in, in Belgium. He was particularly proud
of a real white shirt ; " C'est ma chemise de con-
ference," he said, and shot out the cuffs of it with
pardonable pride. He was full of his experiences
of Belgium, and in particular he said some very
pretty things about Bruges and its beguinages, and
how much he should like to spend the rest of his
life there. Yet it seemed less the mediaeval build-
ings -^vhich had attracted him than a museum of
old lace. He spoke with a veiled utterance, diffi-
cult for me to follow. Not for an instant would
he take off his hat, so that I could not see the
Socratic dome of forehead which figures in all
the caricatures. I thought his countenance very
Chinese, and I may perhaps say here that when
he was in London in 1894 I called him a Chinese
philosopher. He replied : " Chinois — comme vous
voulez, mais philosophe — non pas !"

On this first occasion (April 2, 1893), recita-
tions were called for, and Verlaine repeated his
Clair de Lune : —

" Votre S.me est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs deguisements fantasques,"

and presently, with a strange indifference to all
incongruities of scene and company, part of his
wonderful Mon Dieu m'a dit: —

" J'ai r^pondu : * Seigneur, vous avez dit mon ime.
C'est vrai que je vous cherche et ne vous trouve pas.
Mais vous aimer ! Voyez comme je suis en bas,
Vous dont I'amour toujours monte comme la flamme

i88 FRENCH PROFILES

' Vous, la source de paix que toute soif reclame,
Helas ! Voyez un peu tous mes tristes combats !
Oserai-je adorer la trace de vos pas,
Sur ces genoux saignants d'un rampement infame ? ' "

He recited in a low voice, without gesticulation,
very delicately. Then M. Mordas, in exactly the
opposite manner, with roarings of a bull and with
modulated sawings of the air with his hand, in-
toned an eclogue addressed by himself to Verlaine
as "Tityre." And so the exciting evening closed,
the passionate shepherd in question presently dis-
appearing again down those mysterious stairs.
And we, out into the soft April night and the
budding smell of the trees.

1896.

THE IRONY OF M. ANATOLE FRANCE

If we are asked, What is the most entertaining
intelligence at this moment working in the world
of letters ? I do not see that we can escape from
replying, That of M. Anatole France. Nor is it
merely that he is sprightly and amusing in him-
self ; he is much more than that. He indicates
a direction of European feeling ; he expresses a
mood of European thought. Excessively weary
of all the moral effort that was applied to literature
in the eighties, all the searchings into theories and
proclaimings of gospels, all the fuss and strain of
Ibsen and Tolstoi and Zola, that the better kind
of reader should make a volte-face was inevitable.
This general consequence might have been fore-
seen, but hardly that M. Anatole France, in his
quiet beginnings, was preparing to take the position
of a leader in letters. He, obviously, has dreamed
of no such thing ; he has merely gone on develop-
ing and emancipating his individuality. He has
taken advantage of his growing popularity to be
more and more courageously himself ; and doubt-
less he is surprised, as we are, to find that he has
noiselessly expanded into one of the leading
intellectual forces of our day.

After a period of enthusiasm, we expect a great

suspicion of enthusiasts to set in. M. Anatole

189

I90 FRENCH PROFILES

France is what they used to call a Pyrrhonist in
the seventeenth century — a sceptic, one who
doubts whether it is worth while to struggle
insanely against the trend of things. The man
who continues to cross the road leisurely, although
the cyclists' bells are ringing, is a Pyrrhonist — and
in a very special sense, for the ancient philosopher
who gives his name to the class made himself
conspicuous by refusing to get out of the way of
careering chariots. After a burst of moral excite-
ment, a storm of fads and fanaticism, there is
bound to set in calm weather and the reign of
indifferentism. The ever-subtle Pascal noticed
this, and remarked on the importance to scepticism
of working on a basis of ethical sensitiveness.
" Rien fortifie plus le pyrrhonisme," he says, " que
ce qu'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens." The
talent of M. Anatole France is like a beautiful
pallid flower that has grown out of a root fed on
rich juices of moral strenuousness. He would
not be so delicately balanced, so sportive, so
elegantly and wilfully unattached to any moral
system, if he had not been preceded by masters
of such a gloomy earnestness.

Le Mannequin D'Osier

After many efforts, more or less imperfectly
successful, M. France seems at last to have dis-
covered a medium absolutely favourable to his
genius. He has pursued his ideal of graceful
scepticism from period to period. He has sought
to discover it in the life of late antiquity {Thais), in

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 191

the ironic naivete of the Middle Ages {Balthasar
and Le Putts de Sainte Claire^, in the humours of
eighteenth-century deism {La Roiisserie de la Reine
Pedauque and M. Jerome Coignard), in the criticism
of contemporary books (Z,a Vie Litteraire\ in pure
philosophical paradox {Le Jardin d Epicure). Only
once, in my opinion, has he ceased to be loyal to
that sagesse et elegance which are his instinctive
aim ; only once — in that crude Le Lys Rouge^
which is so unworthy of his genius in everything
but style. With this exception, through fifteen
delightful volumes he has been conscientiously
searching for his appropriate medium, and, surely,
he has found it at last. He has found it in that
unnamed town of the north of France, where he
listens to the echoes and reverberations of the life
of to-day, and repeats them naively and maliciously
to us out of his mocking, resonant lips.

The two books which M. Anatole France
published in 1897 belong to the new cate-
gory. Perhaps it was not every reader of
L'Orme du Mail who noticed the words ^^Histoire
Contentporaine" at the top of the title-page. But
they are repeated on that of Le Mannequin
d'Osier, and they evidently have a significance.
Is this M. Anatole France's mode of indicating
to us that he is starting on some such colossal
enterprise as a Come'die Humaine, or a series like
Les Rougon Macquart? Nothing quite so alarming
as this, probably, but doubtless a series of some
sort is intended ; and, already, it is well to warn
the impetuous reader not to open Le Mannequin
dOsier till he has mastered LOrme du Mail, at the

192 FRENCH PROFILES

risk of failing to comprehend the situation. The
one of these books is a direct continuation of
the other.

There was no plot in LOrme du Mail. We were
introduced, or rather invisibly suspended within,
a provincial city of France of to-day, where, under
all species of decorous exteriors, intrigues were
being pushed forward, domestic dramas conducted,
the hollowness of intellectual pretensions con-
cealed, and even — for M. Anatole France knows
the value of the savage note in his exquisite
concert — brutal crimes committed. With a skill
all his own, he interested us in the typical indi-
vidualities in this anthill of a town, and he knows
how to produce his effects with so light and yet so
firm a hand, that he never for a moment wearied
us, or allowed us to forget his purpose. He has
become no less persuaded than was Montaigne
himself of the fact that man is in his essence
" ondoyant et divers," and he will teach us to see
these incongruities, no longer in some fabulous
Jerome Coignard, but in the very forms of
humanity which elbow us daily in the street. He
will do this with the expenditure of that humour
which alone makes the Pyrrhonist attitude toler-
able, and he will scatter the perfume of his gaiety
in gusts so delicate and pure that it shall pervade
his books from end to end, yet never for a
moment betrays the author into farce or caricature.
He will, moreover, lift his dialogue on to a plane
of culture much higher than is customary even in
French novels, where the standard of allusion and
topic in conversation has always been more

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 193

instructed than in English stories of a similar
class. He will examine, with all his array of wit
and tolerance and paradoxical scepticism, how the
minds of average men and women are affected by
the current questions of the hour.

Readers of L'Orme du Mail were prepared for
the entertainment which was bound to follow.
They were familiar with the battle royal for the
vacant mitre which was silently raging between
M. rAbb6 Lantaigne and M. I'Abb^ Guitrel ; they
sympathised with the difficulties of the pr^fet, M.
Worms-Clavelin, so little anxious to make himself
disagreeable, and so good-natured and clever
underneath his irradicable vulgarity ; they had
listened with eagerness to the afternoon conver-
sations in the bookshop of M. Paillot ; they had
hung over the back of the seat in the shadow of
the great elm-tree on the Mall, to overhear the
endless amiable wranglings of M. Lantaigne and
the Latin professor, M. Bergeret, the only persons
in the whole town who "s'interessaient aux id^es
g^n^rales." They had thrilled over the murder of
Madame Houssieu, and laughed at the sophisti-
cations of M. de Terremondre, the antiquary.
LOrme du Mail ended like a volume of Tristram
Shandy, nowhere in particular. We laid it down
with the sentence, " No^mi est de force a faire
un 6veque ; " saying to ourselves, " Will she do
it ? " And now that we have read Le Mannequin
d^ Osier, we know as little as ever what she
can do.

But we know many other things, and we are
not quite happy. Le Mannequin d Osier is not so

N

194 FRENCH PROFILES

gay a book as its predecessor, and the Pyrrhonism
of M. Anatole France seems to have deepened
upon him. The air of insouciance which hung
over the sun-Hghted Mall has faded away. M.
Bergeret sits there no longer, or but very seldom,
arguing with M. I'Abb^ Lantaigne ; the clouds are
closing down on the fierce Abb6 himself, and he
will never be Bishop of Tourcoing. In the new
book, M. Bergeret, who took a secondary place in
L'Orme du Mail, comes into predominance. His
sorrows and squalor, the misfortunes of his
domestic life, his consciousness of his own tri-
viality of character and mediocrity of brain —
those are subjected to cruel analysis. The differ-
ence between L'Orme du Mail and Le Mannequin
d Osier is that between the tone of Sterne and of
Swift. The comparison of Madame Bergeret, by
her husband, to an obsolete and inaccurate Latin
lexicon is extremely in the manner of A Tale of
a Tub, and the horribly cynical and entertaining
discussion as to the criminal responsibility of the
young butcher Lecceur — who has murdered an
old woman in circumstances of the least attenuated
hideousness, but who gains the sympathy of the
prison chaplain — is exactly in the temper of the
" Examination of Certain Abuses," It is curious
to find this Swift-like tone proceeding out of the
Shandean spirit which has of late marked the
humour of M. Anatole France. He is so little
occupied with English ideas that he is certainly
unconscious of the remarkable resemblance be-
tween his reflections as to the nationalisation of
certain forms of private property at the Revolution

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 195

— " en quelque sorte un retour a I'ancien regime,"
and a famous page of Carlyle.

Around that dressmaker's dummy of Madame
Bergeret, which gives its name to the book, there
gather innumerable ideas, whimsical, melancholy,
contradictory, ingenious, profound. The peculiar
obscurity and helplessness of poor M. Bergeret,
compiling a Virgilhis Nauticus with his desk cramped
by an enormous plaster cylinder in front of it, and
the terrible dummy behind it, exacerbated by his
indigence and his mediocrity, by the infidelities
of Madame Bergeret and the instabihty of his
favourite pupils, his abject passivity, like that of a
delicate, sentient thing, possessing neither tongue,
nor hands, nor feet — all this forms in the end a
sinister picture. Is M. Anatole France mocking
his own kith and kin ? Is the most brilliant
man of letters that the modern system of education
in France has produced holding that very system
up to ridicule ? We might warn him to take care
that the fate of Orpheus does not overtake him,
were not his tact and rapidity equal to his pene-
tration. We are quite sure that, like M. Bergeret,
when M. Roux recited his incomprehensible poem
in vers litres, M. Anatole France will always know
the right moment to be silent " for fear of affront-
ing the Unknown Beauty."

HiSTOIRE COMIQUE

The intelligent part of the English public has
been successfully dragooned into the idea that M.
Anatole France is the most ingenious of the

196 FRENCH PROFILES

younger writers of Europe. It is extraordinary,
but very fortunate, that the firm expression of an
opinion on the part of a few expert persons whose
views are founded on principle and reason still
exercises a very great authority on the better class
of readers. When it ceases to do so the reign of
chaos will have set in. However, it is for the
present admitted in this country that M. Anatole
France, not merely is not as the Georges Ohnets
are, but that he is a great master of imagination
and style. Yet, one can but wonder how many
of his dutiful English admirers really enjoy his
books — how many, that is to say, go deeper down
than the epigrams and the picturesqueness ; how
many perceive, in colloquial phrase, what it is he
is " driving at," and, having perceived, still admire
and enjoy. It is not so difficult to understand
that there are English people who appreciate the
writings of Ibsen and of Tolstoi, and even, to sink
fathoms below these, of D'Annunzio, because
although all these are exotic in their relation to
our national habits of mind, they are direct. But
Anatole France — do his English admirers realise
what a heinous crime he commits ? — for all his
lucidity and gentleness and charm, Anatole France
is primarily, he is almost exclusively, an ironist.

In the literary decalogue of the English reader
the severest prohibition is " Thou shalt not commit
irony ! " This is the unpardonable offence. What-
ever sentiments a writer wishes to enforce, he has
a chance of toleration in this country, if he takes
care to make his language exactly tally with his
intention. But once let him adopt a contrary

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 197

method, and endeavour to inculcate his meaning
in words of a different sense, and his auditors fly
from him. No one who has endeavoured for the
last hundred years to use irony in England as an
imaginative medium has escaped failure. How-
ever popular he has been until that moment, his
admirers then slip away from hinl, silently, as
Tennyson's did when he wrote the later sections
of Maud, and still more strikingly as Matthew
Arnold's did when he published Friendship's
Garland. The result of the employment of irony
in this country is that people steal noiselessly
away from the ironist as if he had been guilty in
their presence of a social incongruity. Is it
because the great example of irony in our lan-
guage is the cruel dissimulation of Swift ? Is it
that our nation was wounded so deeply by that
sarcastic pen that it has suspected ever since,
in every ironic humorist, "the smiler with the
knife " ?

But the irony of M. Anatole France, like that
of Renan, and to a much higher degree, is, on the
contrary, beneficent. It is a tender and consola-
tory raillery, based upon compassion. His greatest
delight is found in observing the inconsistencies,
the illusions of human life, but never for the pur-
pose of wounding us in them, or with them. His
genius is essentially benevolent and pitiful. This
must not, however, blind us to the fact that he is
an ironist, and perhaps the most original in his
own sphere who has ever existed. Unless we
see this plainly, we are not prepared to compre-
hend him at all, and if our temperaments are so

198 FRENCH PROFILES

Anglo-Saxon as to be impervious to this form of
approach, we shall do best to cease to pretend
that we appreciate M. Anatole France. To come
to a case in point, the very title of the Histoire
Comique is a dissimulation. The idea of calling
this tale of anguish and disillusion a " funny story"
would certainly baffle us, if we did not, quite by
chance, in the course of a conversation, come
upon the explanation. Constantin Marc, discuss-
ing the suicide of the actor Chevalier, " le trouvait
comique, c'est-a-dire appartenant aux com^diens."
And this gives the keynote to the title and to the
tale ; it is a story about men and women who
deal with the phenomenal sides of things, and
who act life instead of experiencing it. It is a
book in which the personages, with the greatest
calmness, do and say the most terrible things, and
the irony consists in the mingled gravity and levity
with which they do and say them.

The design of the author, as always — as most
of all in that most exquisite of his books, Le Jardin
d Epicure — is to warn mankind against being too
knowing and too elaborate. Be simple, he says,
and be content to be deceived, or you cannot be
happy. Doctor Trublet, in the Histoire Comique,
the wise physician who attends the theatre, and
whom the actresses call Socrates, exclaims, " Je
tiens boutique de mensonages. Je soulage, je con-
sole. Peut-on consoler et soulager sans mentir ? "
This is a characteristic Anatolian paradox, and no
one who has followed the author's teaching will
find any difficulty in comprehending it. Over and
over again he has preached that intelligence is

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 199

vanity, that the more we know about Hfe the less
we can endure the anguish of its impact. He says
somewhere — is it not in Le Lys Rouge? — that the
soul of man feeds on chimeras. Take this fabulous
nourishment from us, and you spread the banquet
of science before us in vain. We starve on the
insufficiency of a diet which has been deprived of
all our absurd traditional errors, " nos idees betes,
augustes et salutaires." It is strange that all the
subtlety of this marvellous brain should have found
its way back to the axiom, Unless ye become as
little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom
of heaven.

These reflections may bewilder those who take
up the Histoire Comique as a work of mere enter-
tainment. They may even be scandalised by the
story; and indeed to find it edifying at all, it is
needful to be prepared for edification. Novelists
are like the three doctors whom, at a critical
moment, Mme. Douce recommends to be called
in. They were all clever doctors, but Mme. Douce
could not find the address of the first, the second
had a bad character, and the third was dead. M.
Anatole France belongs to the first category, but
we must take care that we know his address. In
the Histoire Comique he has quitted his series called
Histoire Contemporaine, and, we regret, M. Bergerat.
Nor has he returned, as we admit we hoped he
had done, to the Rotisserie de la Reine Pe'dauque,
and the enchanting humours of his eighteenth cen-
tury. He has written a novel of to-day, of the
same class as Le Lys Rouge. He has taken the
coulisses of a great theatre as the scene of the very

200 FRENCH PROFILES

simple intrigue of his story, which is, as always
with M. Anatole France, more of a chronicle than
a novel, and extremely simple in construction.

He has chosen the theatre for his scene, one
may conjecture, because of the advantage it offers
to a narrator who wishes to distinguish sharply
between emotions and acts. It troubles M. Anatole
France that people are never natural. They
scarcely ever say a thing because they think it.
They say it because it seems the proper thing to
say, and it is extremely rare to find any one who is
perfectly natural. In this book F^licie Nanteuil
congratulates herself that her lover, Robert de
Ligny, is natural ; but that is her illusion ; he is
not. This contrast between what people feel and
think and what they say is projected in the highest
relief upon the theatre. A violent symbol of this is
shown in the great scene where the actress, fresh
from the funeral of the man whose jealousy has
destroyed her happiness for ever, is obliged, at a
rehearsal, to repeat over and over the phrase,
" Mon cousin, je suis 6veill6e toute joyeuse ce
matin."

It would perhaps be difficult to point to a single
book which M. Anatole France has published in
which his theory that only two things, beauty and
goodness, are of any importance in life, seems at
first sight to be less prominent than in his Histoire
Comique. But it prevails here, too, we shall find,
if we are not hasty in judgment. And if we do
not care to examine the philosophy of the story,
and to reconcile its paradoxes with ethical truth,
we can at least enjoy the sobriety, the precision,

M. ANATOLE FRANCE 201

the elasticity of its faultless style. If the reader
prefers to do so, he may take Histoire Comique
simply as a melancholy and somewhat sensuous
illustration of the unreasonable madness of love,
and of the insufficiency of art, with all its discipline,
to regulate the turbulent spirit of youth.

1903.

PIERRE LOTI

It is one of the advantages of foreign criticism
that it can stand a little aloof from the movement
of a literature, and be unaffected by the passing
fluctuations of fashion. It is not obliged to take
into consideration the political or social accidents
which may affect the reputation of an author at
home. The sensitive and dreamy traveller whose
name stands at the head of this page was, for ten
years after his first appearance with that delicious
fantasia which he called Raharu, but which the
public insisted on knowing as Le Manage de Loti,
the spoiled favourite of the Parisian press. His
writings of this first period have been frequently
examined in England, by no one, however, so
delicately and exhaustively as by Mr. Henry
James. In 1891 " Pierre Loti" (whose real name,
of course, is Captain Louis Marie Julien Viaud)
was elected a member of the French Academy.
His candidature began in mischief, as we read in
the Journal of Goncourt, and in jest it ended. His
discours de reception may have been a very diverting
document, but it could not be considered a wise
one. The merry sailor had his joke, and lost his
public — that is to say, not to exaggerate, he alien-
ated the graver part of it. Since that time there
has been a marked disposition in French criticism

PIERRE LOTI 203

to reduce Pierre Loti's pretentions, to insist upon
"showing him his place." If the attention paid
him before was excessive, so has been the neglect
which has since been his portion. Neither the
one nor the other has been perfectly sane ; neither
one nor the other should prevent a foreign critic
from endeavouring, from the vantage-ground of
distance, to discover the place in contemporary
literature held by an artist whose range is limited,
but who possesses exquisite sensibilities and a rare
faculty of notation. In the following pages I have
successively examined the main publications of
Pierre Loti since the crisis in his literary fortunes.

Le Desert

This is the first work of importance which
Pierre Loti has published since he was made an
Academician, for Fantome d' Orient exceeded the
permission given to its author to be sentimental
and languishing, while Maielot, in spite of certain
tender pages, was distinctly below his mark. The
disturbance caused by his surprising entry into the
Mazarin Palace must now have passed away, for
in his new book he is eminently himself again.
This, at all events, is du meilleur Loti, and the
patient readers of fifteen previous volumes know
what that means. There is no more curious pheno-
menon in the existing world of letters than the
fascination of Loti. Here is a man and a writer
of a thousand faults, and we forgive them all. He
is a gallant sailor, and he recounts to us his
timidities and his effeminacies ; we do not care.

204 FRENCH PROFILES

He is absolutely without what we call " taste " ;
he exploits the weakness of his mother and the
death-bed of his aunt ; it makes no difference to
us. Irritated travellers of the precise cast say that
he is inaccurate ; no matter. Moralists throw up
their hands and their eyes at Aziyade and Chrysan-
theme and Suleima ; well, for the moment, we are
tired of being moral. The fact is, that for those
who have passed under the spell of Loti, he is irre-
sistible. He wields the authority of the charmer,
of the magician, and he leads us whither he
chooses. The critical spirit is powerless against
a pen so delicately sensitive, so capable of play-
ing with masterly effect on all the finer stops of
our emotions.

Even the sempiternal youth of Loti, however, is
waning away, and we are sensible in Le Desert
that the vitality of the writer is not what it was
when he made his first escapades in Senegambia,
in Montenegro, in Tahiti. Doubtless, the austerity
of the theme excludes indiscretion ; there is little
room for scandal in the monastery of Mount Sinai
or in the desert of Tih. But the secret of the
sovereign charm of Loti has always been the
exactitude with which his writing has transcribed
his finest and most fleeting emotions. He has
held up his pages like wax tablets and has pressed
them to his heart. This deep sincerity, not really
obscured to any degree by his transparent affecta-
tions, has given his successive books their poig-
nancy. And he has always known how to combine
this sincerity with tact, no living writer under-
standing more artfully how to arrange and to

PIERRE LOTI 205

suggest, to heighten mystery or to arrest an
indolent attention. Hence it would not be like
him to conceal the advances of middle age, or to
attempt to deceive us. We find in Le Desert a
Loti who is as faithful to his forty-five years as
the author of Le Roman dun Spahi was to his five-
and-twenty. The curiosity in mankind, and in
particular in himself, seems to have grown less
acute ; the outlook on the world is clearer and
firmer, less agitated and less hysterical. The
central charm, the exquisite manner of expressing
perfectly lucid impressions, remains absolutely
unmodified.

The book is the record of an expedition which
occupied just four weeks. Armed with a safe-
conduct from the powerful Seid, Omar El
Senoussi El Hosni, at the end of February of
last year, and in company of a noble friend
whose name does not occur in his pages, although
it constantly occupied the newspapers of Paris,
Pierre Loti started from Cairo on his way to
Palestine. His great design was to pass through
the heart of Idumaea, by the route of Petra, it
having been ten years since any European had
crossed that portion of the desert. The sheik of
Petra, it appears, is in revolt against both Turkey
and Egypt, and has closed a route which in
Stanley's day was open and comparatively easy.
Loti was unable, as will be seen, to achieve his
purpose, but a unique fortune befell him. In the
meanwhile, he started by Suez, landing on the
other side of the gulf, ascended Sinai, descended
again eastward, reached the sea, and marched

2o6 FRENCH PROFILES

beside it up to the head of the bay, halting in
that strange little town of Akabah, which repre-
sents the Eziongaber of Scripture and the -^lama
of the Crusaders. From this point he should
have started for Petra ; but as that proved quite
impossible, the expedition held a little to the west
and proceeded north through the singular and
rarely visited desert of Tih, the land of the
Midianites and the Amalekites. On Good Friday
they crossed the frontier of Palestine, and three
days later dismounted in one of the most ancient
and most mysterious cities in the world, Gaza of
the Philistines, a land of ruins and of dust, a
cluster of aged minarets and domes girdled by
palm-trees. The book closes with the words,
"To-morrow, at break of day, we shall start for
Jerusalem."

The sentiment of the desert has never been so
finely rendered before. Without emphasis, in his
calm, progressive manner, Loti contrives to plunge
us gradually in the colour and silence and desola-
tion of the wilderness. His talent for bringing up
before the eye delicate and complicated schemes
of aerial colour was never more admirably exer-
cised. He makes us realise that we have left
behind us the littleness and squalor of humanity,
lost in the hushed immensity of the landscape.
There are no crises in his narrative ; it proceeds
slowly onward, and, by a strange natural magic
in the narrator, we sweep onward with him. The
absence of salient features concentrates our atten-
tion on the vast outlines of the scene. As they
left the shores of the Gulf of Suez, the travellers

PIERRE LOTI 207

quitted their European dress, and with it they
seemed to have left the western world behind.
Every night, as they camped in darkness, the
granite peaks still incandescent about them, the
air full of warm aromatic perfumes, they descended
into a life without a future and without a past,
into a dim land somewhere behind the sun and
the moon.

This is the class of impression which Pierre
Loti is particularly fortunate in rendering. We
turn from his pages to those of a traveller who
was, in his own class, an admirable writer, a quick
and just observer. Forty years before Loti set
forth, Canon (afterwards Dean) Stanley attempted
almost exactly the same adventure, and his " Sinai
and Palestine " is still a classic. It is very instruc-
tive to see how the same scenes struck two such
distinct minds, both so intelligent and subtle,
but the one a philosopher, the other an artist.
One of the most singular spots on the earth's
surface must be the desolate shore of the still
more desolate Gulf of Akabah. This is how
Stanley regarded it : —

" What a sea ! what a shore ! From the dim
silvery mountains on the further Arabian coast,
over the blue waters of the sea, melting into
colourless clearness as they roll up the shelly
beach — that beach red with the red sand, or red
granite gravel, that pours down from the cliffs
above — those cliffs sometimes deep red, some-
times yellow and purple, and above them all the
blue cloudless sky of Arabia. Of the red sand
and rocks I have spoken ; but, besides these,

2o8 FRENCH PROFILES

fragments of red coral are for ever being thrown
up from the shores below, and it is these coralline
forests which form the true ' weeds ' of this fan-
tastic sea. But, above all, never did I see such
shells. Far as your eye can reach you can see
the beach whitening with them, like bleaching
bones."

This is eloquent, and Stanley is seldom so much
moved. But how much broader is the palette on
Loti's thumb, and how much more vivid is his
fragment of the same landscape : —

" L'ensemble des choses est rose, mais il est
comme barr6 en son milieu par une longue bande
infinie, presque noire a force d'etre intens^ment
bleue, et qu'il faudrait peindre avec du bleu de
Prusse pur legerement z6br6 de vert ^meraude.
Cette bande, c'est la mer, I'invraisemblable mer
d'Akabah ; elle coupe le desert en deux, nette-
ment, crument ; elle en fait deux parts, deux
zones d'une couleur d'hortensia, d'un rose exquis
de nuage de soir, ou, par opposition avec ces
eaux aux couleurs trop violentes et aux contours
trop durs, tout semble vaporeux, indecis a force
de miroiter et d'eblouir, ou tout 6tincelle de nacre,
de granit et de mica, oii tout tremble de chaleur
et de mirage."

The analysis of such a passage as this, and it is
not exceptionally remarkable, tends to show the
reader what a singular, perhaps what an un-
precedented gift Loti has for recording, with
absolute precision, the shades and details of a
visual effect. His travels in the desert, where
there is scarcely anything but elementary forms

PIERRE LOTI 209

of light and colour to be seen, have given him an
unparalleled opportunity for the exercise of a
talent which is less frequent than we are apt to
suppose, and which no recent French writer has
possessed in equal measure. There are pages of
Z^ Desert with which there is nothing in European
literature, of their limited class, to compare, except
certain of the atmospheric pictures in Fromentin's
two books and in Modern Painters. How bad this
sort of thing can be in clumsy hands, the gaudy
sunsets of William Black remind us. We turn ia
horror from the thought, and re-read the descrip-
tions in Le Desert of morning and evening from
the ramparts of the monastery on Mount Sinai, of
the enchanted oasis of Oued-el-Ain, of the ceme-
tery of Akabah at midnight. These, and a score
more pictures, seem to pass in the very reality of
vision before our eyes, as the author quietly rolls
them out of the magic lantern of his journal.

The lover of adventure will find nothing to
excite him in Loti's panorama. The Bedouins
were amiable and exacting, the expedition never
lost its way, such dangers as threatened it proved
merely to be mirages. If the travellers met a
panther in a cave, it merely opened half a yellow
eye ; if robbers hovered in the distance, they
never came within rifle shot. Mr. Rider Haggard
would make our flesh creep in a single paragraph
more than the amiable French pilgrim does in his
whole volume. In the deep and sonorous desert
Loti went to seek, not a sword, but peace. One
central impression remains with the reader, of a
great empty red land, a silent Edom, red as when

O

2IO FRENCH PROFILES

Diodorus Siculus described it two thousand years
ago, unchanging in its dry and resonant sterility.
Loti's book is simply the record of a peaceful
promenade, on the backs of swaying dromedaries,
across a broad corner of this vague and rose-
coloured infinity.

1895.

Jerusalem

In the midst of that persistent and maddening
search for novelty which is the malady, and at the
same time the absurdity, of our feverish age, there is
present in most of us an instinct of a diametrically
opposite nature. If no quarter of a century has
ever flung itself against the brazen door of the
future with so crazy a determination to break into
its secrets, to know, at all hazards, what to-morrow
is to be like, it is equally certain that no previous
epoch has observed with so deep an attention the
relics of the extreme past, nor listened with an ear
bent so low for a whisper from the childhood of
the world. The bustle of modern life cannot
destroy our primal sense of the impressiveness of
mystery, and nothing within our range of ideas is
so mysterious as the life which those led who im-
printed on the face of our earth indelible marks of
their force two or even three thousand years ago.
Of all the human forces which interest and perplex,
those of the founders of religion overpower the
imagination most. If we can discover on this
earth a city which has been the cradle, not of one
mode of faith, but of many modes, we may be
sure that around the crumbling and defaced walls

PIERRE LOTI 211

of that city a peculiar enchantment must depend.
There is but one such place in the world, and no
processes of civilisation, no removal of barriers, no
telegraphs or railways, can part the idea of Jeru-
salem from its extraordinary charm of sacrosanct
remoteness. The peculiar sentiment of Zion is
well expressed for us in the volume which Pierre
Loti has dedicated to it, a book which none
of those who propose to visit the Holy Land
should fail to pack away in their trunks. M.
Loti is the charmer par excellence among living
writers. To him in higher degree than to any one
else is given the power of making us see the object
he describes, and of flooding the vision in the true,
or at all events the effective, emotional atmosphere.
He has no humour, or at least he does not allow
it to intrude into his work. To take up a book on
the Holy Land, and to find it jocose — what an
appalling thing that would be ! We fancy that
Jerusalem is one of the few cities which Mark
Twain has never described. May he long be
prevented from visiting it ! A sense of humour is
an excellent thing in its place ; but the ancient
and mysterious cradles of religion are not its
proper fields of exercise. Mr. Jerome's Three
Men do very well in a Boat ; but it would require
the temper of an archimandrite to sojourn with
them in Jerusalem. M. Loti is never funny ; but
he is pre-eminently sensitive, acute, and sym-
pathetic.

With most of us theidea of Jerusalem was founded
in childhood. We retain the impression of a
clean, brilliantly white city, with flat roofs and a few

212 FRENCH PROFILES

scattered domes, perched on the crag of a mountain,
while precipices yawn below it and a broken desert
spreads around. To enhance the whiteness of the
shining town, the sky had usually been surcharged
with tempest by the artist. We formed the notion
that if we could climb to its neatly-fashioned gates
and escape the terrors of the dark gulfs below,
something very exquisite — above all, very fresh,
trim, and lustrous — would reward us inside those
strange ramparts. It is thus that Jerusalem appears
to-day to hundreds of thousands of spiritual pil-
grims. The hymns we sing and the sermons we
listen to support this illusion. They confound the
New Jerusalem with the old, and they suggest the
serenity and beauty of broad white streets and
saintly calm. Nothing could be falser to fact.
The real Jerusalem is what Lord Chesterfield calls,
in another sense, "a heterogeneous jumble of
caducity." It is a city that has turned reddish
with the concentrated dust of centuries. Under
this coating of dust there lurk fragments of all the
civilisations which have swept over it, one after the
other, one in the steps of the other.

This is the solemnising (even the terrifying)
aspect of Jerusalem. Its composite monuments,
in their melancholy abandonment, speak of the
horrors of its historic past. Nowhere can this
past be heard to speak more plainly than in the
wonderful kiosk, covered with turquoise-coloured
faience, which stands close to the Mosque of Omar
in the Haram-esh-Cherif. M. Loti describes its
double row of marble columns as a museum of
all the debris of the ages. Here are Greek and

PIERRE LOTI 213

Roman capitals, fragments of Byzantine and of
Hebrew architecture ; and among these compara-
tively historic specimens there are others of a
wild and unknown style, at the sight of which the
imagination goes back to some forgotten art of the
primitive Jebusites, the very nature of which is
lost in the obscurity of remote time. It is the
peculiarity of Jerusalem that, whilst nothing has
been completely preserved, nothing has been
wholly lost. Jealous religions have fought with
one another for the possession of this rocky
sanctuary which they all have claimed. None
has entirely succeeded, and gradually all have
settled down to an uneasy toleration, each scrap-
ing away the dust and fashioning an altar for itself
among cyclopean stones which were ancient in the
days of Solomon, inside fortifications which Herod
may have built over the place of martyrdom of
some primitive and fabulous saint.

At the very foot of the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
where the path has crossed the Kedron and is just
about to mount again towards Gethsemane, there
is an extraordinary example of this sordid and
multifarious sanctity. A melancholy mausoleum
is seen, in the midst of which an ancient iron door
admits to the Tomb of the Virgin, a church of the
fourth century, which, for more than a thousand
years, has been the theatre of incessant ecclesiastical
battle. At the present moment the Western
Churches are excluded from this singular con-
venticle ; but the Greeks, the Armenians, the
Syrians, the Abyssinians, the Copts, and even the
Mahometans, make themselves at home in it.

214 FRENCH PROFILERS

The visitor enters, and is met by darkness and a
smell of damp and mildew. A staircase, dimly
perceived before him, leads down into the bowels
of the earth, and presently introduces him to a
church, which is more like a grotto than a human
construction, and continues to sink lower as he
proceeds. This strange cavern is dimly lighted by
hundreds of gold and silver lamps, of extreme
antiquity, hung from the low roof in wreaths and
garlands. Within this agitating place, which is full
of dark corners and ends of breakneck stairs that
climb to nothing, five or six religions, each hating
the rest, carry on simultaneously their ancient
rituals, and everywhere there ascend discord of
incoherent prayer and distracted singing, with
candles waving and incense burning, processions
in mediaeval brocades that disturb kneeling pilgrims
in the green turban of Mecca ; a chaos of con-
flicting religions humming and hurrying in the
darkness of this damp and barbarous cavern.
Nothing could give a stronger impression of the
bewildered genius of Jerusalem.

It was the privilege of M. Loti to be admitted to
the arcane treasuries of the Armenian Church in
Jerusalem, a privilege which, we understand him
to say, no previous traveller has enjoyed. Under
the special patronage of His Beatitude the
Patriarch, and after a strange diplomatic enter-
tainment of coffee, cigarettes, and a conserve of
rose-leaves, the French writer was permitted to
visit one of the oldest and most curious churches
in Jerusalem. Its walls and all its massive pillars
are covered with the lovely azure porcelain which

PIERRE LOTI 215

is the triumph of ancient Arabic art. The thrones
of the Patriarchs are wrought in mosaics of
mother-of-pearl of an almost prehistoric work-
manship. From the roof hang golden lamps and
ostrich- eggs mounted in silver, while the marble
floors are concealed from view under thick Turkey
carpets of extreme antiquity, faded into exquisite
harmonies of yellow, blue, and rose-colour. It
was in front of the high altar, in the midst of all
this profusion of superb, archaic decoration, that
pale priests, with clear-cut profiles and black silky
beards, brought out to M. Loti one by one the
pieces of their incomparable and unknown Treasure,
— a missal presented nearly seven hundred years
ago by a Queen of Cilicia, mitres heavy with
emeralds and pearls, tiaras of gold and rubies,
fairy-like textures of pale crimson, embroidered
with lavish foliage of pearl-work, in which the
flowers are emeralds and each fruit is a topaz.
Then, by little doors of mother-of-pearl, under
ancient hangings of velvet, through sacristies lined
with delicate porcelain, the visitor was hurried from
chapel to chapel, each stranger and more archaic
than the last, while his conductor, as though
speaking of the latest historical event which had
come to his knowledge, loudly lamented the cruel-
ties of that sacrilegious king Khosroes II. and the
ravages he had committed in Jerusalem.

This is an excellent specimen of the surprises that
the sacred city reserves for pious visitors. It is a
mass of decrepit fragments, a dust-heap of the reli-
gions of centuries upon centuries, preserving here
and there, under the mask of its affliction and its

2i6 FRENCH PROFILES

humiliation, folded away in its mysterious sanctu-
aries, remnants of the beauty of the past so com-
plete, so isolated, and so poignant, that the imagin-
ation finds it almost painful to contemplate them.
" Jerusalem, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least
in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy
peace ! But now they are hid from thine eyes."

1895.

La Galilee

The trilogy of travel is now concluded with
La Galilee. The completed work certainly forms
the most picturesque description of the Holy Land
and its surroundings which has yet been given to
the world. We close this third volume with a
sense of having really seen the places which had
been a sort of sacred mystery to us from earliest
childhood, Loti is a master of enchantment, and
so cunningly combines the arts of harmony and
colour in writing that he carries us, like St.
Thomas, whither we would not. In other words,
by the strange and scarcely analyzable charm of
his style, he bewitches us beyond our better
judgment. But a reaction comes, and we are
obliged to admit that in the case of La Galilee
it has come somewhat soon.

It was only while reading this third volume
that we became conscious that Pierre Loti was
doing rather a mechanical thing. In Le Desert
we were ready to believe that nothing but the
fascination of wild places took him across the
wilderness and up into that grotesque shrine of

PIERRE LOTI 217

Christianity that lurks among the fierce pin-
nacles of Mount Sinai. In Jerusaletny led away
by the pathos of the scene and the poignant
grace of the pilgrim's reflections, we still per-
suaded ourselves to see in him one who withdrew
from the turmoil of the West that he might wor-
ship among the dead upon Mount Moriah. But
in La Galilee the illusion disappears. Loti crosses
Palestine, embarks upon the Sea of Gennesaret,
ascends Mount Hermon, winds down into the
rose-oasis of Damascus, no longer as the insou-
ciant and aristocratic wanderer, " le Byron de ncs
jours," but as a tourist like ourselves, wrapped in
a burnous, it is true, and not personally con-
ducted by Messrs. Cook & Sons, yet not the
less surely an alien, manufacturing copy for the
press. He is revealed as the " special corres-
pondent," bound, every night, however weary he
may be, to " pan out " sufficient description to fill
a certain space on the third page of the " Figaro."
There is nothing dishonourable in being a
special correspondent, nor is there a journalist
living who might not envy Pierre Loti the sup-
pleness and fluid felicity of his paragraphs. But
this is not the light in which we have learned
to know him. He has very carefully taught us
to regard him as one to whom literature is
indifferent, who never looks at a newspaper,
whose impressions of men and manners are
formed in lands whither his duties as a sailor
have casually brought him, who writes of them
out of the fullness of his heart, in easy exquisite
numbers cast forth as the bird casts its song. We

2i8 FRENCH PROFILES

have had an idea that Loti never looks at a
proof, that some comrade picks up the loose
leaves as they flutter in the forecastle, and
sends them surreptitiously to kind M. Calmann
L6vy. When he is elected to the French
Academy, he is the last to know it, and wonders,
as he is rowed back from some Algerian har-
bour, what his men are shouting about on
board his ship. All this is the legend of Loti,
and we have nourished and cherished it, but it
will not bear the fierce light that beats upon La
Galilee. We cannot pretend any longer; we
cannot force ourselves to think of a romantic
pilgrim of the sea, flung ashore at Aleppo and
wandering vaguely up into the spurs of Carmel.
Certainly not ! This is a Monsieur Loti who is
travelling in the pay of an enterprising Parisian
newspaper, does his work very conscientiously, but
is sometimes not a little bored with it.

The reader, who finds out. that he has been
played with, grows captious and unjust. The
result of discovering that Pierre Loti, notwith-
standing the burnous and the Arab carpets, is
nothing better than a glorified commis voyageur,
has made us crusty. We are displeased that he
should travel so fast, and be willing to scamper
through the whole of " ce pays sacr6 de Galil " in
six weeks. It is really no matter of ours whether
he lingers or not, and yet we resent that he should
push on as monotonously as any of the Cookites
do, about whom he is so sarcastic. Our disgust
invades us even when we read the famous descrip-
tions ; we feel, not that they impressed themselves

PIERRE LOTI 219

irresistibly upon him, but that he went out for the
purpose of making them, and made them as fast
as he could. He becomes, to our affronted fancy,
a sort of huge and infinitely elaborate photographic
machine, making exquisite kodaks as his guides
hurry him along. All this, we admit, is very
unfair, but it exemplifies the danger of admitting
the public too much into the works of the musical
box. We find ourselves glancing back at our old
favourites with horrid new suspicions. Was he
paid so much a line to make love to his plaintive
bride in Tahiti ? Did some newspaper engage
him to pursue Aziyad^ so madly through the length
and breadth of Stamboul ? Was the Press kept
waiting while Tante Claire was dying ? These are
hideous questions, and we thrust them from us,
but Pierre Loti should really be made to realise
that the romantic attachment which his readers
bear him is a tender plant. He holds them
because he is so wayworn and desolate, but if he
read his Shelley he would learn that " desolation
is a delicate thing."

We would not be supposed to deny that La
Galilee is full of pages which Loti only could write,
pictures which he alone could paint. Here is a
marvellous vignette of that sombre and sepulchral
city of Nablous, so rarely visited by Christians, so
isolated in its notorious bigotry, which an outrage
on a small Protestant mission has just brought
prominently before us. Here is Nazareth in
twilight, with the moon flooding the boundless gulf
of grasses that stretch from its rocky feet. Very
impressive is the picture of the dead city of

220 FRENCH PROFILES

Tiberias, along whose solemn and deserted quays,
once thronged with shipping, no vessel has been
moored for centuries, looking down at the reflection
of its crenelated walls in the tideless waters of
Gennesaret. Beautiful, too, and " du meilleur Loti "
is the description of the descent from the grey
terraces of Hermon, to that miraculous oasis in
the Idumean desert where Damascus lifts its rose-
coloured minarets and domes out of pale-green
orchards of poplars and pomegranates, beneath
whose boughs the rivulets run sparkling over a
carpet of iris and anemone. It is in forming
impressions such as these, where no detail escapes
the narrator's eye, and not a word is said too
little or too much, that Pierre Loti asserts that
supremacy as a master of description which no
carelessness and no inconsistency can deprive him
of. He has little pretension to being an intellectual
force in literature, but as a proficient in this
species of sensuous legerdemain he has had no
rival, and is not likely soon to be surpassed.

1896.

Figures et Choses qui passaient

It has long been the custom of Pierre Loti to
gather together at intervals those short pieces of
his prose which have not found their place in any
consecutive fiction or record of travel. In the
case of most authors, even of the better class,
such chips from the workshop would excite but a
very languid interest, or might be judged wholly

PIERRE LOTI 221

impertinent. All that Loti does, however, on
whatever scale, is done with so much care and is
so characteristic of him, that his admirers find
some of their richest feasts in these his baskets of
broken meat. The genuine Lotist is a fanatic,
who can give no other reason for the faith that
is in him than this, that the mere voice of this
particular writer is an irresistible enchantment.
It is not the story, or the chain of valuable
thoughts, or the important information supplied
by Pierre Loti that enthrals his admirers. It is
the music of the voice, the incomparable magic of
the mode in which the mournful, sensuous, exquisite
observations are delivered. He is a Pied Piper,
and as for his admirers, poor rats, as he pipes,
they follow, follow. He who writes these lines is
always among the bewitched.

The convinced Lotist, then, will not be dis-
couraged to hear that Figures et Choses qui passaientj
which is the twentieth tune (or volume) which this
piper has played to us, is made up entirely of bits
and airs that seem to have lost their way from
other works. On the contrary, it will amuse and
stimulate him to notice that Passage cPEnfant
suggests a lost chapter of Le Livre de la Pitie et de
la Mott ; that Instant de Recueillement reads like a
rejected preface to the novel called Ramuntcho ;
that Passage de Sultan is a sort of appendix to
Fantome d' Orient ; and that Passage de Carmencita
forms a quite unexpected prelude to Le Mariage de
Loti. But this at least may be said, that this beau
gahier of literature, the fantastic and wayward
sailor so signally unlike the kind of mariner

222 FRENCH PROFILES

(with a pigtail, and hitching up white ducks),
who still continues to be our haunting mari-
time convention — this complicated and morbid
Alcade de la Mer who walks so uncompromis-
ingly the quarter-deck of the French Academy,
has never published a book which more tyranni-
cally presupposes an acquaintance with all his
previous works. But he knows our frailty ; and
I will make a confession which may go to the
heart of other Lotists. There is one piece in
Figures et Choses which certainly ought never to
have been written. I hope to screw up my
courage, presently, to reprove it by name ; it is
horrible, unseemly. But I have read every word
of it, slowly, with gusto, as we read our Loti,
balancing the sentences, drawing the phrases over
the palate. It is a vice, this Lotism ; and I am not
sure that there ought not to be a society to put
it down. Yet if I were persuaded to sign a pledge
never to read another page of Loti, I know that
I should immediately break it.

Yet Loti does everything which, according to
the rules, he should not do. Passage d'Enfanty
with which this volume opens, is a study such as
no Englishman can conceive himself proposing to
write. The author is in Paris, about some official
business. He receives a letter and a telegram to
say that a little boy of two years old, the child of
a pair of his domestic servants at Rochefort, has
suddenly died of croup. The resulting emotion
is so capricious, so intimate, so poignant, that one
would hardly be able to tell it, were it one's own
experience, to one's most familiar friend. Pierre

PIERRE LOTI 223

Loti tells it to the world in full detail, without
concealment of names or places or conditions, and
with an absolute perfection of narrative. He
weaves it into a sort of diatribe against " the stupid
cruelty of death." He flies back to his home, he
visits the little newly-made grave, he mingles his
tears with those of the child's father, he recalls a
score of pretty tricks and babblings. There seems
to us English people a certain lack here of decent
proportion or self-command. Yet these are local
matters, and the standard of taste varies so much
at different times in different countries that one
hesitates to dogmatise. And besides, the whole
thing is steeped in that distinguished melancholy
beauty which redeems and explains everything.

A large section of this new volume deals with
the customs and landscape of that extreme corner
of south-western France which the author has
made his own during the years in which he has
been stationed at the mouth of the Bidassoa. All
these studies of the " Euskal-Erria," the primitive
Basque Country, are instinct with the most grace-
ful qualities of Pierre Loti's spirit. He has an
exquisite instinct for the preservation of whatever
is antique and beautiful, a superstitious conser-
vatism pushed almost to an affectation. As he
grows older, this characteristic increases with him.
He has become an impassioned admirer of cathe-
drals ; he is moved, almost to an act of worship,
by sumptuous and complicated churches ; he bows
a dubiously adoring knee at Loyola and at Burgos.
He is very eager to take part in processions, he is
active among crowds of penitents, he omits no

224 FRENCH PROFILES

item in the sensual parts of ritual, and is swayed
almost to intoxication on the ebb and flood of
mysterious and archaic incantations. The reader
of his Jerusalem will recall how earnestly and
how vainly Pierre Loti sought for a religious idea,
or a genuine inspiration of any spiritual kind,
among the shrines and waters of Palestine. Once
more this unction is denied him. Doomed for
ever to deal with the external side of things, the
exquisite envelope of life, Loti, as time goes by,
seems knocking with a more and more hope-
less agitation at the door of the mystical world.
But that which is revealed to children will never
be exposed to him. It ought to be enough for
Loti that he surpasses all the rest of his fellow-
men in the perfection of his tactile apparatus.
That which is neither to be seen, nor touched,
nor smelled, nor heard, lies outside his province.

But, within his province, what a magician he
is ! Vacances de Pdques, apparently a cancelled
chapter from Le Roman d'un Enfant, tells us how
a certain Easter holiday was spent in Loti's child-
hood, and how the days flew one after another,
in the same cold rain, under the same black sky.
The subject, mainly dealing with a neglected
imposition and the dilatory labours of an idle
schoolboy, seems as unpromising as possible, but
the author's skill redeems it, and this little essay
contains one page on the excessive colour of
bright flowers under a grey or broken sky which
ranks among the best that he has written. Pierre
Loti is always excellent on this subject ; one re-
collects the tiny blossoms that enamelled the floor

PIERRE LOTI 225

of his tent in Au Maroc. In the present volume,
while he is waiting on the hill-side to join the
procession winding far up the Pyrenees to Ron-
cevaux, he notes the long rosy spindles of the
foxgloves, lashed with rain, the laden campanulas,
the astonishing and almost grotesque saxifrages
torn and ravaged by the hail. And here and
there a monotonous flush of red flowers — rosy
moss-campions, rosy geraniums, rosy mallows —
and from the broken stalks the petals flung in pink
ribands across the delicate deep green mosses.

An example of the peculiar subtlety of Loti's
symbolism is afforded by the curious little study
here called Papillon de Mite. In that corner of
his house in Rochefort of which he has often told
us, where all the treasures are stored up that he
has brought home from his travels, the author
watches a clothes-moth disengage itself from a
splendid Chinese robe of red velvet, and dance in
a sunbeam. Rapidly, rapidly, in the delirium of
existence, this atom waves its wings of silken dust,
describing its little gay, fantastic curves of flight.
Loti strikes it carelessly to the ground, and then
begins to wonder what it is that it reminds him
of. Where had he once seen before in his life
something " papillonnement gris pareil " which
had caused him a like but a less transient melan-
choly ? And he recollects — it was long ago, at
Constantinople, on the wooden bridge that con-
nects Stamboul and Pera. A woman who had
lost both her legs was begging, while a little, grey,
impassive child, with shrivelled hands, lay at her
side. Presently the mother called the child to

P

226 FRENCH PROFILES

come and have its small garment put on, when all
at once it leaped from her hands and escaped,
dancing about in the cold wind, and flapping the
sleeves of its burnous-like wings. And it was of
this poor child, soon exhausted, soon grey and
immobile again, but for an instant intoxicated with
the simple ecstasy of existence and motion, that
Loti was reminded by the curves and flutterings
of the clothes-moth. This is a wonderfully
characteristic example of the methods of the
author, of his refined sensibility, vivid memory
for details, and fondness for poignant and subtle
impressions of association.

In Profanation — the study which I have dared
to speak of with reprobation — I feel sure that
he carries too far his theory that we may say any-
thing if only we say it exquisitely enough and in
the interests of pity. Loti's ideas of " taste," of
reticence, are not ours ; he does not address an
Anglo-Saxon audience. But the cases in which
he offends against even our conventions are very
few in Figures et Choses. I have left myself no
space to speak of the vivid pictures of sports
among the primeval Basque population — studies,
one might conjecture them to be, for the book
that afterwards became Ramuntcho. I can but
refer, with strong commendation, to the amazing
description of the sacred dance of the Souletins.
The last one hundred pages of this enchanting
volume are occupied by Trois Journees de Guerre,
an exceedingly minute and picturesque report of
the storming of the city of Hu6 in the Annam
War of 1883. Unless I am mistaken, these notes

PIERRE LOTI 227

were originally sent home to some Parisian news-
paper, where their publication gave great offence
at the French Admiralty or War Office. Why it
should do so, it is not easy after fifteen years of
suppression to conceive. These Trots Joumees de
Guerre en Atinam form one of the most admirably
solid of all Pierre Loti's minor writings. They
ought to be read in conjunction with the book
called Propos d'ExiL

1897.

Ramuntcho

In Ramuntcho Pierre Loti returns to the class
of work which originally made him famous. It is
eleven years since he published Pecheur d'Islande,
the latest of his genuine novels, for we refuse to
include among these the distressing sketch called
Matelot. During this decade he has written much,
and some of it, such as Fantome d' Orient, has taken
a form half-way between fact and fiction ; the rest
has been purely descriptive, culminating, or rather
going to seed, in the rather empty volume called
La Galilee. It is probable that Loti — who for
a person who never reads anything (as he told the
French Academy) is remarkably shrewd in feeling
the pulse of literature — has become conscious that
he must recover some lost steps of his position.
After a considerable pause, then, he comes forward
with a book which is not only one of the most
attractive that he has ever written, but belongs to
the class which the public particularly enjoys. In
Ramuntcho the tribe of the Lotists recover the Loti

228 FRENCH PROFILES

that they like best, the Loti of Pecheur d'hlande
and Le Roman d'un Spahi. Such a book as this,
very carefully written in his best style by the
most sensitive writer now living, is an event, and
one on which to congratulate ourselves.

The scene of Ramuntcho is the extreme south-
western corner of France, between the Bay of
Biscay and the Pyrenees, where the remnants
of an ancient race speak their mysterious and
unrelated Basque language, and live a life apart
from the interests and habits of their fellow-
countrymen. We are reminded of the Breton
scenes in Mon Frere Yves, with their flashes of
sunshine breaking through long spells of rain and
mist ; and Ramuntcho, the hero of the book, is,
indeed, a sort of Yves — less intelligent, less
developed, carried less far into manhood, but with
the same dumb self-reliance, the same unadulter-
ated physical force, the same pathetic resignation
as the scion of a wasting, isolated race. The
landscape of the Basque country interpenetrates
the whole fabric of the story ; we never escape
from it for a moment. We move among grey
hamlets, infinitely old, which are perched among
great chestnuts, high up upon the terraces of
mountain sides. On one hand the Bay of Biscay,
with its troubled waters, never ceases to moan ;
on the other, the tumultuous labyrinth of the
Pyrenees, with its sinuous paths and winding
streams, stretches interminably, obscure and threat-
ening. In each of the sparse mountain villages
two monuments of great antiquity hold the local
life together ; one is the massive and archaic

PIERRE LOTI 229

church, often as soHd as a fortress ; the other is
the fives-court, in which for generations past all
the young men of the parish have tempered their
muscles of steel, and become adepts in this national
game of la pelote.

Those who are familiar with the way in which
the imagination of M. Loti works will have no
difficulty in guessing the line he takes with such a
landscape as this. Its inaccessibility to modern
innovations, its secular decay, the gravity and
dignity of its inhabitants, their poverty and in-
dependence, their respect for physical beauty, their
hardy activity — all these are qualities naturally
fascinating to M. Loti, and he adds to a com-
bination of these the peculiar melancholy, the
sense of the inexorable " fallings from us, vanish-
ings," of which he is so singular a master. Never
has he been more pathetic, more deeply plunged
in the consciousness that, as the Persian poet
puts it,

" The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing."

Never has he expended a greater wealth of melody
and colour, never fused his effects into tones of
rarer delicacy, than in this tale of smuggling,
/>^/o/^-playing and courtship in a mountain village
of the Basques.

No injustice is done to the author of such a
novel as this by giving an outline of his plot, for
the mere story is primitive and simple ; it is in
the telling that the art consists. The hamlet of
Etchezar is the home of Franchita, a lonely

230 FRENCH PROFILES

woman, who, with one little son, Raymond or
(in Basque) Ramuntcho, stole back thither some
fifteen years before the tale opens, having been
deserted by the man, an unnamed person of
quality from Paris, whose mistress she had been
in Biarritz. Ramuntcho grows up with a mixed
temperament ; partly he is a Basque, stolid, im-
penetrable, intensely local, but partly also he is
conscious of cosmopolitan instincts, faint blasts of
longing, like those which come to Arne in Bjorn-
son's beautiful story, for the world outside, the
au-dela, or, as Ramuntcho vaguely puts it, " les
choses d'ailleursy In the village of Etch^zar,
which mainly supports itself by smuggling, the
widow Dolores is a prominent personage, with
her intensely respectable past, her store of money,
and the two beautiful children, her son Arrochkoa
and her daughter Gracieuse. But she hates and
despises the unfortunate Franchita, and scorns
Ramuntcho. The latter youth, arriving at the
maturity of seventeen years, and in close amity
with Arrochkoa, is admitted into the secret fellow-
ship of a most desperate and successful band of
smugglers, who, under the guidance of Itchoua, a
much older man, harry the frontier of Spain.

The excursions of the smugglers give M. Loti
opportunities for his matchless power in visual
writing. The great scene in which, under the
intoxication of the magical south wind, the band
of desperados cross the shining estuary of the
Bidassoa at sunrise, is superb. But still more
striking are the pictures of home life in the village,
the ceremonies and entertainments on All Saints

PIERRE LOTI 231

Day, scenes the theatres of which are the church
and the pehfe-couri. In the national game — the
Basque fives in excelsis — Ramuntcho becomes, as
he approaches the age of eighteen, extremely
skilful ; he and Arrochkoa, indeed, are the two
champion players of the whole district, and are
thus drawn into closer mutual friendship. And
under the smile with which Gracieuse rewards his
prowess at the game, an old affection for the sister
of his friend is blown into a passion, which is
returned, and would be avowed, but for the
jealousy of old Dolores. The lovers are driven to
innocent clandestine meetings on the stone bench
under Dolores' house, or, upon moonlight nights,
within the dense shadow of the chestnut trees. If
there is any theme in which M. Loti delights, and
to the delineation of which he brings his most
delicate and sympathetic gifts, it is the progress of
the passion of love in adolescence. Ramuntcho
comes to Gracieuse from his perilous skirmishings
with the Spanish Custom-house officers, and from
long vigils which have brought him close to the
very pulse of nature. I cannot refrain from
quoting, in this connexion, one passage intimately
characteristic of its author : —

"Voici venir les longs cr^puscules pales de
juin. . . . Pour Ramuntcho, c'est I'^poque ou la
contrebande devient un metier presque sans peine,
avec des heures charmantes : marcher vers les
sommets, a travers les nuages printaniers ; franchir
les ravins, errer dans des regions de sources et de
figuiers sauvages ; dormir, pour attendre I'heure
convenue avec les carabiniers complices, sur des

232 FRENCH PROFILES

tapis de menthes et d'oeillets. La bonne senteur
des plantes impr^gnait ses habits, sa veste jamais
mise qui ne lui servait que d'oreiller ou de
couverture ; et Gracieuse quelquefois lui disait le
soir : ' Je sais la contrebande que vous avez faite
la nuit derni^re, car tu sens les menthes de la
montagne au-dessus de Mendiazpi,' ou bien : ' Tu
sens les absinthes du marais de Subernoa.' "

This happy condition of things is brought to an
end by the necessity in which Ramuntcho finds
himself of opting for Spanish or French citizen-
ship. If he chooses the latter, he must prepare
for three years' absence on military duty before he
can marry Gracieuse. He determines, however,
that to accept his fate is the manly thing to do ;
but hardly has he so decided, when an unexpected
letter comes from an uncle Ignacio, in Uruguay,
offering to adopt him if he will go out to America.
The proposal comes too late, and he starts for his
military service. Then the tragedy begins. He
returns after his three years' absence to find his
mother dying, and his Gracieuse vanished. The
bitter old Dolores, after vainly thrusting a rich
suitor upon her daughter, has driven her to take
the veil, and she is now a nun in a little remote
mountain-convent close to the Spanish frontier.
Ramuntcho takes up the old wild life as a smuggler,
but he cannot get the idea of Gracieuse out of
his mind ; and at last, encouraged by Arrochkoa,
he determines to make a raid on the convent,
snatch Gracieuse from her devotions, and fly with
her to Argentina. The two young men make
an elaborate plan for a nocturnal rape of their

PIERRE LOTI 233

Iberian Sabine. But when they arrive at the
peaceful, noiseless nunnery, and are hospitably
received by the holy women, their ardour dies
away. Gracieuse gives no sign of any wish to fly ;
she merely says, when she hears that Ramuntcho
is leaving the country, that they will all pray the
Virgin that he may have a happy voyage. Intimi-
dated by the sanctity of the life which it seemed
so easy to break into as they talked about it late
at nights over their chacoli, but which now seems
impregnable, the lads go peaceably away, Arroch-
koa sullenly to his nocturnal foray on the frontier,
Ramuntcho with a broken heart to Bordeaux and
Buenos Ayres. And so, with that tribute to the
mutability of fortune which Loti loves, and
with a touch of positive pietism which we meet
with in his work almost for the first time — there
was a hint of it m Jerusalem — this beautiful and
melancholy book closes. We feel as we put down
the volume more convinced than ever of the
unique character of its author's talent, so evasive
and limited, and yet within its own boundaries of
so exquisite a perfection. It is a talent in which
intellect has no part, but in which melody and
perfume and colour combine with extraordinary
vivacity to produce an impression of extreme and
perhaps not quite healthy sensibility.

1897.

234 FRENCH PROFILES

Les Derniers Jours de Pekin.

It was a fortunate chance which sent to China,
in the late autumn of 1900, the man in whom,
perhaps more dehcately than in any other Hving
person, are combined the gifts of the seeing eye
and the expressive pen. The result is a book
which, so far as mere visual presentment goes,
may safely be said to outweigh the whole bulk of
what else was sent home from the extreme East,
in letters and articles to every part of the world,
during that terrible period of storm and stress.
Pierre Loti arrived when the fighting was over,
when the Imperial family had tied, and when the
mysteries of the hitherto inviolable capital of China
had just first been opened to the Powers. He
reaped the earliest harvest of strange and magni-
ficent impressions, and he saw, with that incom-
parably clear vision of his, what no European had
seen till then, and much that no human being will
ever see again. Moreover, after a long rest, the
great artist, who had seemed in Jerusalem^ and still
more in La Galilee, to have tired his pen a little,
and to have lost something of his firm clairvoyance,
has enjoyed a rest of several years. His style
proclaims the advantage of this reserve. Loti is
entirely himself again ; never before, not even in
the matchless Fleurs d'Exil, has he presented his
talent in a form more evenly brilliant, more splen-
didly characteristic in its rich simplicity, than in
Les Derniers Jours de Pekin.

Pierre Loti arrived at Ning-Hai, on the Yellow
Sea, in a French man-of-war, on October 3, and a

PIERRE LOTI 235

week later he started on a mission to Peking. His
journey thither was marked by no very striking
events, except his passage through the vast and
deserted city of Tong-Tcheou, full of silence and
corpses, and paved with broken porcelain. The
horrors of this place might fill a niche in some
eastern Inferno ; and they offer Loti his first oppor-
tunity to exercise in China his marvellous gift for
the reproduction of phenomena. We pass with
him under the black and gigantic ramparts of
Tong-Tcheou, and thread its dreadful streets under
the harsh and penetrating light of Chinese autumn.
The coldness, the dark colour, the awful silence,
the importunate and crushing odour of death, these
he renders as only a master can. The little party
pursues its course, and on October 18, quite sud-
denly, in a grim solitude, where nothing had been
visible a few seconds before, a huge crenelated
rampart hangs high above their heads, the discon-
certing and grimacing outer wall of the Tartar city
of Peking.

We cannot follow the author through his intel-
lectual adventures, on a scene the most mysterious
and the most tragic in the modern world, where,
it is true, the agony of movement had ceased, but
where, in the suspense and hush, the mental ex-
citement was perhaps even greater than it had been
during the siege. Everywhere was brooding the
evidence of massacre, everywhere the horror of
catastrophe, in what had so lately been the most
magnificent city in the world, and what was now
merely the most decrepit. The author, by virtue
of his errand and his fame, had the extreme good

236 FRENCH PROFILES

fortune to be passed from the ruined French Em-
bassy, in and in, through the Yellow City and the
Pink City, to the very Holy of Holies, the ultimate
and mysterious shrine, never before exhibited or
even described to a Western eye, where, above the
fabulous Lake of Lotus, the Empress and the Em-
peror had their group of secluded palaces. He
was lodged in a gallery, walled entirely with glass
and rice-paper, where marvellous ebony sculptures
dropped in lacework from the ceiling, and where
Imperial golden-yellow carpets, incredibly soft and
sumptuous, rolled their dragons along the floor.
Here the Empress, until a month or two before,
had played the goddess among her great ladies in
an indolent magnificence of flowers and satins and
music.

But, perhaps, more incalculable still was the
little dark chamber, furnished with a deep austerity
of taste, and faintly pervaded with an odour of tea,
of withered roses and of old silks, where, on a low
bed, the dark blue coverlid thrown hastily aside,
no change had been made since the pale and timid
Emperor, whose innermost lair this was, had risen,
in a paroxysm of terror, to fly for his life into the
darkness, into the unknown spaces, guided only
by that fierce and wonderful woman, of whose per-
sonal greatness everything that reaches us through
the dimness of report merely seems to intensify
our perception.

It is impossible here to do more than indicate
the fullness of the descriptive passages which
throng this volume. All the scenes, by day and
night, in the Pink City, with its ramparts the

PIERRE LOTI 237

colour of dried blood ; all the pictures of temples
and pagodas, half-lost in groves of immemorial
cedars, and stained, in their exquisite and precious
beauty, by dust, and corruption, and neglect ; all
the visits to sinister mandarins ; all the chiaroscuro
of night, scented and twinkling, falling upon this
foul and fairylike nightmare — all must be read in
the author's own language. How concise that is,
how unaffected, how competent to transfer to us
the image strongly imprinted upon Loti's own
delicately ductile vision, one extract must suffice
to exemplify. It is the conclusion of the account
he gives of his visit to the triple Temple of the
Lamas, where all had been in contrast, in its colour
of ochre and rust, with the rose-colour and golden
yellow of purely Chinese state ornament : —

" Ce dernier temple — le plus caduc peut-etre, le
plus dejete, et le plus vermoulu — ne presente que
la r6p6tition obs^dante des deux autres — sauf
pourtant I'idole du centre qui, au lieu d'etre assise
et de taille humaine, surgit debout, geante, im-
pr^vue et presque effroyable. Les plafonds d'or,
coup6s pour la laisser passer, lui arrivent a mi-
jambe, et elle monte toute droite sous une espece
de clocher dore, qui la tient par trop ^troitement
emboit^e. Pour voir sa visage, il faut s'approcher
tout contre les autels, et lever la tete au milieu des
brule-parfums et des rigides fleurs ; on dirait alors
une momie de Titan erig^e dans sa gaine, et son
regard baiss^, au premier abord, cause quelque
crainte. Mais, en la fixant, on subit d'elle un
mal^fice plutot charmeur ; on se sent hypnotist
et retenu la par son sourire, qui tombe d'en haul

238 FRENCH PROFILES

si d^tache et si tranquille, sur tout son entourage
de splendeur expirante, d'or, et de poussiere, de
froid, de crepuscule, de mines, et de silence."

Pierre Loti's brief visit was paid just when the
tide was turning. Even while he stayed in his
fairy palace he noted the rapid recovery of Peking.
The corpses were being buried out of sight, the
ruins repaired, the raw edges of useless and
barbarous destruction healed over. And now,
after so short an absence, the mysterious Empress
and her flock of mandarins are back once more,
to restore as best they may their sparkling ter-
races of alabaster and their walls of sanguine lac.
Once more the secrets of the Pink City will fold
their soft curtains around them, and that inscrut-
able existence of ceremonious luxury resume its
ancient course. Will any living Western man see
again what Loti and his comrades saw in the
winter of 1900? In one sense it is impossible
that he should, since the adorable palace of the
Empress, occupied by Field-Marshal von Walder-
see, was burned down by accident in April 1901.
But even what survives is only too likely to be
hidden again for ever from European eyes, unless,
indeed, another massacre of Christians throws it
open to our righteous Vandalism.

1902.

SOME RECENT BOOKS OF
M. PAUL BOURGET

VOY AG BUSES

The talent of M. Paul Bourget has but rarely
consented to submit itself to that precision of
form and rapidity of narrative which are necessary
for the conduct of a short story. His novels,
indeed, have been becoming longer and longer,
and the latest, Un Crime d' Amour, had, we are
bound to confess, such an abundance of reflec-
tions and so little plot that it seemed to take us
back to the days of Marivaux and Richardson.
It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise to open
M. Bourget's new volume, and discover that it is
a collection of six independent stories, not one of
them lengthy. The title, Voyageuses, is explained
by a brief preface. These are tales of female
travellers, whom the author has met (or feigns to
have met) in the course of those restless perambu-
lations of the world which he describes to us,
every now and then, in his graceful "sensations."
M. Bourget appears to us in Voyageuses in his very
happiest vein, with least of his mannerism and
most of his lucid gift of penetrating through action
to motive.

The first of these stories is also the most subtle
and pleasing. " Antigone " is the name the

240 FRENCH PROFILES

author gives to a Frenchwoman whom he meets
in Corfu. She is the sister of a deputy who has
been attainted in the Panama scandal, and who
still tries to be dignified in exile. This ignoble
person affects complete innocence, and has de-
ceived a noble Ionian burgher. Napoleon Zaffoni,
into a belief in him, so that Zaffoni entrusts to
him the MS. of a book, the work of his lifetime,
on the history and constitution of the Ionian
Islands. From this the deputy grossly plagiarises,
and would be cast forth even from Corfu were he
not protected by the fervent good faith of his
sister, who, in spite of all his rogueries, persists
in believing in him. His character is presently
whitewashed in Paris, and he returns to the
Chamber of Deputies triumphant, owing all to
the long-suffering old maid whom he probably
robs and upon whom he certainly tramples.

We pass over to America in the somewhat fan-
tastic tale called " Deux Manages." The author has
been told in Paris that he must make the acquain-
tance of Mrs. Tennyson R. Harris, who is " such "
a bright, cultured woman with a " lovely " home
at Newport. Unfortunately there is a husband,
a common millionaire, without any conversation ;
but one need take no notice of him. M. Bourget
visits Mrs. Tennyson R. Harris, but finds her
pretentious, scandalous and empty, and her lovely
home a crazy shop of knick-knacks. But, on the
other hand, he becomes deeply interested in the
husband, a silent, down-trodden man, horribly
overworked and beginning to suffer from " nerve-
trouble." He is ordered south for rest, and in-

M. PAUL BOURGET 241

vites the author to come with him. At Thomas-
ville, a fashionable watering-place in Georgia, they
have a curious experience, which M. Bourget must
be permitted to tell in his own words.

We are next in Ireland, in the exquisite story
called " Neptunevale." Two young Parisians of
fashion, the one as empty-headed as the other,
but, beneath their frivolity, deeply and mutually
enamoured, receive soon after their marriage a
singular legacy. It is nothing less than a small
property on the west coast of Ireland, where an
uncle of the hero's, having persisted against the
wish of his family in marrying a governess, retired
half a century ago in dogged determination of
exile. The young people do not know what to do
with this little white Irish elephant, except to sell
it for as much cash as it would fetch. But they
have a curiosity to see it first, and, utterly ignorant,
they persuade M. Bourget, who " knows the
language," to come over with them. Neptunevale
— for that is the name of their uncle's home —
lies on the coast of county Galway ; they have to
get out at Oranmore station and drive to it. The
arrival at the strange house, the reception of the
French visitors by the old Irish servants, the way
that the Celtic sentiment invades and engulfs the
newcomers, so that at last they are afraid to sell
the place at all, but find it exercising a curious
fascination over them, an attraction half of terror
and half of love — all this is described with extreme
skill and delicacy. Nor can we fail to remark,
with some degree of surprise as well as of admira-
tion, how exactly M. Bourget, who can have but

Q

242 FRENCH PROFILES

a slight and superficial knowledge of Ireland, has
caught the note of Irish mysticism. There is a
scene in which an old mad woman and a little
boy sacrifice a cock, with horrid rites, to some
dim Celtic deity, which is calculated to give Mr.
Yeats himself a shiver.

Much more conventional is "Charity de Femme,"
a story which I should be inclined to describe as
insignificant, were it not that it contains an in-
cident, very naturally and unexpectedly introduced,
which illuminates it, as with a flash of lightning.
The scene of this tale, moreover, is laid in the
islands off the coast of Provence, a territory
which seemed to belong till lately to Guy de
Maupassant, and has since been annexed by M.
Melchior de Vogu6. There is a vague sense in
which we conceive that certain districts are the
property of particular novelists, and resent the
intrusion of others, unless the newcomers bring
with them some very marked freshness of the
point of view. This is wanting in " Charity de
Femme." More striking is " Odile," which is com-
posed, in point of fact, of two distinct episodes.
In a Parisian drawing-room the author meets a
strange Marquise d'Estinac, very distinguished,
shy and mysterious, who invites him to take a
drive with her in her carriage, for the purpose,
as he afterwards divines, of enabling her to con-
quer an otherwise irresistible tendency to suicide.
He learns that she is extremely fond of her
husband, who neglects her for a belle mondaine,
Madame Justel. While the author is still bewil-
dered at a circumstance which is unparalleled in his

M. PAUL BOURGET 243

career — for the companion of his drive refused to
speak to him or look at him — he abruptly hears
of the sudden and mysterious death of Madame
d'Estinac. A couple of years afterwards, being
at Maloja, he meets in the hotel there the Marquis,
who has in the meantime married Madame Justel.
A third person is of the party, Mademoiselle Odile
d'Estinac, a girl of fourteen, the exact counterpart
of her unfortunate mother. M. Bourget soon
perceives that between this proud, reserved child
and her new stepmother the relations are more
than strained. He is witness to the insulting
tyranny of the one, the isolation and despair of
the other ; and the body of Odile is presently
discovered in the tarn below the hotel.

The longest and the most elaborated of these
stories is the last, and it does not properly belong
to them, for " La Pia " is no voyageuse, but a dweller,
against her will, in the tents of Shem. This
beautiful and extraordinary tale of a masterpiece
stolen from the remote basilica of San Spirito in
Val d'Elsa is one of the most effective examples
we have met with of M. Bourget's method. It
would be unfair to describe it fully, for while the
five previous stories, of which we have given the
brief outlines, depend exclusively for their effect
on their execution, here the surprises of the plot
have their adventitious value. The English
readers of this volume will be inclined to see in
it a curious tribute to an artist of our own race.
It is hardly possible to believe that M. Bourget,
who has always shown himself sensitive, as
perhaps no other French writer of equal value,

244 FRENCH PROFILES

to exotic influences, has been an inattentive reader
of Mr. Henry James's latest volumes, and, in par-
ticular, of Embarrassments and Terminations. He
remains, of course, essentially himself; but, as
Guy de Maupassant in Notre Cceur was evidently
trying his hand at an essay in the Bourget manner,
so in "Antigone" and "La Pia" M. Bourget is dis-
covered, so it seems at least to us, no less in-
dubitably trying what he can produce with the
pencils and two-inch square of ivory that are the
property of Mr. Henry James.
1897.

La Duchesse Bleue

The violence of public movements in France in
1897 was so great as to produce an unusual
scarcity in literary productions. In such a barren
season, therefore, the fecundity of M. Paul Bour-
get is remarkable. La Duchesse Bleue is the third
volume which he has published this year, and it
is one of the most solid and elaborate of his
novels. But it is not quite new, although it is
now given to the public for the first time in book
form. Five years ago, if I remember right, the
" Journal " applied to M. Bourget in great haste
for a new novel, and he wrote, somewhat in a
hurry and for that special purpose, a story called
Trois Ames d Artistes. He was dissatisfied with it,
and left it there in the lost columns of a daily
newspaper, from which he has now redeemed it,
taking the opportunity to revise, adapt and indeed
rewrite it as La Duchesse Bleue. We are not sure
that this is ever a very fortunate method of pro-

M. PAUL BOURGET 245

ducing a book, and, although the novel before us
bears trace of extraordinary care and fastidious
correction, it lacks that spontaneity which comes
with work which has been run on right lines from
its very inception. La Duchesse Bleue, let me
admit at once, is not M. Bourget's masterpiece.
But it possesses a dedication, which is some-
thing of a literary event. The dedications of M.
Bourget have always been a curious feature of his
work. They are often, as in the present case,
essays of some length and seriousness ; they
frequently develop a theory or a philosophy of
the ingenious writer's. On principle, we are
adverse to such prefatory disquisitions. If an
author, long after the date of original publication,
likes to gossip to us about the mode in which the
plot and place commended themselves to him, we
are well pleased to listen. But to open a new
novel, and to find that a critical or metaphysical
essay divides us from the tale, is not, to our mind,
a happy discovery. It tends to destroy the
illusion ; it is, in its distinguished way, of the same
order of obstacle as " this is a fact " of the very
clumsy narrator. We begin by passing under a
cold shower of scepticism ; the effort to believe
in the story is vastly increased. The dedicatory
prefaces of M. Bourget are peculiarly disillusion-
ing. He talks in them so much about the crafts-
man and the artist, so much about methods and
forms ; in short, he takes the music-box to pieces
before us so resolutely, that we start with a sense
of artificiality. Even in these complex days, we
like to pretend that we are sitting in a ring around

246 FRENCH PROFILES

the story-teller, under the hawthorn-tree, and that
when he says, "There was, once upon a time,"
once upon a time there was.

In the case before us we are, as usual, of
opinion that the " dedication " is no help to the
reader in giving him faith in the incidents about
to be related to him, but it forms in itself an
agreeable and suggestive piece of literature. It is
addressed to Madame Matilde Serao, the Neapolitan
novelist, whose astonishing II paese di Cuccagna, by
the way, has been excellently translated out of the
Italian by Madame Paul Bourget. M. Bourget
has been reading this brilliant book, and he has
felt, once more, what a chasm divides the crowded
and animated scenes of Madame Serao from his
own limited studies of psychological problems.
Accordingly he writes a long letter to explain this
to Madame Serao, and to remind her that in the
house of the novel there are many chambers.
The great central hall, no doubt, is that occupied
by herself and Balzac, Zola and Tolstoi — and, we
may add, by Fielding and Dickens — where an
eager creative energy sets on their feet, and spurs
to concerted action personages of every kind, in
hundreds at a time. This prodigious power to
crowd the canvas with figures belongs to Madame
Serao alone among the living novelists of Italy.
One has only to recollect how entirely it is want-
ing to Gabriele d'Annunzio. It is a gift not to be
despised ; it suggests a virility of intellect and a
breadth of sympathy which are rewarded by a
direct influence over a wide circle of readers.
The success of such novels, in the hands of a great

M. PAUL BOURGET 247

artist, is not problematical, because they possess,
obviously and beyond contradiction, what M.
Bourget calls " le coloris de la vie en mouvement."
If, however, this kind of scene-painting were
the only species of fiction permitted, there are
many novelists who could never earn their daily
bread, and M. Bourget is one of them. Accord-
ingly his flattering address to Madame Serao is
merely the prelude to an ingenious apology for
the painting of sentiments and emotions in the
novel which analyses minute and fugitive im-
pressions. This demands a closeness of texture
and a strenuous uniformity of technical effort
which are in themselves advantages, but which
are with difficulty exercised in the huge world-
romance. In the course of his essay M. Bourget
pauses to express his warm admiration of Mr.
Henry James, whom he takes as the first living
exponent of this peculiarly intense and vivid
manner of contemplating, as through a micro-
scope, the movement of intellectual life. We
cannot but record this fact with complaisance,
since, in reviewing Voyageuses last year, we re-
marked that, if it were possible to imagine that
a prominent French writer could undergo the
influence of an Anglo-Saxon contemporary, the
transition which the style and attitude of M.
Bourget are now undergoing would point to a
deliberate study of Mr. James's manner. M.
Bourget, in the dedication to La Duchesse Bleue,
practically confesses that we were correct in
what seemed our almost daring conjecture. He
names Mr. James's volume called Terminations as

248 FRENCH PROFILES

the model which he has placed before himself in his
recent treatment of problems of artistic psychology.

The original name of the story before us was
Trots Ames d' Artistes, as we have already said. M.
Bourget explains that, on reflection, he thought
this too ambitious a title. It was at least descrip-
tive, whereas La Duchesse Bleue suggests nothing ;
it proves upon examination to be the nickname of
a part in a play in which the heroine made a
success. M. Bourget has portrayed in this
book three artistic temperaments set side by side.
These are respectively those of a novelist and
dramatist, an actress and a painter, and he has
shown these three persons to us in a mutual crisis
of tragical passion. Jacques Moran, the dramatist,
has a play being acted, for the principal role in
which a charming little actress, with a Botticelli
face, Camille Favier, makes a great success ; the
painter is Vincent la Croix, who tells the story.
Moran is adored by Camille, but deserts her for a
woman of fashion, Madame de Bonnivet, while
Vincent, worked upon by his generous indignation
at this treatment, fails to perceive through three
hundred pages that he himself loves Camille, and
might be loved in return. The plot is no more
complicated than this, and we confess that it
requires some respect for M. Bourget and some
enthusiasm for the processes of the psychological
novel to carry us through so long a book attached
to so slender a thread of plot.

Moran and Camille are entirely successful in
life, Vincent la Croix is a failure in everything he
touches, and the object of La Duchesse Bleue seems

M. PAUL BOURGET 249

to be to distinguish between the one race of artists
which translates marvellously without itself experi-
encing, and the other race which experiences with-
out being able to translate. For a phrase to say on
the boards, for a sentence to write in a book, the
former class would sell their father or their mother.
The moral of La Duchesse Bleue, in a nutshell,
is that if we wish to keep our hearts tender and
fresh, we must be content to be ourselves mediocre
and obscure. The thesis is a not unfamiliar one.
It occurred to the fiery spirit of Elizabeth Browning
while she watched the great god Pan, down by
the reeds in the river, " draw out the pith like the
heart of a man." In the hypothesis of the French
novelist, a love, a hatred, a joy, a sorrow, is to
the really successful artist nothing more than so
much manured earth out of which he can force
the flower of his talent, that blossom of delicacy
and passion, to perfect which he will not hesitate
for a moment to kill in himself every true delicacy
and every living emotion. It is not a pleasant
theory, and the ugliness of it may help us who form
the vast majority of men and women to bear with
fortitude the mortifying fact thatwewere not born to
be geniuses. But we think that M. Bourget makes
a mistake in attributing this peculiarly inhuman
hardness of heart exclusively to the artist of the
highest class. We are afraid that our experience
has led us to observe the vanity — which is really
at the root of this moral deformity — in those who
have nothing of genius in their nature except its
fretfulness and its ferocity.

250 FRENCH PROFILES

Complications Sentimentales

In reading M. Bourget's collection of short
stories called Vqyageuses, we observed that he had
quitted for a moment that perfumed atmosphere
of the salon and the boudoir which he loves, and
that he had consented to take us with him out
into the fresh air. It was but an episode ; in Com-
plications Sentimentales we find ourselves once more
in the scented world of Parisian elegance, among
those well-bred people of wealth, without occupa-
tion, whose intrigues and passions M. Bourget has
taught himself to analyse with such extraordinary
precision. His new book consists of three tales,
or short novels, one of which at least, " L'Ecran,"
might easily be expanded into the form of a com-
plete work. These three stories deal with three
critical conditions of the mind and temper of a
woman. The first and second end in a moral
tragedy : the third ends well, after excursions and
alarms, and may be called a tragi-comedy of the
soul. All three analyse symptoms of that disease
which M. Bourget believes to be so widely dis-
seminated in the feminine society of the day, " la
trahison de la femme," deception under the guise
of a bland and maiden candour. The heroines of
the three stories are all liars : but while two of
them are minxes, the third is a dupe. Admirers
of that clever novel, MensongeSy will find themselves
quite in their element when they read Complications
Sentimentales.

One of these three stories, " L'Ecran," is in its
way a masterpiece. M. Bourget has never written

M. PAUL BOURGET 251

anything which better exempHfies his pecuHar
quaUties, the insinuating and persistent force of his
style, his preoccupation with delicate subtleties and
undulations of feeling, the skill with which he
renders the most fleeting shades of mental sensation.
In " L'Ecran," moreover, he avoids to a remarkable
degree that defect of movement which has seriously
damaged several of his most elaborate books :
which, for instance, makes Utie Idylle Tragique
scarcely readable. His danger, like that of Mr.
Henry James, whom he resembles on more sides
than one, is to delay in interminable psychological
reflections until our attention has betrayed us, and
we have lost the thread of the story. This error,
or defect, would seem to have presented itself as a
peril to the mind of M. Bourget : for in his latest
stories he is manifestly on his guard against it, and
" L'Ecran," in particular, is a really excellent
example of a tale told to excite and amuse even
those who are quite indifferent to the lesson it
conveys, and to the exquisite art of its delivery.

In the month of June the Lautrecs and the Sar-
lifeves, two aristocratic menages of Paris, come over
to England to enjoy the London season, into the
whirlpool of which they descend. But at almost
the same moment arrives the Vicomte Bertrand
d'Aydie, who is understood to nurse an absolutely
hopeless and respectful passion for the sainted
Marquise Alyette de Lautrec. This devotion is
much " chaffed " in clubs and smilingly alluded
to in drawing-rooms as pure waste of time, since
the purity and dignity of Madame de Lautrec are
above the possibility of suspicion. But Madame

252 FRENCH PROFILES

de Lautrec's dearest friend happens to be the
Vicomtesse Emmeline de Sarlieve — a gay and
amiable butterfly, of whom no one thinks seriously
at all. Bertrand and Emmeline have, however, for
some time past, carried on with complete immunity
a liaison, under the shadow of their friendship for
Alyette, fe'cran, the screen. Bertrand encourages
the idea that he is throwing away a desperate
passion on the icy heart of Alyette, when he is
really planning with Emmeline rendezvous, which
owe their facility to the presence of Alyette. The
reader does not know M. Bourget if he is not by
this time conscious that here are united all the
elements for one of his most ingenious ethical
problems. The visit of the quintette to London
precipitates the inevitable catastrophe. M. Bour-
get's sketch of our society is wonderfully skilful
and entertaining, and Londoners will recognise
some familiar faces, scarcely disguised under the
travesty of false names.
1899.

Outre-Mer

The author of Outre-Mer takes himself, as the
phrase goes, rather seriously. He passes in New
York and in Paris as a kind of new De Tocque-
ville. We mean no detraction of his gifts, nor of
the charm of his amusing volumes, when we say
that they are not quite so important to an English
as to a French or to an American audience. They
are important in France, because M. Bourget
is a highly accomplished public favourite, whose
methods attract attention whatever subject he may

M. PAUL BOURGET 253

deal with, and whose mind has here been given to
the study of a kind of life not familiar to Frenchmen.
They are important in America, because America
is greatly moved by European opinion, and must
be flattered at so close an examination of her in-
stitutions by an eminent French writer. But in
England our contact with the United States is
closer and more habitual than that between those
States and France, while our vanity is not more
stimulated by M. Bourget's study of America than
by M. Loti's pictures of Jerusalem. To put it
boldly, we know more and care less than the
two main classes who will form the audience of
Outre-Mer.

Taking, then, this calmer standpoint, the feats
of M. Bourget's sympathetic appreciation, and the
deficiencies in his equipment, leave us, on the
whole, rather indifferent. No book of this author
has been so much talked of beforehand, or so
ardently expected, as Outre-Mer, and we do not
suppose that its two main bodies of readers will
be at all disappointed. But no philosophical Eng-
lishman will consider it the best of M. Bourget's
books. He will, for example, be infinitely less
pleased with it than he was with Sensations d'ltalte,
a much less popular work. The fact is that in
reading what the elegant psychologist has to say
about America, " on y regrette," as he himself
would say, " la douce et lente Europe." The
reason of this is, that in dealing with certain super-
ficial features of a vast and crude new civilisation,
M. Bourget is a razor cutting a hone. The razor
is amazingly sharp and bright, but it is not doing

254 FRENCH PROFILES

its proper business. M. Bourget is a subtle and
minute analyst, whose gift it is to distinguish be-
tween delicate orders of thought which are yet
closely allied, to determine between new elements
and old ones in survival, to provoke, with pro-
fundity and penetration, long developments of
reverie. He is at home in old societies and
waning cities ; he is a master in the evocation
of new lights on outworn themes. He is full of
the nostalgia of the past, and he dreams about
the dead while he moves among the living. It is
obvious that such a writer is out of place in the
study of a country that has no past, no history,
no basis of death, a country where a man looks
upon his grandfather as a historical character, and
upon a house a hundred years old as a historical
monument. What M. Bourget has done is extra-
ordinarily clever and brilliant, but he was not the
man to be set to do it.

The conditions under which the work progressed
were, though specious, not less unfavourable to
its perfection. These notes, by a famous French-
man, on the social life of America to-day, were
prepared to appear first of all in an enterprising
New York journal. That M. Bourget should ac-
cept such a test proclaims his courage, and that
he should, in the main, have endured the ordeal,
his accuracy and care. It is none the less a shock
to find the book dedicated, in a very clever pre-
fatory epistle, to Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and
to realise that before its impressions could be given
to the world they had to pass through the mill of
the New York Herald* The result is a book which

M. PAUL BOURGET 255

is beautifully written, and which, above all, gives
the impression of being sincerely written — a book
which contains many brilliant flashes of intuition,
many just and liberal opinions, and some pictures
of high merit, but which, somehow, fails to be
philosophical, and is apt to slip between the stools
of vain conjecture and mere reporter's work. A
great deal which will be read with most entertain-
ment in Outre-Mer — the description of Chicago,
for instance, and the visit to the night-side of New
York — is really fitted to appear in a daily news-
paper, and then to be forgotten. It is very full
and conscientious, but it is the production of a
sublimated reporter, and there is precious little De
Tocqueville about it.

This, however, may be considered hypercritical.
M. Bourget spent eight or nine months in the
United States, with no other occupation than the
collection of the notes from which these volumes
are selected. He had all possible facilities given
to him, and he worked in a fair and generous
spirit. He was genuinely interested in America,
interested more intelligently, no doubt, than any
other recent Frenchman has been. It would have
been strange if he had not written a book which
repaid perusal. The faults of M. Bourget's style
have always been over-elaboration and excess of
detail. Here he has been tempted to indulge
these frailties, and we cannot say that he is not
occasionally tedious when he lingers upon facts
and conditions obvious to all Englishmen who
visit America. Hence, we like his book best where
it gives us the results of the application of his

256 FRENCH PROFILES

subtle intellect to less familiar matters. All he has
to say about the vitality of the Catholic Church
in the United States is worthy of close attention.
His interviews with Cardinal Gibbon and Arch-
bishop Ireland are of material interest, and his
notes on the socialistic tendencies of American
Catholicism singularly valuable. No pages here
are more graphic than those which record a visit
to a Roman church in New York, and the sermon
which the author listened to there. He was struck,
as all visitors to America must be, with the absence
of reverie, of the spiritual and experimental spirit,
in the teaching and tendency of the Church of
Rome in America, and with its practical energy,
its businesslike activity and vehemence. In a few
words M. Bourget renders with admirable skill
that air of antiquity and Catholic piety which
make Baltimore more like a city of Southern
Europe than any other in the United States. In
observation of this kind M. Bourget can always
be trusted.

As befits the inquiry of a Latin psychologist,
the question of woman takes a very prominent
part in the investigation of M. Bourget. On this
subject what he has to say and what he has to
admit ignorance of are equally interesting. He
has to confess himself baffled by that extraordinary
outcome of Western civilisation, the American
girl, but he revenges himself by the notation of
innumerable instances of her peculiarities and
idiosyncrasies. On the whole, though she puzzles
him, he is greatly delighted with her. We re-
member hearing of the visit paid to Newport by

M. PAUL BOURGET 257

a young French poet of the Symbolists, who was
well acquainted with the American language, but
whose manners were all adjusted to the model
of the Boulevard St. Michel. He made a dozen
serious blunders, all of which were benignly for-
given, before he settled down to some due recog-
nition of the cold, free, stimulating and sphinx-like
creature that woman is on the shores of America.
M. Bourget is too much a man of the world, and
has been too carefully trained, to err in this way,
but his wonder is no less pronounced. He comes
to the curious " r^sultat que le d^sir de la femme
est demeur^ au second rang dans les preoccupa-
tions de ces hommes." He considers, as other
observers have done, that this condition of things
can be but transitory, and that the strange apo-
theosis of the American girl, with all that it pre-
supposes in the way of reticence of manners, is
but a transitory phase. He falls into an eloquent
description of the American idol, the sexless
woman of the United States, and closes it with a
passage which is one of the most remarkable in
his volumes : —

" Cette femme peut ne pas Itre aim^e. Elle
n'a pas besoin d'etre aimee. Ce n'est ni la volupt6
ni la tendresse qu'elle symbolise. Elle est comme
un objet d'art vivant, une savante et derni^re com-
position humaine qui atteste que le Yankee, ce
d^sesp^r^ d'hier, ce vaincu du vieux monde, a su
tirer de ce sauvage univers 011 il fut jet6 par le
sort toute une civilisation nouvelle, incarn^e dans
cette femme-la, son luxe et son orgueil. Tout
s'^claire de cette civilisation au regard de ces yeux

R

258 FRENCH PROFILES

profonds, . . . tout ce qui est I'ld^alisme de ce
pays sans Id^al, ce qui sera sa perte peut-etre,
mais qui jusqu'ici demeure sa grandeur : la foi
absolue, unique, systematique et indomptable dans
la Volonte."

With the West the author does not seem to
have any personal acquaintance. In his chapter
on " Cowboys " he tells some marvellous stories.
We know not what to think of the vivacious anec-
dote of the men who, weary to see some eminent
emanation of the East, planned the kidnapping
of Madame Sarah Bernhardt as she passed Green
River on her way to the Pacific. The great actress
had taken an earlier express, and was saved from
her embarrassing captors. M. Bourget occupies
nearly fifty pages with a " Confession of a Cow-
boy," the source of which is very vaguely stated.
All this, we must acknowledge, seems rather poor
to us, and must have been collected at worse than
second-hand. Those chapters, on the contrary,
which deal with the South, are particularly fresh
and charming. There is no sort of connection be-
tween the close of the second volume, which deals
with an excursion through Georgia and Florida,
and the rest of the book, yet no one will wish this
species of appendix omitted. The author gives an
exceedingly picturesque and humorous picture of
life in a Georgian watering-place, which he calls
Phillipeville, where somebody or other is lynched
every year. M. Bourget, as in duty bound, tells a
spirited story of a " lynchage." He describes, too,
in his very best style, the execution of a rebellious
but repentant mulatto.

M. PAUL BOURGET 259

When our author proceeded still further South,
he had not the good fortune to see such strik-
ing sights, or to meet with so singular a popula-
tion. But at Jacksonville, Florida, he was able, as
nowhere else, to study the negro at home, and at
St. Augustine he discovered to his delight a sort
of Cannes or Monte Carlo of America, with its
gardens of oranges and jasmine, its green oaks and
its oleanders. He rejoiced, after his long inland
wanderings, to see the ocean breaking on the reefs
of Anastasia. Upon the whole, whether in the
North or the South, M. Bourget has been pleased
with the United States. He has recognised the
two great defects of that country : its incoherence,
and its brutality. He has recognised a factitious
element in its cultivation, corruption in its politics,
and a general excess in its activity. He delights
in three typical American words, and discovers
"puff," "boom," and "bluff" at every turn. He
comes back to Europe at last with that emotion
of gratitude which every European feels, however
warmly he has been welcomed in America, and
in however favourable a light American life has
been shown to him. Yet he is conscious of its
high virtues, its noble possibilities, and on the
whole his picture of the great Republic, so care-
fully and modestly prepared, so conscientiously
composed, is in a high degree a flattering and
attractive one.

1895.

26o FRENCH PROFILES

L'Etape

We are so little accustomed in England to the
polemical novel, or, indeed, to the novel of ideas
in any form, that it is difficult for us to realise the
condition of mind which has led M. Bourget to
fling himself into the arena of French politics with
a romance which must give extreme offence to the
majority of its possible readers, and which runs
violently counter to the traditional complacency of
French democratic life. It is probable that M.
Bourget no longer cares very much whether he
offends or pleases, and, doubtless, the more he
scourges the many, the more he endears himself to
the comparatively few. Here, in England, we are
called upon — if only English people would com-
prehend the fact — to contemplate and not to criti-
cise the intellectual and moral idiosyncrasies of our
neighbours. If we could but learn the lesson that
a curious attention, an inquisitive observation into
foreign modes of thought becomes us very well,
but that we are not asked for our opinion, it would
vastly facilitate our relations. In calling attention
to M. Bourget's extremely interesting and powerful
novel, I expressly deprecate the impertinence of
our " taking a side " in the matter of its aim. We
have our own national failings to attend to ; let
us, for goodness' sake, avoid the folly of hauling
our neighbours up to a tribunal of Anglo-Saxon
political virtue. It should be enough for us that
the phenomena which in France produce a Mon-
neron on the one side and a Ferrand on the other

M. PAUL BOURGET 261

are very interesting. Let us observe them as closely
as we can, but not hazard a decision.

The title of M. Bourget's book would offer me
a great difficulty if I were called upon to translate
it, and I am not sure that a Frenchman will im-
mediately understand what is symbolised by it.
An etape is a stage, a station ; on briile I'e'tape by
rushing through, without, as it were, stopping to
change horses. Is, then, the theme of this book
the stage, the day's march, as it were, which its
over-educated peasant takes in passing over to
Conservatism ? Does the Monnerons' fault consist
in their having " burned " their etape in their too
great hurry to cut a figure in society ? It is not
until the final page 516 that we meet with the
word and the image, even as we have to reach the
last paragraph of Stendhal's masterpiece before we
hear of the Chartreuse de Parme. Enough, then,
that the subject of this £tape is the story of a family
of peasants from the Ardeche, one of whom has
received an education in excess of his fitness for
it ; has become, in other words, a functionary and
a bourgeois without the necessary preparation. It
might be rash to suppose that so practised an
author as M. Bourget would condescend to be
influenced by a much younger writer, or else I
should say that throughout this book I am con-
strained to perceive the spirit of M. Maurice
Barrds. The attitude of the writer of L'^tape has,
at all events, become astonishingly identical with
that of the author of Les De'racines, and to have
read that extraordinary work will prepare a reader
in many ways for the study of the novel before us.

262 FRENCH PROFILES

In both the one and the other it would, perhaps,
be more critical to say that we see fructifying and
spreading the pessimist influence of Taine.

The uncomfortable and paradoxical condition of
modern society in France is attributed by these
writers of the school of Taine to the obstinate
cultivation of political chimeras which have out-
lived the excitement of the Revolution. The key-
note to the attitude of modern democracy is
conceived by M. Bourget to be hostility to the
origins and history of the country. The good
hero of the story, M. Ferrand (who is inclined,
like all good heroes, to be a little oracular), re-
minds the young socialist of a passage in Plato's
Timceus where we are told that a most ancient
priest of the temple of Sais warned Solon that the
weakness of the Greeks was their possessmg no
ancient doctrine transmitted by their ancestors,
no education passed down from age to age by
venerable teachers. It is this lack of authoritative
continuity which M. Bourget deplores ; his view
of 1789 is that it snapped the thread that bound
society to the past, that it vulgarised, uprooted,
shattered, and destroyed things which were essen-
tial to national prosperity and to individual happi-
ness. He thinks that one of these links still exists
and can be strengthened indefinitely — namely, the
Catholic religion. Therefore, according to M.
Bourget, the first thing a Frenchman has to do
is to abandon his ideology and his collectivism,
which lead only to anarchical and incoherent
forms of misery, and to humble himself before
the Church, by the aid of which alone a whole-

M. PAUL BOURGET 263

some society can be rebuilt on the ruins of a
hundred years of revolutionary madness.

One is bound, however, to point out that if
Taine's teaching can be interpreted in a re-
actionary sense, there is nothing in his writings
which seems to justify its being distorted for
political and clerical purposes. I have endeavoured
to summarise as fairly as possible what seem to
be M. Bourget's views about "the lack of authori-
tative continuity." But Taine is careful, in L'Ancien
R^gimey precisely to insist that all the Revolution
did was to transfer the exercise of absolute power
from the King to a central body of men in Paris.
Here was no breach of continuity ; it was merely
a new form of precisely the same thing. M.
Bourget, and those who act with him, seem to
overlook completely the kernel of Taine's argu-
ment, namely, that the Revolution was not a
spontaneous growth, but the outcome of three
centuries of antecedent events. The latest re-
actionaries, I must confess, appear to me to intro-
duce an element of wilful obscurity into a position
which Taine left admirably clear and plain.

Considered purely as a story, L'Etape is told
with all M. Bourget's accustomed solidity and
refinement. It has, moreover, a vigorous evolu-
tion which captivates the attention, and prevents
the elaboration of the author's analysis from ever
becoming dull. The action passes in university
society, and practically within the families of two
classical professors at the Sorbonne. M. Ferrand,
the Catholic, who is all serenity and joy, has a
gentle, lovely daughter, Brigitte. She is courted

264 FRENCH PROFILES

by Jean, the eldest son of M. Monneron, who has
the misfortune to be a Republican and a Drey-
fusard, and everything, in fact, which is sinister
and fatal in the eyes of M. Bourget. Brigitte will
not marry Jean Monneron unless he consents to
become a Catholic, and the intrigue of the novel
proceeds, with alarming abruptness, during the
days in which Jean is making up his mind to take
the leap. Terrible things happen to the agitated
members of the Monneron family — things which
lead them to forgery and attempted murder — and
all on account of their deplorable political opinions,
while the happy and virtuous Ferrands sit up aloft,
in the purity of their reaction, and, ultimately, as
it happens, take care of the life of poor Jean. Told
baldly thus, or rather not told at all, but sum-
marised, the plot seems preposterous ; and it
cannot, I think, be denied that it is in some
degree mechanical. Is not this a fault to which
those novelists in France who throw in their lot
with the disciples of Balzac are peculiarly liable ?

Plot, however, in our trivial sense, is the least
matter about which M. Bourget troubles himself.
He is occupied with two things : the presentation
of his thesis — we may almost say his propaganda
— and the conduct of his personages when face to
face in moments of exalted spiritual excitement.
In the past, he has sometimes shirked the clash
of these crises, as if shrinking a little from the
mere physical disturbance of them. But he does
not do so in VEtape, which will be found " awfully
thrilling," even by the Hildas of the circulating
libraries. In the study of the " Union Tolstoi,"

M. PAUL BOURGET 265

which is a sort of Toynbee Hall, founded in the
heart of Paris by Cremieu-Dax (a curious re-
miniscence, whether conscious or not, of our own
Leonard Montefiore), M. Bourget is led away by
the blindness of his exclusive fanaticism. A lighter
touch, a little of the playfulness of humour, would
have rendered more probable and human this
humanitarian club of Jews and Protestants and
Anarchists and faddists, united in nothing but in
their enmity to the ancient government and faith
of France. And the ruin of the " Union Tolstoi "
is shown to be so inevitable, that we are left to
wonder how it could ever have seemed to flourish.

The portraits in the book, however, are neither
mechanical nor hard. The old Monneron, gentle,
learned, and humane, but bound hand and foot by
his network of political prejudices ; the impudent
Antoine ; Julie, the type of the girl emancipated
on Anglo-American lines, and doomed to violent
catastrophe ; the enthusiastic and yet patient, fana-
tical and yet tender millionaire socialist, Solomon
Cr^mieu-Dax ; in a lesser degree the unfortunate
Abb6 Chanut, who believes that the democracy
can be reconciled to the Church — all these are
admirable specimens of M. Bourget's art of por-
traiture. The novel is profoundly interesting,
although hardly addressed to those who run
while they read ; but it must not be taken as
a text-book of the state of France without a
good deal of counteracting Republican literature.
Yet it is a document of remarkable value and a
charming work of art.

1902.

M. RENE BAZIN

When I was young I had the pleasure of knowing
a prominent Plymouth Brother, an intelligent and
fanatical old gentleman, into whose house there
strayed an attractive volume, which he forbade his
grown-up son and daughter to peruse. A day or
two later, his children, suddenly entering his library,
found him deep in the study of the said dangerous
book, and gently upbraided him with doing what
he had expressly told them not to do. He replied,
with calm good-humour, " Ah ! but you see I have
a much stronger spiritual digestion than you have!"
This question of the " spiritual digestion " is one
which must always trouble those who are asked to
recommend one or another species of reading to
an order of undefined readers. Who shall decide
what books are and what books are not proper to
be read ? There are some people who can pasture
unpoisoned upon the memoirs of Casanova, and
others who are disturbed by The Idyls of the King.
They tell me that in Minneapolis Othello is con-
sidered objectionable ; our own great-aunts thought
Jane Eyre no book for girls. In the vast compli-
cated garden of literature it is always difficult to
say where the toxicologist comes in, and what dis-
tinguishes him from the purveyor of a salutary
moral tonic. In recent French romance, every-

366

M. RENE BAZIN 267

body must acknowledge, it is practically impossible
to lay down a hard and fast rule.

The object of this chapter, however, is not to
decide how far the daring apologist can go in the
recommendation of new French novel-writers, but
to offer to the notice of shy English readers a par-
ticularly " nice " one. But, before attempting to
introduce M. Ren6 Bazin, I would reflect a moment
on the very curious condition of the French novel
in general at the present time. No one who ob-
serves the entire field of current French literature
without prejudice will deny that the novel is pass-
ing through a period which must prove highly
perilous to its future, a period at once of transition
and of experiment. The school of realism or
naturalism, which was founded upon the prac-
tice of Balzac in direct opposition to the prac-
tices of George Sand and of DumB.s pere, achieved,
about twenty years ago, one of those violent vic-
tories which are more dangerous to a cause than
defeat itself. It was in 1880 that M. Zola pub-
lished that volume of polemical criticism which
had so far-reaching an effect in France and else-
where, and which was strangely ignored in England
— Le Roman Experimental. This was just the point
of time at which the Rougon-Macquart series of
socio-pathological romances was receiving its maxi-
mum of hostile attention. M. Zola's book of criti-
cism was a plausible, audacious, magnificently
casuistical plea, not merely for the acceptance of
the realistic method, but for the exclusion of every
other method from the processes of fiction. It
had its tremendous effect ; during the space of

268 FRENCH PROFILES

some five years the " romanciers naturalistes," with
M. Zola at their head, had it all their own way.
Then came, in 1885, La Terre, an object-lesson in
the abuse of the naturalistic formula, and people
began to open their eyes to its drawbacks. And
then we all dissolved in laughter over the protest
of the " cinq purs," and the defection of a whole
group of disciples. M. Zola, like the weary Titan
that he was, went on, but the prestige of naturalism
was undermined.

But, meanwhile, the old forms of procedure in
romance had been dishonoured. It was not enough
that the weak places in the realistic armour should
be pierced by the arrows of a humaner criticism ;
the older warriors whom Goliath had overthrown
had to be set on their legs again. And it is not
to be denied that some of them were found to be
dreadfully the worse for wear. No one who had
read Flaubert and the Goncourts, no one who had
been introduced to Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky, could
any longer endure the trick of Cherbuliez. It was
like going back to William Black after Stevenson
and Mr. Barrie. Even Ferdinand Fabre, the
Thomas Hardy of the Cevennes, seemed to have
lost his savour. The novels of Octave Feuillet
were classics, but no one yearned for fresh imita-
tions of Monsieur de Camors. Pierre Loti turned
more and more exclusively to adventures of the
ego in tropical scenery. Alphonse Daudet, after
a melancholy eclipse of his fresh early genius,
passed away. Even before the death of Edmond,
the influence of the Goncourts, although still
potent, spread into other fields of intellectual effort,

M. RENE BAZIN 269

and became negligible so far as the novel, pure
and simple, was concerned. What was most note-
worthy in the French belles-lettres of ten years ago
was the brilliant galaxy of critics that swam into
our ken. In men like MM. Lemaitre, Anatole
France, Brunetiere and Gaston Paris, the intel-
ligent reader found purveyors of entertainment
which was as charming as fiction, and much more
solid and stimulating. Why read dull novels when
one could be so much better amused by a new
volume of La Vie Litteraire ?

In pure criticism there is now again a certain
depression in French literature. The most brilliant
of the group I have just mentioned has turned
from the adventures of books to the analysis of
life. But the author of L'Anneau cCAmethyste is
hardly to be counted among the novelists. His
philosophical satires, sparkling with wit and malice,
incomparable in their beauty of expression, are
doubtless the most exquisite productions proceed-
ing to-day from the pen of a Frenchman, but
L'Orme du Mail is no more a novel than Friend-
ship's Garland is. Among the talents which were
directly challenged by the theories of the natural-
istic school, the one which seems to have escaped
least battered from the fray is that of M. Paul
Bourget. He stands apart, like Mr. Henry James
— the European writer with whom he is in closest
relation. But even over this delicious writer a
certain change is passing. He becomes less and
less a novelist, and more and more a writer of
nouvelles or short stories. La Duchesse Bleue was
not a roman, it was a nouvelle writ large, and in the

270 FRENCH PROFILES

volume of consummate studies of applied psy-
chology {Un Homme d' Affaires), which reaches me
as I write these lines, I find a M. Paul Bourget
more than ever removed from the battle-field of
common fiction, more than ever isolated in his
exquisite attenuation of the enigmas of the human
heart. On the broader field, M. Marcel Provost
and M. Paul Hervieu support the Balzac tradition
after their strenuous and intelligent fashion. It is
these two writers who continue for us the manu-
facture of the " French novel " pure and simple.
Do they console us for Flaubert and Maupassant
and Goncourt ? Me, I am afraid, they do as yet
but faintly console.

Elsewhere, in the French fiction with which the
century is closing, we see little but experiment,
and that experiment largely takes the form of
pastiche. One thing has certainly been learned by
the brief tyranny of realism, namely, that the mere
exterior phenomena of experience, briefly observed,
do not exhaust the significance of life. It is not
to be denied that a worthy intellectual effort, a
desire to make thought take its place again in
aesthetic literature, marks the tentatives, often very
unsatisfactory in themselves and unrelated to one
another, which are produced by the younger nove-
lists in France. These books address, it must never
be forgotten, an audience far more cultivated, far
less hide-bound in its prejudices, than does the
output of the popular English novelist. It is diffi-
cult to conceive of a British Huysmans translating,
with the utmost disregard for plot, the voluptuous
languors of religion ; it is even more difficult to

M. RENE BAZIN 271

conceive of a British Maurice Barres engaged, in
the form of fiction, in the glorification of a theory
of individuaUsm. It is proper that we should do
honour to the man who writes and to the public
that reads, with zeal and curiosity, these attempts
to deal with spiritual problems in the form of
fiction. But it is surely not unfair to ask whether
the experiment so courageously attempted is per-
fectly successful ? It is not improper to suggest
that neither La Cathedrak nor Les De'racine's is exactly
to be styled an ideal novel.

More completely fulfilling the classic purpose of
the romance, the narrative, are some of the experi-
mental works in fiction which I have indicated as
belonging to the section of pastiche. In this class
I will name but three, the Aphrodite of M. Pierre
Louys, La Nichina of M. Hugues Rebell, and La
Route d'J^meraude of M. Eugene Demolder. These,
no doubt, have been the most successful, and the
most deservedly successful, of a sort of novel in
these last years in France, books in which the life
of past ages has been resuscitated with a full sense
of the danger which lurks in pedantry and in a
didactic dryness. With these may be included the
extraordinary pre-historic novels of the brothers
Rosny. This kind of story suffers from two dan-
gers. Firstly, nothing so soon loses its pleasur-
able surprise, and becomes a tiresome trick, as
pastiche. Already, in the case of more than one
of the young writers just mentioned, fatigue of
fancy has obviously set in. The other peril is a
heritage from the Naturalists, and makes the dis-
cussion of recent French fiction extremely difficult

272 FRENCH PROFILES

in England, namely, the determination to gain a
sharp, vivid effect by treating, with surgical cool-
ness, the maladies of society. Hence — to skate as
lightly as possible over this thin ice — the difficulty
of daring to recommend to English readers a single
book in recent French fiction. We have spoken
of a strong spiritual digestion ; but most of the
romances of the latest school require the digestion
of a Commissioner in Lunacy or of the matron in a
Lock hospital.

Therefore — and not to be always pointing to the
Quaker-coloured stories of M. Edouard Rod — the
joy and surprise of being able to recommend,
without the possibility of a blush, the latest of all
the novelists of France. It has been necessary, in
the briefest language, to sketch the existing situa-
tion in French fiction, in order to make appreciable
the purity, the freshness, the simplicity of M. Ren6
Bazin. It is only within the last season or two
that he has come prominently to the front, although
he has been writing quietly for about fifteen years.
It would be absurd to exaggerate. M. Bazin is
not, and will not be here presented as being, a
great force in literature. If it were the part of
criticism to deal in negatives, it would be easy to
mention a great many things which M. Bazin is
not. Among others, he is not a profound psy-
chologist ; people who like the novels of M.
El^mir Bourges, and are able to understand them,
will, unquestionably, pronounce Les Noellet and La
Sarcelle Bleue very insipid. But it is possible that
the French novelists of these last five years have
been trying to be a great deal too clever, that they

M. RENE BAZIN 273

have starved the large reading public with the
extravagant intellectuality of their stories. Whether
that be so or not, it is at least pleasant to have
one man writing, in excellent French, refined,
cheerful, and sentimental novels of the most ultra-
modest kind, books that every girl may read, that
every guardian of youth may safely leave about in
any room of the house. I do not say — I am a
thousand miles from thinking — that this is every-
thing ; but I protest — even in face of the indignant
Bar of Bruges— that this is much.

Little seems to have been told about the very
quiet career of M. Ren6 Bazin, who is evidently
an enemy to self-advertisement. He was born at
Angers in 1853, and was educated at the little
seminary of Montgazon. Of his purely literary
career all that is known appears to be that in 1886
he published a romance. Ma Tante Giron, to which
I shall presently return, which fell almost un-
noticed from the press. It found its way, how-
ever, to one highly appropriate reader, M. Ludovic
Hal^vy, to whom its author was entirely unknown,
M. Hal^vy was so much struck with the cleanliness
and the freshness of this new writer that he recom-
mended the editor of the " Journal des D^bats " to
secure him as a contributor. To the amazement
of M. Bazin, he was invited, by a total stranger, to
join the staff of the " Debats." He did so, and for
that newspaper he has written almost exclusively
ever since, and there his successive novels and
books of travel have first appeared. It is said that
M. Hal^vy tried, without success, to induce the
French Academy to give one of its prizes to Ma

S

274 FRENCH PROFILES

Tante Giron. That attempt failed, but no doubt it
was to the same admirer that was due the crowning
of M. Ren6 Bazin's second story, Une Tache d'Encre.
One can hardly doubt that the time is not far
distant when M. Bazin will himself be in a posi-
tion to secure the prizes of the Academy for still
younger aspirants. This account of M. Bazin is
meagre ; but although it is all that I know of his
blameless career, I feel sure that it is, as Froude
once said on a parallel occasion, " nothing to what
the angels know."

When we turn to M. Bazin's earliest novel. Ma
Tante Giron, it is not difficult to divine what it was
that attracted to this stranger the amiable author of
L Abbe Constantin and Monsieur et Madame Cardinal.
It is a sprightly story of provincial life, a dish, as
was wickedly said of one of M. Hal^vy's own
books, consisting of nothing but angels served up
with a white sauce of virtue. The action is laid
in a remote corner of Western France, the Craonais,
half in Vendue, half in Brittany. There are fine
old sporting characters, who bring down hares at
fabulous distances to the reproach of younger
shots ; there are excellent cur^s, the souls of
generosity and unworldliness, with a touch of
eccentricity to keep them human. There is an
admirable young man, the Baron Jacques, who
falls desperately in love with the beautiful and
modest Mademoiselle de Seigny, and has just
worked himself up to the point of proposing,
when he unfortunately hears that she has become
the greatest heiress in the country-side. Then,
of course, his honourable scruples overweigh his

M. RENE BAZIN 275

passion, and he takes to a capricious flight. Made-
moiselle de Seigny, who loves him, will marry no
one else, and both are horribly unhappy, until
Aunt Giron, who is the comic providence of the
tale, rides over to the Baron's retreat, and brings
him back, a blushing captive, to the feet of the
young lady. All comes well, of course, and the
curtain falls to the sound of wedding bells, while
Aunt Giron, brushing away a tear, exclaims, " La
joie des autres, comme cela fait du bien ! "

But Ma Tante Giron is really the least bit too
ingenuous for the best of good little girls. Hence
we are not surprised to find M. Bazin's next novel
at the same time less provincial and less artless.
It is very rare for a second book to show so
remarkable an advance upon a first as Une Tache
dEncre does upon its predecessor. This is a story
which may be recommended to any reader, of
whatever age or sex, who wishes for a gay, good-
humoured and well-constructed tale, in which the
whole tone and temper shall be blameless, and in
which no great strain shall be put upon the intel-
lectual attention. It is excellently carpentered ; it
is as neatly turned-out a piece of fiction-furniture
as any one could wish to see. It has, moreover,
beyond its sentimental plot, a definite subject. In
Une Tache dEncre the perennial hostility between
Paris and the country-town, particularly between
Paris and the professional countryman, is used,
with excellent effect, to hang an innocent and
recurrent humour upon. Fabian Mouillard, an
orphan, has been educated by an uncle, who is a
family lawyer at Bourges. He has been brought

276 FRENCH PROFILES

up in the veneration of the office, with the fixed
idea that he must eventually carry on the profes-
sion, in the same place, among the same clients ;
he is a sort of Dauphin of the basoche, and it has
never been suggested to him that he can escape
from being his uncle's successor. But Fabian
comes up to Paris, that dangerous city, hatred and
fear of which have been most carefully instilled
into him. He still continues, however, to be as
good as gold, when a blot of ink changes the
whole current of his life. He is engaged in com-
posing a thesis on the Junian Latins, a kind of
slaves whose status in ancient Rome offers curious
difficulties to the student of jurisprudence. To
inform himself of history in this matter he attends
the National Library, and there, one afternoon, he
is so unlucky (or so lucky) as to flip a drop of ink
by accident on to a folio which is in act of being
consulted by M. Flamaran, of the Academy of
Moral and Political Sciences. M. Flamaran is a
very peppery old pedant, and he is so angry that
Fabian feels obliged to call upon him, at his
private house, with a further apology. The fond
reader will be prepared to learn that M. Flamaran,
who is a widower, lives with a very charming
daughter, and that she keeps house for him.

The course of true love then runs tolerably
smoothly. The virtuous youth without a profes-
sion timidly woos the modest maiden without a
mamma, and all would go well were it not for the
fierce old solicitor at Bourges. M. Flamaran will
give his daughter if Fabian will live in Paris ; but
the uncle will accept no niece unless the young

M. RENE BAZIN 277

couple will settle in the country. The eccentric
violence of M. Mouillard gives the author occasion
for a plentiful exercise of that conventional wit
about lawyers which never fails to amuse French
people, which animates the farces of the Renaissance,
and which finds its locus classicus in the one great
comedy of Racine. There follows a visit to Italy,
very gracefully described ; then a visit to Bourges,
very pathetical and proper ; and, of course, the
end of it all is that the uncle capitulates in snuff
and tears, and comes up to Paris to end his days
with Fabian and his admirable wife. A final con-
versation lifts the veil of the future, and we learn
that the tact and household virtues of the bride
are to make the whole of Fabian's career a honey-
moon.

The same smoothness of execution, the same
grace and adroitness of narrative, which render
Une Tache d^Encre as pleasant reading as any one
of Mr. W. E. Norris's best society stories, are dis-
covered in La Sarcelle Bleue, in which, moreover,
the element of humour is not absent. As a typical
interpreter of decent French sentiment, at points
where it is markedly in contrast with English
habits of thought, this is an interesting and even
an instructive novel. We are introduced, in a
country-house of Anjou, to an old officer, M.
Guillaume Maldonne, and his wife, and their young
daughter, Th^rdse. With these excellent people
lives Robert de K^r^dol, an old bachelor, also a
retired officer, the lifelong friend of Maldonne.
The latter is an enthusiastic ornithologist, and
keeper of the museum of natural history in the

278 FRENCH PROFILES

adjoining country-town. His ambition is to pos-
sess a complete collection of the birds of the
district, and the arrival of Robert de Keredol is
due to a letter inviting him to come to Anjou and
bring his gun. He has just been wounded in
Africa, and the invitation is opportune. He arrives,
and so prolongs his visit that he becomes a member
of the household : —

'< Robert recovered, and was soon in a fit state
to go out with his friend. And then there began
for both of them the most astonishing and the
most fascinating of Odysseys. Each felt some-
thing of the old life return to him ; adventure, the
emotion of the chase, the need to be on the alert,
shots that hit or missed, distant excursions, nights
beneath the stars. All private estates, princely
domains, closed parks, opened their gates to these
hunters of a new type. What mattered it to the
proprietor most jealous of his rights if a rare
woodpecker or butcher-bird was slaughtered ?
Welcomed everywhere, feted everywhere, they
ran from one end of the department to the other,
through the copses, the meadows, the vineyards,
the marshlands. Robert did not shoot, but he
had an extraordinary gift for divining that a bird
had passed, for discovering its traces or its nest,
for saying casually, ' Guillaume, I feel that there
are woodcock in the thickets under that clump of
birches ; the mist is violet, there is an odour of
dead leaves about it.' Or, when the silver Spring,
along the edges of the Loire, wakens all the little
world of clustered buds, he was wonderful in per-
ceiving, motionless on a point of the shore, a ruff

M. RENE BAZIN 279

with bristling plumage, or even, posed between
two alder catkins, the almost imperceptible blue
Hnnet."

It follows that this novel is the romance of
ornithology, and in its pleasantest pages we follow
the fugitive "humeur d'oiseau." To the local
collection at last but one treasure is lacking. The
Blue Teal (perhaps a relative of the Blue Linnet)
is known to be claimed among the avifauna of
Anjou, but Maldonne and K^r^dol can never come
within earshot of a specimen. Such is the state of
affairs when the book opens. Without perceiving
the fact, the exquisite child Th^rese Maldonne has
become a woman, and Robert de K^redol, who
thinks that his affection for her is still that of an
adopted uncle, wakens to the perception that he
desires her for his wife. Docile in her inexperi-
ence and in her maidenly reserve, Th^rese
accustoms her mind to this idea, but at the death-
bed of a village child, her prot6g6, she meets an
ardent and virtuous young gentleman of her own
age, Claude Revel, and there is love almost at first
sight between them.

In France, however, and especially in the pro-
vinces, the advances of Cupid must be made with
extreme decorum. Revel is not acquainted with
M. Maldonne, and how is he to be introduced ?
He is no zoologist, but he hears of the old col-
lector's passion for rare birds, and shooting a
squirrel, he presents himself with its corpse at the
Museum. He is admitted, indeed, but with some
scorn ; and is instructed, in a high tone, that a
squirrel is not a bird, nor even a rarity. He

28o FRENCH PROFILES

receives this information with a touching lowHness
of heart, and expresses a thirst to know more.
The zoologist pronounces him marvellously igno-
rant, indeed, but ripe for knowledge, and deigns
to take an interest in him. By degrees, as a rising
young ornithologist, he is introduced into the
family circle, where Ker^dol instantly conceives a
blind and rude jealousy of him. Th^rese, on the
contrary, is charmed, but he gets no closer to her
parents. It is explained to him at last by Th^rese
that his only chance is to present himself as a
suitor, with a specimen of the Blue Teal in his
hands. Then we follow him on cold mornings,
before daybreak, in a punt on the reedy reaches of
the Loire ; and the gods are good to him, he pots
a teal of the most cerulean blueness. Even as he
brings it in, K^redol, an incautious lago, snatches
it from him, and spoils it. But now the scales fall
from everybody's eyes ; Ker^dol writes a long
letter of farewell, and disappears, while Th^rese,
after some coy raptures, is ceremoniously betrothed
to the enchanted Claude Revel. It is not suggested
that he goes out any longer, searching for blue
teal, of a cold and misty morning. La Sarcelle
Bleue is a very charming story, only spoiled a little,
as it seems to me, by the unsportsmanlike violence
of Robert de K^redol's jealousy, which is hardly
in keeping with his reputation as a soldier and a
gentleman.

As he has advanced in experience, M. Rene
Bazin has shown an increasing ambition to deal
with larger problems than are involved in such
innocent love intrigues as those which we have

M. RENfi BAZIN 281

just briefly analysed. But in doing so he has,
with remarkable persistency, refrained from any
realisation of what are called the seamy sides of
life. In De Toute son Ame he attempted to deal
with the aspects of class-feeling in a large pro-
vincial town, and in doing so was as cautious as
Mrs, Gaskell or as Anthony Trollope. This story,
indeed, has a very curious resemblance in its plan
to a class of novel familiar to English readers
of half a century ago, and hardly known outside
England. One has a difficulty in persuading
oneself that it has not been written in direct
rivalry with such books as Mary Barton and John
Halifax, Gentleman. It is a deliberate effort to pre-
sent the struggle of industrial life, and the contrasts
of capital and labour, in a light purely pathetic and
sentimental. To readers who remember how this
class of theme is usually treated in France — with
so much more force and colour, perhaps, but with
a complete disregard of the illusions of the heart —
the mere effort is interesting. In the case of De
Toute son Ante the motive is superior to the execu-
tion. M. Bazin, greatly daring, does not wholly
succeed. The Latin temper is too strong for him,
the absence - of tradition betrays him ; in this
novel, ably constructed as it is, there is a certain
insipid tone of sentimentality such as is common
enough in English novels of the same class, but
such as the best masters amongst us have avoided.
True to his strenuous provinciality, M, Bazin
does not take Paris as his scene, but Nantes.
That city and the lucid stretches of the vast Loire,
now approaching the sea, offer subjects for a series

282 FRENCH PROFILES

of accurate and picturesque drop-scenes. The
plot of the book itself centres in a great factory,
in the ateliers and the usines of the rich firm of
Lemarie, one of the most wealthy and prosperous
industrials of Nantes. Here one of the artisans is
Uncle Eloi, a simple and honest labourer of the
better class, who has made himself the guardian
of his orphan nephew and niece, Antoine and
Henriette Madiot. These two young people are
two types — the former of the idle, sly, and vicious
ne'er-do-well, the latter of all that is most indus-
trious, high-minded and decently ambitious. But
Henriette is really the illegitimate daughter of the
proprietor of the works, M. Lemari6, and his son
Victor is attracted, he knows not why, by a
fraternal instinct, to the admirable Henriette.
She is loved by a countryman, the tall and hand-
some Etienne, reserved and silent. The works in
Nantes are burned down, by the spite of Antoine,
who has turned anarchist. Lemarie, the selfish
capitalist, is killed by a stroke of apoplexy on
hearing the news. His widow, a woman of deep
religion, gives the rest of her life to good works,
and is aided in her distributions by Henriette, who
finds so much to do for others, in the accumula-
tion of her labours for their welfare, that her own
happiness can find no place, and the silent Etienne
goes back to his country home in his barge. De
Toute son Ame is a well-constructed book, full of
noble thoughts ; and the sale of some twenty large
editions proves that it has appealed with success
to a wide public in France. But we are accus-
tomed in England, the home of sensibility, to

M. RENE BAZIN 283

guard, with humour and with a fear of the absurd,
against being swept away on the full tide of senti-
ment, and perhaps this sort of subject is better
treated by a Teutonic than by a Latin mind. At
all events, De Toute son Ante, the most English of
M. Bazin's novels, is likely to be the one least
appreciated in England.

A very characteristic specimen of M. Bazin's
deliberate rejection of all the conventional spices
with which the French love to heighten the flavour
of their fiction, is found in the novel called Madame
Corenttne, a sort of hymn to the glory of devoted
and unruffled matrimony. This tale opens in the
island of Jersey, where Madame Corentine L'H^r^ec
is discovered keeping a bric-a-brac shop in St.
Heliers, in company with her thirteen-year-old
daughter, Simone. Madame L'H^r^ec is living
separated from her husband, but M. Bazin would
not be true to his parti pris if he even suggested
that there had been any impropriety of moral con-
duct on either side. On the contrary, husband
and wife are excellent alike, only, unhappily, there
has been a fatal incompatibility of temper, exacer-
bated by the husband's vixen mother. Corentine
was a charming girl of Perros in Brittany ; M.
L'H^r^ec, a citizen of the neighbouring town of
Lannion. Now he remains in Lannion, and she
has taken refuge in Jersey ; no communication
passes between them. But the child Simone longs
to see her father, and she sends him a written
word by a Breton sailor. Old Capt. Guen,
Corentine's widowed father, writes to beg her to
come to Perros, where her younger sister, Marie

284 FRENCH PROFILES

Anne, has married the skipper of a fishing-vessel.
Pressed by Simone, the mother consents to go,
although dreading the approach to her husband.
She arrives to find her sister's husband, SulHan,
drowned at sea, and the father mourns over two
daughters, one of whom is a widow and the other
separated from her man. But Sullian comes back
to life, and through the instrumentality of little
Simone, the L'Hereecs are brought together, even
the wicked old mother-in-law getting her fangs
successively drawn. The curtain falls on a scene
of perfect happiness, a general " Bless ye, my
children " of melodrama.

There is a great deal of charming description in
this book, both the Jersey and the Lannion and
Perros scenes being painted in delightful colours.
A great part of the novel is occupied with the
pathos of the harvest of the sea, the agony of
Breton women who lose their husbands, brothers
and sons in the fisheries. Here M. Bazin comes
into direct competition with a greater magician,
with Pierre Loti in his exquisite and famous
Pecheur d'Islande. This is a comparison which is
inevitably made, and it is one which the younger
novelist, with all his merits, is not strong enough
to sustain. On the other hand, the central subject
of the novel, the development of character in the
frivolous and tactless but essentially good-hearted
Corentine, is very good, and Simone is one of the
best of M. Bazin's favourite "girlish shapes that
slip the bud in lines of unspoiled symmetry." It
is not possible for me to dwell here on Les Noellet,
a. long novel about provincial society in the

M. RENE BAZIN 285

Angevin district of the Vendue, nor on Humble
Amour, a series of six short stories, all (except
Les Trots Peines d'un Rossigno/, a fantastic dream
of Naples) dealing with Breton life, because I
must push on to a consideration of a much more
important work.

The most successful, and I think the best, of M.
Ren6 Bazin's books, is the latest. When La Terre
qui Meurt was published in 1899, there were not a
few critics who said that here at last was a really
great novel. There is no doubt, at all events, that
the novelist has found a subject worthy of the
highest talent. That subject briefly is the draining
of the village by the city. He takes, in La Terre
qui Meurt, the agricultural class, and shows how
the towns, with their offices, caf6s, railway stations
and shops, are tempting it away from the farms,
and how, under the pressure of imported produce,
the land itself, the ancient, free prerogative of
France, the inalienable and faithful soil, is dying
of a slow disease. To illustrate this heroic and
melancholy theme, M. Bazin takes the history of a
farm in that flat district occupying the north-west
of the department of the Vendue, between the
sandy shore of the Atlantic and the low hills of the
Bocage, which is called Le Marais. This is a
curious fragment of France, traversed by canals, a
little Holland in its endless horizons, broken up by
marshes and pools, burned hard in summer, floated
over by icy fogs in winter, a country which, from
time immemorial, has been proud of its great
farms, and where the traditions of the soil have
been more conservative than anywhere else. Of

286 FRENCH PROFILES

this tract of land, the famous Marais Vend^en,
with its occasional hill-town looking out from a
chalky island over a wild sea of corn and vines and
dwarf orchards to the veritable ocean far away in
the west, M. Bazin gives an enchanting picture. It
may be amusing to note that his landscape is as
exact as a guide-book, and that Sallertaine, Challans,
St. Gilles, and the rest are all real places. If the
reader should ever take the sea-baths at Sables
d'Olonne, he may drive northward and visit for him-
self "la terre qui meurt" in all its melancholy beauty.
The scene of the novel is an ancient farm,
called La Fromenti^re (even this, by the way, is
almost a real name, since it is the channel of
Fromentine which divides all this rich rnarsh-Iand
from the populous island of Noirmoutiers). This
farmstead and the fields around it have belonged
from time immemorial to the family of Lumineau.
Close by there is a chateau, which has always been
in the possession of one noble family, that of the
Marquis de la Fromenti^re. The aristocrats at the
castle have preserved a sort of feudal relation to
the farmers, as they to the labourers, the demo-
cratisation of society in France having but faintly
extended to these outlying provinces. But hard
times have come. All these people live on the
land, and the land can no longer support them.
The land cannot adapt itself to new methods, new
traditions ; it is the most unaltering thing in the
world, and when pressure comes from without and
from within, demanding new ideas, exciting new
ambitions, the land can neither resist nor change,
it can only die.

M. RENE BAZIN 287

Consequently, when La Terre qui Meurt opens,
the Marquis and his family have long ceased to
inhabit their chateau. They have passed away to
Paris, out of sight of the peasants who respected
and loved them, leaving the park untended and the
house empty. Toussaint Lumineau, the farmer,
who owns La Fromentiere, is a splendid specimen
of the old, heroic type of French farmer, a man
patriarchal in appearance, having in his blood,
scarcely altered by the passage of time, the pre-
judices, the faiths, and the persistencies of his
ancient race. No one of his progenitors has ever
dreamed of leaving the land. The sons have
cultivated it by the side of the fathers ; the
daughters have married into the families of neigh-
bouring farms, and have borne sons and daughters
for the eternal service of the soil. The land was
strong enough and rich enough ; it could support
them all. But now the virtue has passed out of
the land. It is being killed by trains from Russia
and by ships from America ; the phylloxera has
smitten its vineyards, the shifting of markets has
disturbed the easy distribution of its products.
And the land never adapts itself to circumstances,
never takes a new lease of life, never " turns over
a new life." If you trifle with its ancient, immut-
able conditions, there is but one thing that the land
can do — it can die.

The whole of La Terre qui Meurt shows how,
without violence or agony, this sad condition pro-
ceeds at La Fromentiere. Within the memory of
Toussaint Lumineau the farm has been prosperous
and wealthy. With a wife of the old, capable

288 FRENCH PROFILES

class, with three strong sons and two wholesome
daughters, all went well in the household. But,
gradually, one by one, the props are removed, and
the roof of his house rests more and more heavily
on the old man's own obstinate persistence. What
will happen when that, too, is removed ? For the
eldest son, a Hercules, has been lamed for life by
a waggon which passed over his legs ; the second
son and the elder daughter, bored to extinction by
the farm life, steal away, the one to a wretched
post at a railway station, the other to be servant
in a small restaurant, both infinitely preferring the
mean life in a country town to the splendid solitude
of the ancestral homestead. Toussaint is left with
his third son, Andre, a first-rate farmer, and with
his younger daughter, Rousille. In each of these
the genuine love of the soil survives.

But Andr6 has been a soldier in Africa, and has
tasted of the sweetness of the world. He pines for
society and a richer earth, more sunlight and a
wider chance ; and, at length, with a breaking
heart, not daring to confide in his proud old
father, he, too, steals away, not to abandon the
tillage of the earth, but to practise it on a far
broader scale in the fertile plains of the Argentine.
The eldest son, the cripple, dies, and the old
Toussaint is left, abandoned by all save his younger
daughter, in whom the heroic virtue of the soil
revives, and who becomes mistress of the farm and
the hope of the future. And happiness comes to
her, for Jean Nesmy, the labourer from the Bocage,
whom her father has despised, but whom she has
always loved, contrives to marry Rousille at the

M. RENfi BAZIN 289

end of the story. But the Marquis is by this time
completely ruined, and the estates are presently to
be sold. The farms, which have been in his family
for centuries, will pass into other hands. What
will be the result of this upon the life at La
Fromentiere ? That remains to be seen ; that
will be experienced, with all else that an economic
revolution brings in its wake, by the children of
Rousille.

A field in which M. Ren6 Bazin has been fer-
tile almost from the first has been the publication
in the " D6bats," and afterwards in book-form, of
short, picturesque studies of foreign landscape,
manners and accomplishment. He began with A
fAventure, a volume of sketches of modern Italian
life, which he expanded a few years later in Les
Italiens dAujourd'hui. Perhaps the best of all these
volumes is that called Sicile, a record of a tour
along the shores of the Mediterranean, to Malta,
through the length and breadth of Sicily, north-
ward along Calabria and so to Naples. In no book
of M. Bazin's are his lucid, cheerful philosophy and
his power of eager observation more eminently
illustrated than in Sicile. A tour which he made
in Spain during the months of September and
October, 1894, was recorded in a volume entitled
Terre cCEspagne. Of late he has expended the same
qualities of sight and style on the country parts of
France, the western portion of which he knows
with the closest intimacy. He has collected these
impressions — sketches, short tales, imaginary con-
versations— in two volumes. En Province, 1896,
and Croquis de France, 1899. In 1898 he accom-

T

290 FRENCH PROFILES

panied, or rather pursued, the Emperor of Germany
on his famous journey to Jerusalem, and we have
the result in Croquis d'Orient. In short, M. Bazin,
who has undertaken all these excursions in the
interests of the great newspaper with which he is
identified, is at the present moment one of the
most active literary travellers in France, and his
records have exactly the same discreet, safe and
conciliatory qualities which mark his novels.
Wherever M. Bazin is, and whatever he writes,
he is always eminently sage.

We return to the point from which we started.
Whatever honours the future may have in store
for the author of La Terre qui Meurty it is not to be
believed that he will ever develop into an author
dangerous to morals. His stories and sketches
might have been read, had chronology permitted,
by Mrs. Barbauld to Miss Hannah More. Mrs.
Chapone, so difficult to satisfy, would have rejoiced
to see them in the hands of those cloistered virgins,
her long-suffering daughters. And there is not, to
my knowledge, one other contemporary French
author of the imagination who could endure that
stringent test. M. Bazin's novels appeal to persons
of a distinctly valetudinarian moral digestion.
With all this, they are not dull, or tiresome, or
priggish. They preach no sermon, except a broad
and wholesome amiability ; they are possessed by
no provoking propaganda of virtue. Simply, M.
Bazin sees the beauty of domestic life in France,
is fascinated by the charm of the national gaiety
and courtesy, and does not attempt to look below
the surface.

M. RENfi BAZIN 291

We may find something to praise, as well as
perhaps something to smile at, in this chaste and sur-
prising optimism. In a very old-fashioned book,
that nobody reads now, Alfred de Musset's Confes-
sion dun Enfant du Steele, there is a phrase which
curiously prefigures the ordinary French novelist
of to-day. " Voyez," says the hero of that work,
" voyez comme ils parlent de tout : toujours les
termes les plus crus, les plus grossiers, les plus
abjects ; ceux-la seulement leur paraissent vrais ;
tout le reste n'est que parade, convention et pr6-
jug6s. Qu'ils racontent une anecdote, qu'ils ren-
dent compte de ce qu'ils ont 6prouv6, — toujours
le mot sale et physique, toujours la lettre, tou-
jours la mort." What an exact prediction ; and
it is to the honour of M. Bazin that all the faults
of judgment and proportion which are here so
vigorously stigmatised are avoided by his pure and
comfortable talent.

1901.

M. HENRI DE REGNIER

Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins

The determination of the younger French writers
to enlarge and develop the resources of their
national poetry is a feature of to-day, far too
persistent and general to be ignored. Until a
dozen years ago, the severely artificial prosody
accepted in France seemed to be one of the
literary phenomena of Europe the most securely
protected from possible change. The earliest
proposals and experiments in fresh directions
were laughed at, and often not undeservedly.
No one outside the fray can seriously admit that
any one of the early francs-tireurs of symbolism
made a perfectly successful fight. But the num-
ber of these volunteers, and their eagerness, and
their intense determination to try all possible
doors of egress from their too severe palace of
traditional verse, do at last impress the observer
with a sense of the importance of the instinct
which drives them to these eccentric manifesta-
tions. Renan said of the early Decadents that
they were a set of babies, sucking their thumbs.
But these people are getting bald, and have grey
beards, and still they suck their thumbs. There
must be something more in the whole thing
than met the eye of the philosopher. When the

M. HENRI DE R^GNIER 293

entire poetic youth of a country such as France
is observed raking the dust-heaps, it is probable
that pearls are to be discovered.

It cannot but be admitted that M. Henri de
R^gnier has discovered a large one, if it seems
to be a little clouded, and perhaps a little flawed.
Indeed, of the multitude of experiment-makers and
theorists, he comes nearest (it seems to me) to
presenting a definitely evolved talent, lifted out
of the merely tentative order. He stands, at this
juncture, half-way between the Parnassians and
those of the symbolists who are least violent in
their excesses. If we approach M. de R^gnier
from the old-fashioned camp, his work may seem
bewildering enough, but if we reach it from the
other side — say, from M. Rene Ghil or from
M. Yvanho6 Rambosson — it appears to be quite
organic and intelligible. Here at least is a writer
with something audible to communicate, with a
coherent manner of saying it, and with a definite
style. A year or two ago, the publication of his
Poemes Anciens et Romanesques raised M. de R^g-
nier, to my mind, a head and shoulders above
his fellows. That impression is certainly streng-
thened by Les Jetix Rustiques et Divins, a. volume full
of graceful and beautiful verses. Alone, among
the multitude of young experimenters, M. de
R^gnier seems to possess the classical spirit ; he
is a genuine artist, of pure and strenuous vision.
For years and years, my eloquent and mysterious
friend, M. St6phane Mallarm^, has been talking
about verse to the youth of Paris. The main
result of all those abstruse discourses has been

294 FRENCH PROFILES

(so it seems to me) the production of M. Henri
de R^gnier. He is the soHtary swallow that
makes the summer for which M. Mallarm6 has
been so passionately imploring the gods.

M. Henri de R^gnier was born at Honfleur in
1864, and about 1885 became dimly perceptible
to the enthusiastic by his contributions to those
little revues, self-sacrificing tributes to the Muses,
which have formed such a pathetic and yet such
an encouraging feature of recent French literature.
He collected these scattered verses in tiny and
semi-private pamphlets of poetry, but it was not
until 1894 that he began to attract general atten-
tion and that opposition which is the compliment
time pays to strength. It was in that year that
M. de R^gnier published Ardthuse, in which were
discovered such poems as Peroratson : —

" O lac pur, j'ai jete mes flutes dans tes eaux,

Que quelque autre, h son tour, les retrouve, roseaux,
Sur le bord pastoral oil leurs tiges sont ndes
Et vertes dans I'Avril d'une plus belle Annee !
Que toute la foret referme son automne
Mysterieux sur le lac pale ou j'abandonne
Mes flfites de jadis mortes au fond des eaux.
Le vent passe avec des feuilles et des oiseaux
Au-dessus du bois jaune et s'en va vers la Mer ;
Et je veux que ton icre ecume, 6 flot amer,
Argente mes cheveux et fleurisse ma joue ;
Et je veux, debout dans I'aurore, sur la proue,
Saisir le vent qui vibre aux cordes de la lyre,
Et voir, aupr^s des Sir^nes qui les attirent
A I'dcueil ou sans lui nous naufragerions,
Le Dauphin serviable aux calmes Arions."

But the vogue of his melancholy and metaphysical
poetry, with its alabastrine purity, its sumptuous

M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 295

richness, began when the poet finally addressed the
world at large in two collections of lyrical verse,
entitled Poentes Anciens et Romanesques (1896) and
Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins (1897), when it was
admitted, even by those who are the most jealous
guardians of the tradition in France, that M. Henri
de R^gnier represented a power which must be
taken for the future into serious consideration.

It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves, in
reading Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins^ of the Mallar-
mean principle that poetry should suggest and not
express, that a series of harmonious hints should
produce the effect of direct clear statement. In
the opposite class, no better example can be
suggested than the sonnets of M. de Heredia,
which are as transparent as sapphires or topazes,
and as hard. But if M. de Regnier treats the
same class of subject as M. de Heredia (and he
often does) the result is totally different. He pro-
duces an opal, something clouded, soft in tone, and
complex, made of conflicting shades and fugitive
lights. In the volume before us we have a long
poem on the subject of Arethusa, the nymph who
haunted that Ortygian well where, when the flutes
of the shepherds were silent, the sirens came to
quench their thirst. We have been so long
habituated, in England by the manner of Keats
and Tennyson, in France by the tradition 6i the
Parnassians, to more or less definite and ex-
haustive portraiture, that at first we read this
poetry of M. de Regnier without receiving any
impression. All the rhythms are melodious, all
the diction dignified and pure, all the images

296 FRENCH PROFILES

appropriate, but, until it has been carefully re-read,
the poem seems to say nothing. It leaves at first
no imprint on the mind ; it merely bewilders and
taunts the attention.

It is difficult to find a complete piece short
enough for quotation which shall yet do no in-
justice to the methods of M. de R6gnier ; but In-
vocation Memoriale may serve our purpose : —

" La main en vous touchant se crispe et se contracte
Aux veines de I'onyx et aux nceuds de I'agate,
Vases nus que I'amour en cendre a faits des umes !
O coupes tristes que je soup^se, une k une,
Sans sourire aux beautes des socles et des anses !
O passe longuement ou je goute en silence
Des poisons, des memoires acres ou le philtre
Qu'avec le souvenir encor I'espoir infiltre
Goutte k goutte puise k d'ameres fontaines ;
Et, ne voyant que lui et elles dans moi-meme,
Je regarde, la-bas, par les fenetres hautes,
L'ombre d'un cypres noir s'allonger sur les roses."

The studied eccentricity of the rhymes may be
passed over ; if fontaines and meme, hautes and
roses, satisfy a French ear, it is no business of an
English critic to comment on it. But the dimness
of the sense of this poem is a feature which we
may discuss. At first reading, perhaps, we shall
find that the words have left no mark behind
them whatever. Read them again and yet again,
and a certain harmonious impression of liquid
poetic beauty will disengage itself, something
more in keeping with the effect on the mind of
the Ode to a Grecian Urn, or the close of the
Scholar Gypsy, than of the purely Franco-Hel-
lenic poetry of Andr6 Ch^nier or of Leconte

M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 297

de Lisle. Throughout this volume what is pre-
sented is a faint tapestry rather than a picture
— dim choirs of brown fauns or cream-white
nymphs dancing in faint, mysterious forests,
autumnal foliage sighing over intangible stretches
of winding, flashing river ; Pan listening, the pale
Sirens singing, Autumn stumbling on under the
burden of the Hours, thyrsus and caduceus flung
by unseen deities on the velvet of the shaven
lawn — everywhere the shadow of poetry, not its
substance, the suggestion of the imaginative act in
a state of suspended intelligence. Nor can beauty
be denied to the strange product, nor to the poet
his proud boast of the sanction of Pegasus : —

" J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or
Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor,
Verdoyant k jamais hier comme aujourd'hui,
Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit."
1896.

La Cite des Eaux

It may be conceded that the publication of a
new volume by M. Henri de R^gnier is, for the
moment, the event most looked forward to in the
poetical world of France. The great poets of an
elder generation, though three or four of them
survive, very rarely present anything novel to
their admirers, and of the active and numerous
body of younger writers there is no one, certainly
among those who are purely French by birth,
whose work offers so little to the doubter and the
detractor as that of M. de R^gnier. He has been
before the public for sixteen or seventeen years ;

298 FRENCH PROFILES

his verse is learned, copious, varied and always
distinguished. Like all the younger poets of
France, he has posed as a revolutionary, and
has adopted a new system of aesthetics, and in
particular an emancipated prosody. But he has
carried his reforms to no absurd excess ; he has
kept in touch with the tradition, and he has never
demanded more liberty than he required to give
ease to the movements of his genius. By the
side of the fanatics of the new schools he has often
seemed conservative and sometimes almost re-
actionary. He has always had too much to say
and too great a joy in saying it to be forever
fidgeting about his apparatus.

M. Henri de Regnier is much nearer in genius
to the Parnassians than any other of his immediate
contemporaries. If he had been born a quarter
of a century earlier, doubtless he would be a
Parnassian. In his earliest verses he showed him-
self a disciple of M. Sully-Prudhomme. But that
was a purely imitative strain, it would seem, since
in the developed writing of M. de Regnier there is
none of the intimate analysis of feeling and the
close philosophic observation which characterise
the exquisite author of Les Vatnes Tendresses. On
the other hand, in M. de Heredia we have a Par-
nassian whose objective genius is closely allied, on
several sides, to that of the younger poet. The
difference is largely one of texture ; the effects of
M. de Heredia are metallic, those of M. de Regnier
supple and silken. A certain hardness of outline,
which impairs for some readers the brilliant
enamel or bronze of Les Trophees is exchanged
in Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins and Les Medailles

M. HENRI DE R^GNIER 299

d'Argile for a softer line, drowned in a more
delicate atmosphere. This does not prevent M.
de Heredia and M. de R^gnier from being the
poets in whom the old and the new school take
hands, and in whom the historical transition may
be most advantageously studied.

La Cite des Eaux emphasises the conservative
rather than the revolutionary tendencies of the
writer. In two closely related directions, indeed,
it shows a reaction against previous movements
made by M. de R^gnier somewhat to the discom-
fort of his readers. In the poetry he was writing
five or six years ago, he seemed to be com-
pletely subdued by two enchanting but extremely
dangerous sirens of style, allegory and symbol.
Some of the numbers in Les Jeux Rustiques ei Divins
were highly melodious, indeed, and full of colour,
but so allusive and remote, so determined always
to indicate and never to express, so unintelligible,
in short, and so vaporous, that the pleasure of the
reader was very seriously interfered with. The
fascinating and perilous precepts of Mallarm^
were here seen extravagantly at work. If M. de
R^gnier had persisted in pushing further and
further along this nebulous path, we will not
venture to say that he would soon have lost him-
self, but he would most assuredly have begun to
lose his admirers. We are heartily glad that in
La Cite des Eaux he has seen fit to return to a
country where the air is more lucid, and where
men are no longer seen through the vitreous
gloom as trees walking.

M. de R6gnier builds his rhyme with deep and
glowing colour. In this he is more like Keats

300 FRENCH PROFILES

than any other recent poet. Whether in the
mysterious eclogues of antiquity which it used to
please him to compose, or in the simpler and
clearer pieces of to-day, he is always a follower
of dreams. If the French poets were distinguished
by flowers, as their Greek predecessors were, the
brows of M. Henri de Regnier might be bound
with newly-opened blossoms of the pomegranate,
like those of Menecrates in the garland of Meleager.
His classical pictures used to be extraordinarily
gorgeous, like those in Keats's Endymion, purpureal
and over-ripe, hanging in glutinous succession
from the sugared stalk of the rhyme. They are
now more strictly chastened, but they have not
lost their dreamy splendour.

The desolation of the most beautiful of Royal
gardens has attracted more and more frequently
of late the curiosity of men of imagination. It in-
spired this year the fantastic and elegant romance
of M. Marcel Batilliat, Versailles-aux-Fantomes.
But it has found no more exquisite rendering
than the cycle of sonnets which gives its name to
the volume before us. M. de Regnier wanders
through the pavilions and across the terraces of
Versailles, and everywhere he studies the effect
of its mossed and melancholy waters. He be-
comes hypnotised at last, and the very enclosures
of turf take the form of pools to his eyes : —

" Le gazon toujours vert ressemble au bassin glauque.
C'est le meme carre de verdure equivoque,
Dont le marbre ou le buis encadrent I'herbe ou I'eau :
Et dans I'eau smaragdine et I'herbe d'emeraude,
Regarde, tour k tour, errer en ors rivaux
La jaune feuille morte et la cyprin qui rode."

M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 301

The vast and monumental garden stretches itself
before us in these sonnets, with its invariable
alleys of cypress and box, its porcelain dolphins,
its roses floating across the wasted marble of its
statues, the strange autumnal odour of its bos-
cages and its labyrinths, and, above all, still
regnant, the majestic and monotonous fafade of
its incomparable palace.

For English readers the matchless choruses of
Empedocles said the final word in poetry about
Marsyas, exactly fifty years ago. M. de R^gnier,
who has probably never read Matthew Arnold,
has taken a singularly parallel view of the story in
Le Sang de Marsyas, where the similarity is increased
by the fact that the French poet adopts a form of
free verse very closely analogous to that used by
Arnold in The Strayed Reveller and elsewhere.
The spirited odes, called La Course and Pan, have
the same form and something of the same Arnoldian
dignity. The section entitled Inscriptions lues au
Soir Tomhant — especially those lines which are
dedicated to " Le Centaure Bless6 " — might have
been signed, in his moments of most Hellenic
expansion, by Landor. It is not an accident that
we are so frequently reminded, in reading M. de
R^gnier's poems, of the English masters, since he
is a prominent example of that slender strain
which runs through French verse from Ronsard
to Andr6 Ch^nier, and on through Alfred de
Vigny, where the Greek spirit takes forms of
expression which are really much more English
than Latin in their character. Of the purely
lyrical section of this charming volume it is

302 FRENCH PROFILES

difficult to give an impression witliout extensive
quotation. We must confine ourselves to a single
specimen, entitled La Lune Jaune : —

" Ce long jour a fini par une lune jaune

Qui monte mollement entre les peupliers,
Tandis que se repand parmi I'air qu'elle embaume
L'odeur de I'eau qui dort entre les joncs mouilles.

Savions-nous, quand, tous deux^ sous le soleil torride,
Foulions la terre rouge et le chaume blessant,

Savions-nous, quand nos pieds sur les sables arides
Laissaient leurs pas empreints comme des pas de sang,

Savions-nous, quand I'amour brulait sa haute flamme
En nos coeurs d^chirds d'un tourment sans espoir,

Savions-nous, quand mourait le feu dont nous brulames.
Que sa cendre serait si douce k notre soir,

Et que cet dpre jour qui s'acheve et qu'embaume
Une odeur d'eau qui songe entre les joncs mouilles

Finirait mollement par cette lune jaune

Qui monte et s'arrondit entre les peupliers ? "

1903.

Les Vacances d'un Jeune Homme Sage

M. Henri de R6gnier is one of the most dis-
tinguished living poets of France. But in writing
Les Vacances dun Jeune Homme Sage he has attacked
a new province of literature, and has taken it by
storm. M. de R^gnier has written several novels, —
La Double Maitresse and Le Bon Plaisir in particular
— which have aimed at reconstructing past eras of
society. These books have been remarkable for
their ethical insouciance, their rough and cynical
disregard of prejudice. One has formed the im-
pression that M. Henri de R^gnier's ambition was
to be a poet like Keats grafted upon a novelist

M. HENRI DE RfiGNIER 303

like Smollett. And the novels, with all their
vigour, were not quite what we sympathise with
in this country. Curiously enough, without giv-
ing us the least warning, M. de Regnier has written,
in a mood of pure laughter, a refined little picture
of real life in a provincial town of to-day. He is
deliciously sympathetic at last.

A boy (I beg his pardon — a young man) of
sixteen, Georges Dolonne, has the misfortune to
be plucked for his bachelor's degree at the Sor-
bonne. This is due partly to his shyness, and
partly to his pre-occupations, for he is very far
indeed from being stupid. It is rather a serious
check, however, but his mother in her clemency
carries him away to the country for the holidays,
to stay with his great-uncle and aunt at the little
town of Rivray-sur-Vince. The story is simply a
plain account of how Georges spent this vacation,
but in the course of it every delightful eccentricity
of the population of Rivray is laid bare. I can
imagine no pleasanter figures to spend a few hours
with than M. de la Boulerie, a decayed old noble-
man with a mania for heraldry ; or comfortable
obese Madame de la Boulerie, whose rich Avignon
accent comes out in moments of excitement ; or
Mademoiselle Duplan, the drawing-mistress, who
wears a huge hat with feathers in the depths of her
own home and dashes out every few moments to
drive the boys from her espaliers ; or M. de la
Vigneraie, coarse and subtle, with his loud voice and
his pinchbeck nobility and his domestic subterfuges.

Every one will laugh with these inhabitants of
Rivray-sur-Vince, but English readers must be a

304 FRENCH PROFILES

little philosophical in order to appreciate young
Master Georges. It is not a mere display of
Podsnappery to find him curiously exotic to our
ideas of decorous youth. But we ought to take
a pleasure in him as a psychological specimen,
although so very unlike those which flourish in
our own collections. There is no cricket, of
course, at Rivray-sur-Vince, and no base-ball ;
Georges neither rides, nor shoots, nor even fishes.
He smokes quantities of little cigarettes, and he
takes walks, not too far nor too fast, and always
on the shady side. In fact, the notion of physical
exercise does not enter into his head. Notwith-
standing this, Georges Dolonne is not a milksop
or a muff ; he is simply a young French gentle-
man in an immature condition. Mentally he is
much more alert, much more adroit and astute,
than an English boy in his seventeenth year would
be, and the extremely amusing part of the book —
that part, indeed, where it rises to a remarkable
originality — is where the contrast is silently drawn
between what his relations and friends believe
Georges to be and insist upon his being, and the
very wide-awake young person that he really is.
The prominent place which the appearance and
company of women take in the interests of a
young Frenchman at an age when the English
youth has scarcely awakened to the existence of
an ornamental side to sex is exemplified very
acutely, but with a charming reserve, in Les
Vacances d'unjeune Homme sage.

1904.

FOUR POETS

STEPHANE MALLARME

In the midst of the violent incidents which
occupied public attention during the month of
September 1898 the passing of a curious figure
in the literary life of France was almost un-
observed. St^phane Mallarm^ died on the 9th at
his cottage of Bichenic, near Vulaine-sur-Seine,
after a short illness. He was still in the fulness
of life, having been born i8th March, 1842, but he
had long seemed fragile. Five or six years ago,
and at a quieter time, the death of Mallarm6
would have been a newspaper " event," for in the
early nineties his disciples managed to awaken
around his name and his very contemplative
person an astonishing amount of curiosity. This
culminated in and was partly assuaged by the
publication in 1893 of his Vers et Prose, with a
dreamy portrait, a lithograph of great beauty, by
Mr. Whistler. Then Mallarm6 had to take his
place among things seen and known ; his works
were no longer arcane ; people had read He'rodiade,
and their reason had survived the test. In France,
where sensations pass so quickly, Mallarm^ has
already long been taken for granted.

It was part of his resolute oddity to call himself
by the sonorous name of St^phane, but I have

305 U

3o6 FRENCH PROFILES

been assured that his god-parents gave him the
humbler one of Etienne. He was descended
from a series, uninterrupted both on the father's
and on the mother's side, of officials connected
with the parochial and communal registers, and
Mallarm6 was the quite-unexpected flower of this
sober vegetation. He was to have been a clerk
himself, but he escaped to England about 1862,
and returned to Paris only to become what he
remained, professionally, for the remainder of his
life — a teacher of the English language. While
he was with us he learned to cultivate a passion
for boating ; and in the very quiet, unambitious
life of his later years to steal away to his yole
d'acajou and lose himself, in dreaming, on one of
the tributaries of the Seine was his favourite,
almost his only, escapade. In 1874 or 1875 he
was in London, and then my acquaintance with
him began. I have a vision of him now, the little,
brown, gentle person, trotting about in Blooms-
bury with an elephant folio under his arm, trying
to find Mr. Swinburne by the unassisted light of
instinct.

This famous folio contained Edgar Poe's Raven,
translated by Mallarm6 and illustrated in the most
intimidating style by Manet, who was then still an
acquired taste. We should to-day admire these
illustrations, no doubt, very much ; I am afraid
that in 1875, in perfidious Albion, they awakened
among the few who saw them undying mirth.
Mallarm^'s main design in those days was to
translate the poems of Poe, urged to it, I think,
by a dictum of Baudelaire's, that such a translation

STfiPHANE MALLARME 307

" peut etre un reve caressant, mais ne peut etre
qu'un r^ve." Mallarm^ reduced it to reality, and no
one has ever denied that his version of Poe's poems
(1888) is as admirably successful as it must have
been difficult of performance. In 1875 the Par-
nasse Contemporain rejected Mallarm^'s first impor-
tant poem, L! Apres-Midi (fun Faune^ and his revolt
against the Parnassian theories began. In 1876
he suddenly braved opinion by two " couriers of
the Decadence," one the Faune, in quarto, the
other a reprint of Beckford's Vaihek, with a pre-
face, an octavo in vellum. Fortunate the biblio-
phil of to-day who possesses these treasures, which
were received in Paris with nothing but ridicule
and are now sought after like rubies.

Extraordinary persistence in an idea, and extra-
ordinary patience under external discouragement,
these were eminent characteristics of Mallarm6.
He was not understood. Well, he would wait a
little longer. He waited, in fact, some seventeen
years before he admitted an ungrateful public again
to an examination of his specimens. Meanwhile,
in several highly eccentric forms, the initiated had
been allowed to buy Pages from his works in
prose and verse, at high prices, in most limited
issues. Then, in 1893, there was a burst of
celebrity and perhaps of disenchantment. When
the tom-toms and the conchs are silent, and the
Veiled Prophet is revealed at last, there is always
some frivolous person who is disappointed at the
revelation. Perhaps Mallarm6 was not quite so
thrilling when his poems could be read by every-
body as when they could only be gazed at through

3o8 FRENCH PROFILES

the glass bookcase doors of wealthy amateurs.
But still, if everybody could now read them, not
everybody could understand them. In 1894 the
amiable poet came over here, and delivered at
Oxford and at Cambridge, cites savanies, an ad-
dress of the densest Cimmerian darkness on Music
and Letters. In 1897 appeared a collection of
essays in prose, called Divagations. The diction-
aries will tell the rest of the story.

It seems quite impossible to conjecture what
posterity will think of the poetry of St^phane
Mallarm6. It is not of the class which rebuffs
contemporary sympathy by its sentiments or its
subjects ; the difficulty of Mallarme consists
entirely in his use of language. He was allied
with, or was taken as a master by, the young men
who have broken up and tried to remodel the
prosody of France. In popular estimation he
came to be identified with them, but in error ;
there are no vers libres in Mallarme. He was
resolutely misapprehended, and perhaps, in his
quiet way, he courted misapprehension. But if
we examine very carefully in what his eccentricity
(or his originality) consisted, we shall find it all
resolving itself into a question of language. He
thought that the vaunted precision and lucidity of
French style, whether in prose or verse, was
degrading the national literature ; that poetry mus-
preserve, or must conquer, an embroidered gart
ment to distinguish her from the daily newspaper.
He thought the best ways of doing this were,
firstly, to divert the mind of the reader from the
obvious and beaten paths of thought, and secondly

STfiPHANE MALLARMfi 309

to arrange in a decorative or melodic scheme
words chosen or reverted to for their peculiar
dignity and beauty.

It was strange that Mallarm6 never saw, or
never chose to recognise, that he was attempting
the impossible. He went on giving us intima-
tions of what he meant, never the thing itself.
His published verses are mere fallings from him,
vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving
about in worlds not realised. They are fragments
of a very singular and complicated system which
the author never carried into existence. Mallarm6
has left no " works," and, although he was always
hinting of the Work, it was never written. Even
his Virgilian Faune, even his Ovidian He'rodiade, are
merely suggestions of the solid Latin splendour
with which he might have carried out a design
he did no more than indicate. He was a
wonderful dreamer, exquisite in his intuitions
and aspirations, but with as little creative power
as has ever been linked with such shining con-
victions.

What effect will the life and death of Mallarm6
have upon poetry in France ? Must it not be
hoped that his influence may prove rather tem-
porary and transitional than lasting ? He did
excellent peripatetic service. His conversation and
example preserved alight, through a rather prosy
time, the lamp of poetic enthusiasm ; he was a
glowing ember. But, on the other hand, who
can deny that his theories and practice, ill-
comprehended as they were, provoked a great
display of affectation and insincerity ? Prose pour

3IO FRENCH PROFILES

les Esseintes is a very curious and interesting com-
position ; but it is not a good model for the young.
Mallarmd himself, so lucid a spirit if so obscure a
writer, was well aware of this. People, he found,
were cocksure of what his poems meant when the
interpretation was only dawning upon himself after
a generation of study. A youthful admirer once
told him, it is said, that he entirely understood the
meaning of one of his most cryptic publications.
" What a genius you have ! " replied Mallarm6,
with his gentle smile ; " at the age of twenty you
have discovered in a week what has baffled me for
thirty years."

Some of the eulogies on this poor, charming
Mallarm^, with his intense and frustrated aspira-
tion after the perfect manner, have been a cruel
satire on his prestige. From one of these mystifi-
cations I learn that " with the accustomed Parian
(flesh of death), Mallarm6 associated grafts of life
unforeseen, eyes of emerald or of sapphire, hair
of gold or silver, smiles of ivory," and that these
statues " failed to fidget on their glued-down feet,
because to the brutal chisel had succeeded a proud
and delicate shiver glimmering through the infinite,
perceptible to the initiated alone, like the august
nibbling-away of Beauty by a white mouse ! " So
far as Mallarm^ and his theories are responsible
for writing such as this — and for the last fifteen
years his name has been made the centre for a
prodigious amount of the like clotted nonsense —
even those who loved and respected the man most
cannot sincerely wish that his influence should
continue.

STfiPHANE MALLARMfi 311

Mallarm^ has been employed as a synonym for
darkness, but he did not choose this as a distinc-
tion. He was not like Donne, who, when Edward
Herbert had been extremely crabbed in an elegy
on Prince Henry, wrote one himself to " match,"
as Ben Jonson tells us, Herbert "in obscureness."
In a letter to myself, some years ago, Mallarm^
protested with evident sincerity against the charge
of being Lycophrontic : " excepte par maladresse
ou gaucherie je ne suis pas obscur." Yet where
is obscurity to be found if not in Don du Poeme?
What is dense if the light flows freely through
Prose pour des Esseintes ? Some of his alterations of
his own text betray the fact that he treated words
as musical notation, that he was far more inti-
mately affected by their euphonic interrelation
than by their meaning in logical sequence. In
my own copy of Les Fenfires, he has altered in
MS. the line

^' Que dore la main chaste de I'lnfini "

to

" Que dore le matin chaste de I'lnfini."

Whether the Infinite had a Hand or a Morning
was purely a question of euphony. So, what had
long appeared as " mon exotique soin " became
" mon unique soin." In short, Mallarm^ used
words, not as descriptive, but as suggestive means
of communication between the writer and the
reader, and the object of a poem of his was
not to define what the poet was thinking about,
but to force the listener to think about it by

312 FRENCH PROFILES

blocking up all routes of impression save that
which led to the desired and indicated bourne.

He was a very delightful man, whom his friends
deeply regret. He was a particularly lively talker,
and in his conversation, which was marked by good
sense no less than by a singular delicacy of percep-
tion, there was no trace of the wilful perversity of
his written style. He had a strong sense of hum-
our, and no one will ever know, perhaps, how far
a waggish love of mystification entered into his
theories and his experiments. He was very much
amused when Verlaine said of him that he "con-
sid^ra la clart6 comme une grace secondaire." It
certainly was not the grace he sought for first.
We may, perhaps, be permitted to think that he
had no such profoundly novel view of nature or
of man as justified procedures so violent as those
which he introduced. But, when we were able
to comprehend him, we perceived an exquisite
fancy, great refinement of feeling and an attitude
towards life which was uniformly and sensitively
poetical. Is it not to be supposed that when he
could no longer be understood, when we lost
him in the blaze of language, he was really more
delightful than ever, if only our gross senses could
have followed him ?

M. EMILE VERHAEREN

Among those poets who have employed the
French tongue with most success in recent years,
it is curious that the two whose claims to distinc-

M. EMILE VERHAEREN 313

tion are least open to discussion should be, not
Frenchmen at all, but Flemings of pure race. The
work of M. Verhaeren has not the amusing quality
which has given a universal significance to the
dramas and treatises of M. Maeterlinck, and he
has remained obstinately faithful to the less popular
medium of verse. In our English sense of the
term, M. Maeterlinck is a poet only upon occasion,
while M. Verhaeren never appears without his
singing-robes about him. By dint of a remark-
able persistency in presenting his talent character-
istically to his readers, M. Verhaeren has risen
slowly but steadily to a very high eminence. He
has out-lived the impression, which prevailed at
first, of ugliness, of squalor, of a preoccupation
with themes and aspects radically antipoetical.
He has conquered us deliberately, book by book.
He has proved that genius is its own best judge
of what is a good "subject," and imperceptibly
we have learned to appreciate and respect him.
He is true to himself, quite indefatigable, and we
are beginning to realise at last that he is one of
the very small group of really great poets born
in Europe since 1850.

He has a local, besides his universal, claim on
our respect, since he is the pioneer and captain
of the brilliant neo-Belgian school which is now
so active and so prominent. His first book of
verses, Les Flamandes, of 1883, is curious to look
back upon. It was thrust upon a perfectly hostile
world of Brussels, a world with its eyes loyally
fixed on Paris. It had just the same harsh,
austere aspect which M. Verhaeren's poetry has

314 FRENCH PROFILES

preserved ever since. It was utterly unlike what
came from Paris then, dear little amber-scented
books of polished sonnets, bound in vellum, with
Lemerre's familiar piocheur on the cover. It
was the first shoot of a new thing, of Franco-
Flemish imaginative literature. M. Verhaeren
cared nothing for the neglect of the critics ; he
went on putting forth successive little volumes,
no less thorny, no less smelling of the dykes and
dunes — Les Moines in 1886, Les Soirs in 1887,
Les Debacles in 1888. It was not until 1889 that
M. Maeterlinck came to his support with a first
book, the Serres Chaudes. Meanwhile, the genius
of M. Verhaeren, the product of an individuality
of extraordinary strength, pressed steadily forward.
He has gained in suppleness and skill since then,
but all that distinguishes him from other writers,
all that is himself, is to be found in these earliest
pamphlets of gaunt, realistic poetry.

The following dismal impression of London is
highly characteristic of the early Verhaeren of
Les Soirs : —

" Et ce Londres de fonte et de bronze, mon 4me,
Oil des plaques de fer claquent sous les hangars,

Ou des voiles s'en vont, sans Notre Dame
Pour etoile, s'en vont, Ik-bas, vers les hasards.

Gares de suies et de fumee, ou du gaz pleure

Ses spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'dclair,

Oil des b^tes d'ennui baillent k I'heure,
Dolente immensdment, qui tinte k Westminster.

Et ces quais infinis de lanternes fatales,

Parques dont les fuseaux plongent aux profondeurs,

Et ces marins noyes, sous des p^tales
De fleurs de boue oil la flamme met des lueurs.

M. EMILE VERHAEREN 315

Et ces chales et ces gestes de femmes soules,
Et ces alcools en lettres d'or jusques au toit,

Et tout k coup la mort parmi ces foules —
O men ime du soir, ce Londres noir qui trone en toi ! "

A hundred years ago we possessed in English
literature a writer very curiously parallel to M.
Verhaeren, who probably never heard of him. I
do not know whether any one has pointed out the
similarity between Crabbe and the Belgian poet of
our day. It is, however, very striking when we
once come to think of it, and it embraces subject-
matter, attitude to life and art, and even such
closer matters as diction and versification. The
situation of Crabbe, in relation to the old school
of the eighteenth century on the one hand and to
the romantic school on the other,^is closely repeated
by that of M. Verhaeren to his elders and his
juniors. If Byron were now alive, he might call
M. Verhaeren a Victor Hugo in worsted stockings.
There is the same sardonic delineation of a bleak
and sandy sea-coast country, Suffolk or Zeeland
as the case may be, the same determination to
find poetic material in the perfectly truthful study
of a raw peasantry, of narrow provincial towns, of
rough and cheerless seafaring existences. In each
of these poets — and scarcely in any other Euro-
pean writers of verse — we find the same saline
flavour, the same odour of iodine, the same
tenacious attachment to the strength and violence
and formidable simplicity of nature.

In Les Forces Tumultueuses we discover the same
qualities which we have found before in M. Ver-

3i6 FRENCH PROFILES

haeren's volumes. He employs mainly two forms
of verse, the one a free species of Alexandrines,
the other a wandering measure, loosely rhymed,
of the sort which used among ourselves to be
called " Pindarique." He gives us studies of modern
figures, the Captain, the Tribune, the Monk, the
Banker, the Tyrant. He gives us studies of towns,
curiously hard, although less violent than those in
his earlier, and perhaps most extraordinary, book,
LesVilles Tentaculaires. His interest in towns and
hamlets is inexhaustible — and did not Crabbe
write "The Village" and "The Borough"?
Even railway junctions do not dismay the muse
of M. Verhaeren : —

" Oh ! ces villes, par I'or putride envenimees !
Clameurs de pierre et vols et gestes de fumees,
Domes et tours d'orgueil et colonnes debout
Dans I'espace qui vibre et le travail qui bout,
En aimas-tu I'effroi et les affres profondes
O toi, le voyageur
Qui t'en allais triste et songeur,
Par les gares de feu qui ceinturent le monde ?

Cahots et bonds de trains par au-dessus des monts !

L'intime et sourd tocsin qui enfi^vrait ton ame

Battait aussi dans ces villes, le soir ; leur flamme

Rouge et myriadaire illuminait ton front,

Leur aboi noir, le cri, le ban de ton coeur meme ;

Ton ^tre entier dtait tordu en leur blaspheme,

Ta volontd jetee en proie k leur torrent

Et vous vous maudissiez tout en vous adorant."

The superficially prosaic has no terrors for M.
Verhaeren. He gives us, too, of course, studies

M. EMILE VERHAEREN 317

of the sea-coast, of that dreary district (it can
never have dreamed that it would nourish a poet)
which stretches from Antwerp westward along the
Scheldt to the North Sea, that infinite roll of
dunes, hung between the convulsive surf and the
heavy sky, over which a bitter wind goes whistling
through the wild thin grass towards a vague inland
flatness, vast, monotonous and dull beyond all
power of language to describe. This is a land
which arrives at relevancy only when darkness
falls on it, and its great revolving lights give
relation to its measureless masses.

The habitual gloom and mournfulness of M.
Verhaeren's pictures are only relieved once in this
powerful volume. The poem called Sur la Mer
strikes a different note, and resembles one of
those rare sunshiny days when the creeks of
Northern Flanders are in gala. We watch the
brilliantly-coloured ship stirring her cordage and
fluttering her pennons, like some gay little Dutch
garden putting merrily out to sea. All is a bustle
of scarlet and orange and blue ; but it would not
be a picture of M. Verhaeren's if it did not offer a
reverse side : —

" Le vaisseau clair revint, un soir de bruit
Et de f^te, vers le rivage,
D'ou son dlan ^tait parti ;
Certes, les mats dardaient toujours leur dme,
Certes, le foe portait encore des oriflammes,
Mais les marins etaient d^couronnds
De confiance, et les haubans et les cordages
Ne vibraient plus comme des lyres sauvages.

3i8 FRENCH PROFILES

Le navire rentra comme un jardin fand,

Drapeaux eteints, espoirs minds,

Avec I'efifroi de n'oser dire k ceux du port

Qu'il avait entendu, Ik-bas, de plage en plage,

Les flots crier sur les rivages

Que Pan et que Jesus, tous deux, dtaient des morts."

For those who seek from poetry its superficial
consolations, the canticles of M. Verhaeren offer
little attraction. But for readers who can endure
a sterner music, and a resolute avoidance of the
mere affectations of the intellect, he is now one
of the most interesting figures in contemporary
literature. And to deny that he is a poet would
be like denying that the great crimson willow-
herb is a flower because it grows in desolate
places.

1902.

ALBERT SAMAIN

The influence of Baudelaire, which so gravely
alarmed the critical sanhedrim of forty years ago,
has proved more durable than was expected, but
at the same time singularly inoffensive. There
seemed to be something in the imagination of
Baudelaire which fermented unpleasantly, and an
outbreak of pestilence in his neighbourhood was
seriously apprehended. He was treated as a sort
of plague-centre. It would be difficult to make
the young generation in London realise what
palpitations, what tremors, what alarms the terrible
Fleurs du Mai caused in poetic bosoms about i860.

ALBERT SAMAIN 319

But the Satanic dandyism, as it was called, of the
poet's most daring verses was not, in reality, a
very perdurable element. Most of it was absurd,
and some of it was vulgar ; all of it, with the
decease of poor Maurice Rollinat, seems now to
have evaporated. What was really powerful in
Baudelaire, and what his horrors at first con-
cealed, was the extreme intensity of his sense of
beauty, or, to be more precise, his noble gift of
subduing to the service of poetry the voluptuous
visions awakened by perfume and music and light.

It is this side of his genius which has attracted
so closely the leaders of the poetic revival in
France. A lofty, if somewhat vaporous dignity ;
a rich, if somewhat indefinable severity of taste ;
these are among the prominent qualities of the
new French poetry, which is as far removed in
spirit from the detestable " mam'e d' e'tonner " of
Les Fleurs du Mai as it is possible to be. Yet in
recounting the precursors to whom the homage
of the new school is due, every careful critic must
enumerate, not only Lamartine and Alfred de
Vigny, but unquestionably Baudelaire.

In the unfortunate Albert Samain, for instance,
whose death has deprived France prematurely of
a nature evidently predestined, as few can be said
to be, to the splendours of poetic fame, this
innocuous and wholesome influence of Baudelaire
may be very clearly traced. It does not interfere
with Samain's claim to be treated as an original
writer of high gifts, but it is impossible to over-
look its significance. The crawling corruption of
Baudelaire has, in fact, in the course of time, not

320 FRENCH PROFILES

merely become deodorised, but takes its place, as
a pinch of "scentless and delicate dust," in the
inevitable composition of any new French poet.

In the course of the winter of 1893, a good
many persons, of whom the present writer was
one, received a small quarto volume, bound in
deep sage-green, from an unknown source in
Paris. The book, which was privately printed
in a very small issue, was called Au Jardin de
r Infante, and it transpired that this was the first
production of a clerk in the Prefecture de la
Seine, named Albert Samain. Born at Lille in
1859, Samain was no longer very young, but he
had no relations with the world of letters, and a
shy dissatisfaction with what he had written gave
him a dislike to publication. The sage-green
volume, already so rare, was, as it now appears,
printed and sent out by a friend, in spite of the
poet's deprecations. A copy of it came into the
hands of M. Frangois Copp6e, who, to his great
honour, instantly perceived its merits, and in the
second series of Mon Franc-Parler attracted atten-
tion to it. In 1897 an edition of Au Jardin de
Hnfante placed the poems of Samain within the
range of the ordinary reader, and in 1898 he
published another volume, Aux Flancs du Vase.
His health, however, had failed, and he had by
this time retired to the country village of Magny-
les-Hameaux, where he died on the 1 8th of August,
1900. Since his death there have appeared a
third volume of poems, Le Chariot d'Or (1901),
and a lyrical drama, Polypheme (1902).

The existence of Albert Samain left scarcely a

ALBERT SAMAIN 321

ripple on the stream of French literary life. He
stood apart from all the coteries, and his shyness
and indigence prevented him from presenting him-
self where he might readily have been lionised.
Of the very few persons who ever saw Samain
I have interrogated one or two as to his appear-
ance and manners. They tell me that he was
pale and slight, with hollow cheeks and pre-
ponderating forehead, and of a great economy
of speech. Excessively near-sighted, he seemed
to have no cognisance of the world about him,
and the regularity of his life as a clerk emphasised
his dreamy habits. He is described to me as
grave, and, when he spoke, somewhat grandi-
loquent ; his half-shut eyes gave an impression
of languor, which was partly physical fatigue. I
think it possible that future times may feel a
curiosity about the person of Albert Samain, and
that there will be practically nothing to divulge,
since his dreams died with him. This small city
clerk, with his poor economies and stricken health,
habitually escaped from the oppression of a life
that was as dull and void as it could be, into
the buoyant -liberty of gorgeous and persistent
vision.

He expresses this himself in every page oi Au
Jardin de l* Infante. He says : —

" Les roses du couchant s'effeuillent sur la fleuve ;
Et dans I'^motion pile du soir tombant,
S'evoque un pare d'automne ou reve sur un banc
Ma jeunesse d^jk grave comme une veuve ; "

and in a braver tone : —

322 FRENCH PROFILES

" Mon ime est une Infante en robe de parade,
Dont Texil se reflate, dternel et royal,
Aux grands miroirs deserts d'un vieil Escurial,
Ainsi qu'une galore oublide en la rade."

Everywhere the evidences of a sumptuous and
enchanted past, everywhere the purity of silence
and the radiance of royal waters at sunset, every-
where the incense of roses that were planted for
the pleasure of queens long dead and gone, and
Albert Samain pursuing his solitary way along
those deserted paths and up the marble of those
crumbling staircases. Such is the illusion which
animates the Garden of the Infanta. Some-
times the poet is not alone there ; other forms
approach him, and other faces smile ; but they
are the faces and the forms of phantoms : —

" L'ime d'une flfite soupire

Au fond du pare melodieux ;
Limpide est I'ombre ou Ton respire
Ton po^me silencieux,

Nuit de langueur, nuit de mensonge,
Qui poses d'un geste ondoyant

Dans ta chevelure de songe
La lune, bijou d'Orient.

Sylva, Sylvie et Sylvanire,
Belles au regard bleu changeant,

L'etoile aux fontaines se mire,
AUez par les sentiers d'argent.

Allez vite — I'heure est si br^ve !

Cueillir au jardin des aveux
Les ccEurs qui se meurent du reve

De mourir parmi vos cheveux."

ALBERT SAMAIN 323

His aim was to express a melancholy and chaste
sensuousness in terms of the most tender and im-
passioned symbolism. No one has succeeded more
frequently than Samain in giving artistic form to
those vague and faint emotions which pass over
the soul like a breeze. He desired to write verses
when, as he said, " I'ame sent, exquise, une caresse
a peine," or even —

" De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame,
Ou la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame, —
De vers d'une ancienne 6toffe extenuee,
Impalpable comme le son et la nuee."

In this mood his poetry occasionally approaches
that of Mr. Robert Bridges on the one side and
of Mr. Yeats on the other. It has at other times
a certain marmoreal severity which reminds us of
neither. I desire the reader's close attention to
the following sonnet, called Cleopatre, in which the
genius of Albert Samain seems to be all revealed.
Here, it may at first be thought, he comes near to
the old Parnassians ; but his methods will be
found to be diametrically opposed to theirs,
although not even M. de Heredia would have
clothed the subject with a nobler beauty : —

" Accoud^e en silence aux crdneaux de la tour,

La Reine aux cheveux bleus, serr^s de bandelettes,
Sous I'incantation trouble des cassolettes,
Sent monter dans son coeur ta mer, immense Amour.

Immobile, sous ses paupi^res violettes,
EUe reve, pamde aux fuites des coussins ;
Et les lourds colliers d'or souleves par ses seins

Racontent sa langueur et ses fi^vres muettes.

324 FRENCH PROFILES

Un adieu rose flotte au front des monuments.
Le soir, veloute d'ombre, est plein d'enchantements ;
Et cependant qu' au loin pleurent les crocodiles,

La Reine aux doigts crispes, sanglotante d'aveux,
Frissonne de sentir, lascives et subtiles,
Des mains qui dans le vent epuisent ses cheveux."

There is much in the history and in the art of
Albert Samain which reminds me of an English
poet whom I knew well when we both were
young, and who still awaits the fulness of re-
cognition— Arthur O'Shaughnessy. Each of them
was fascinated by the stronger genius of two poets
of an older generation — Baudelaire and Edgar
Allan Poe. But each had a quality that was
entirely his own, a quality which the passage of
time will certainly emphasise and isolate.

1904.

M. PAUL FORT

The instinct which impels every energetic talent
to emancipate itself as far as possible from the bond-
age of tradition is a natural one, and it is even not
so dangerous as we suppose. For, if there is a
centrifugal force ever driving the ambition of youth
away from the conventional idea of beauty, this is
easily reversed by the inherent attraction of purity
and nobility in form. The artist makes a bold
flight and wheels away into the distance, but he
returns ; he is true, like Wordsworth's skylark, to
the kindred points of heaven and home. In a
writer, therefore, who starts in open rebellion to

M. PAUL FORT 325

the tradition of style, we have but to wait and see
whether the talent itself is durable. It is only
presumptuous Icarus, whose waxen wings melt in
the sun, and who topples into the sea. It is only
the writer who makes eccentricity the mantle to
hide his poverty of imagination and absence of
thought who disappears. To the young man of
violent idiosyncrasies and genuine talent two things
always happen — he impresses his charm upon our
unwilling senses, and he is himself drawn back,
unconsciously and imperceptibly, into the main
current of the stream of style.

While M. Paul Fort was merely an eccentric
experimentalist, it did not seem worth while to
present him to an English audience. The earliest
of his published volumes, the Ballades Fran^aises of
1897, "^^s ^ pure mystification to most readers.
It was printed, and apparently written, as prose.
It asserted the superiority of rhythm over the arti-
fice of prosody, which is precisely what Walt Whit-
man did. The French conceive poetry, however,
very rigidly in its essential distinction from prose.
There are rules for writing French verse which are
categorical, and these must be taken en bloc. It is
far more difficult in French to imagine a thing
which could represent, at the same moment, poetry
and prose, than it would be in English. But M.
Paul Fort determined to create this entirely new
thing, and when one read his effusions first it is
only fair to admit that one was bewildered. Here,
for instance, is, in its entirety, one of the Ballades
Frangaises : —

" Etre n6 page et brave vielleur d'amour, en la

326 FRENCH PROFILES

gentille cour d'un prince de jadis, chanter une
princesse follement aim^e, au nom si doux que
bruit de roses essaim^es, a qui offrir, un jour, en
lui offrant la main pour la marche a descendre
avant le lac d'hymen, I'odorant coffret d'or sous
ses chaines de lys, plein de bleus hyalins es anneaux
de soleil et d'oiselets de Chypre ardents pour em-
baumer, a qui donner aux sons des fifres et des
vielles, pour notre travers^e en la barque d'hymen,
le frele rosier d'or a tenir en sa main ! "

The only way to make anything of this is to
read it aloud, and it may be said in parenthesis
that M. Fort is a writer who appeals entirely to
the ear, not to the eye. Spoken, or murmured in
accordance with Mr. Yeats's new method, the piece
of overladen prose disengages itself, floats out into
filaments of silken verse, like a bunch of dry sea-
weed restored to its element. In this so-called
ballad the alexandrine dominates, but with elisions,
assonances, irregularities of every description. It
is therefore best to allow the author himself to
define his method. He says in the preface to a
later poem, Le Roman de Louis XI. : —

" J'ai cherch6 un style pouvant passer, au gr6 de
r^motion, de la prose au vers et du vers a la prose:
la prose rythmic fournit la transition. Le vers
suit les Elisions naturelles du langage. II se pr6-
sente comme prose, toute gene d'61ision disparais-
sant sous cette forme."

In short, we have heard much about " free
verse " in France, but here at last we have an
author who has had the daring to consider prose
and verse as parts of one graduated instrument;

M. PAUL FORT 327

and to take the current pronunciation of the
French language as the only law of a general and
normal rhythm. It is a curious experiment, and
we shall have to see what he will ultimately make
of it.

But one is bound to admit that he has made a
good deal of it already. He has become an author
whom we cannot affect or afford to ignore. Born
so lately as 1872, M. Paul Fort is in some respects
the most notable, as he is certainly the most abun-
dant, imaginative author of his age in France.
The book which lies before us, a romance of
Parisian life of to-day in verse, is the sixth of the
volumes which M. Fort has brought out in less
than six years, all curiously consistent in manner,
all independent of external literary influences, and
all full of exuberant, fresh and vivid impressions
of nature. The eccentricities of his form lay him
open, of course, to theoretical objections which
I should never think unreasonable, and which I
am conservative enough to share. But these do
not affect his ardour in the contemplation of nature,
his high gust of being. I scarcely know where to
point in any recent literature to an author so full
of the joy of life. He does not philosophise or
analyse, he affects no airs of priest or prophet ; his
attitude is extraordinarily simple, but is charged
with the ecstasy of appreciation. In two of his
collections of lyrics in rhythm, in particular, we
find this ardour, this enchantment, predominating ;
these 2ire Moniagne, 1898, a.nd L' Amour Marin, 1900,
in which he sings, or chants, the forest and the sea.

In Paris Sentimental M. Paul Fort has written a

328 FRENCH PROFILES

novel in his peculiar and favourite form. We
have had many examples of the dangers and diffi-
culties which attend the specious adventure of
writing modern fiction in metrical shape. Neither
Aurora Leigh nor Lucile nor The Inn Album
is entirely encouraging as more than the ex-
periment of a capricious though splendidly ac-
complished artist. Yet Paris Sentimental is more
nearly related to these than to any French poem
that I happen to recollect. There is, indeed, as it
seems to me, something English in M. Fort's habit
of mind. His novel, however, is much less elaborate
than either of the English poems I have mentioned,
and certainly much less strenuous than the first
and third. It is a chain of lyrical rhapsodies in
which a very plain tale of love and disappointment
in the Paris of to-day is made the excuse for a
poetical assimilation of all the charming things
which Paris contains, and which have hitherto
evaded the skill of the poets, such as the turf in
the Square Monge, and the colour of an autumn
shower on the Boulevard S^bastopol, and the
Tziganes singing by moonlight at the Exposition.
Here is an example of how it is done : —

" Le couchant violet tremble au fond du jour
rouge. Le Luxembourg exhale une odeur d'oranger,
et Manon s'arrete a mon bras ; plus rien ne bouge,
les arbres, les passants, ce nuage 61oign6. . . .

" Et le jet d'eau s'est tu : c'est la ros6e qui
chante, la-bas, dans les gazons, oii r^vent les
statues, et pour rendre, 6 sens-tu ? la nuit plus
d^faillante, les Grangers en fleurs ont enivr6 la
nue."

M. PAUL FORT 329

It would be an easy exercise to search for the
metre here, as we used to hunt for blank verse in
the Leaves of Grass. But M. Paul Fort is less re-
volutionary than Whitman, and more of an artist.
Although he clings to his theories, in each of his
volumes he seems to be less negligent of form, less
provocative, than he was in the last. The force
of his talent is wheeling him back into the inevit-
able tradition ; he is being forced by the music in
his veins to content himself with cadences that
were good enough for Racine and Hugo and
Baudelaire. And, therefore, in the last quotation
which I offer from Paris Sentimental, I take the
liberty of disregarding the typographical whims of
the author, and print his lines as verse : —

" Par les nuits d'ete bleues oii chantent les cigales,
Dieu verse sur la France une coupe d'etoiles.
Le vent porte k ma 16vre un gout du ciel 6!6x6 !
Je veux boire k I'espace fraichement argentd

L'air du soir est pour moi le bord de la coupe froide
Oii, les yeux mi-fermds et la bouche goulue,

Je bois, comme le jus presse d'une grenade,
La firaicheur etoil^e qui se rdpand des nues.

Couch^ sur un gazon dont I'herbe est encore chaude
De s'etre prelassde sous I'haleine du jour,
Oh ! que je viderais, ce soir, avec amour.

La coupe immense bleue ou le firmament rode 1 "

1902.

THE INFLUENCE OF FRANCE UPON
ENGLISH POETRY

Address delivered, February 9, 1904, before the Sociiid des
Conferences, in Paris.

Before I begin to discuss with you the particular
subject of my discourse this afternoon, I cannot
refrain from expressing my emotion at finding
myself, in consequence of your gracious invitation,
occupying this platform. It has been said that,
for a man of letters, consideration in a country
not his own is a foretaste of the verdict of pos-
terity. If there be any truth in this, then surely, in
the particular case where that country happens to
be France, it should be more — it should be some-
thing very like a dangerous mirage of immortality.
When the invitation of your committee first reached
me, it seemed for a moment impossible that I
could accept it. In no perfunctory or compli-
mentary sense, I shrank, with an apprehension of
my own twilight, from presenting myself in the
midst of your blaze of intelligence. How could I
be sure that any of my reflections, of my observa-
tions, could prove worthy of acceptance by an
audience accustomed to the teachings of the most

FRENCH INFLUENCE 331

brilliant and the most learned critics of the world ?
If there be an obvious lack of sufficiency in my
words this afternoon, then, on yourselves must be
the blame, and on your own generosity, since in
venturing to stand before you, it is your com-
mands which I obey in all simplicity. I obey
them as some barbarous Northern minstrel might,
who, finding himself at the court of Philippe de
Valois, should be desired, in the presence of the
prince and of his ladies, to exhibit a specimen of
his rough native art.

The subject of our inquiry to-day is not the
nature of the change which occurs when a new
literature rises out of the imitation of an older
one, as occurred with such splendid results when
Latin poetry was deliberately based on Greek
poetry, in the second century before Christ, or
when, in the early Middle Ages, the vernacular
literatures of modern Europe sprang out of the
decay of Latin. In such cases as these the matter is
simple ; out of the old stock there springs a new
bud, affiliated to it, imitative and only gradually
independent. It is not difficult to see Ennius,
in the dawn of Rome, sitting with the Greek hexa-
meter before him, and deliberately fashioning a
similar thing out of the stubbornness of his own
rough tongue. It is not difficult to see some
student-minstrel of the eleventh century debating
within himself whether he shall put down his
thoughts in faded Latin or in the delicate lingua
Tusca, communis et intelligibilis. Influences of this
kind are a part of the direct and natural evolution
of literature, and their phenomena are almost of a

332 FRENCH PROFILES

physical kind. Wiien a new language breaks
away from an old language into the forms of a
creative literature, its earliest manifestations must
be imitative. It is original in the very fact that it
copies into a new medium instead of continuing
in an old one.

But the problem is much more subtle and the
phenomena more delicate and elusive when we
have to deal with the influences mutually exercised
on one another by contemporary literatures of
independent character and long-settled traditions.
In the case before us, we have one great people
building up for the expression of their joys and
passions a language out of Anglo-Saxon materials,
and another great people forging out of low Latin
a vehicle for their complicated thoughts. The
literatures so created have enjoyed a vivid and
variegated vitality for century after century, never
tending the one towards the other, neither at any
time seriously taking a place subordinate to the
other, nor even closely related. The image that
may help to suggest to us what it is that we
must look for in observing the mutual influences
of French and English literature upon one another
is that of two metallic objects, of different colour,
pursuing a long parallel flight through space. We
are not to count upon their touching one another,
or their affecting the direction or speed of either,
but we may expect, on occasion, to observe along
the burnished side of the one a dash of colour
reflected from the illuminated surface of the other.

It would take us too far from our proper theme
this afternoon — a theme which at best we can but

FRENCH INFLUENCE 333

very hurriedly investigate — were I to dwell on the
essential differences which distinguish the poetry
of England from that of France. But it may be
pointed out that these differences make them-
selves most clearly felt exactly wherever the
national idiosyncrasy is most searchingly defined.
The extraordinary perfection of the verse of
Coleridge in its concentrated sweetness and har-
mony of vision, has never appealed to any French
student of our literature. Perhaps no French ear
could be trained to understand what the sover-
eign music of Coleridge means to us. In like
manner it is probable that, with all our efforts,
English criticism has never understood, and never
will understand, what the effect of the astonishing
genius of Racine is upon the nerves and intelligence
of a Frenchman. On the other hand, it is easy to
see that Mr. Swinburne approaches thought and
style from a point of view eminently, appreciable
by the French, while France contains one great
poet, Charles Baudelaire, whose oddity of mental
attitude and whose peculiar treatment of verse-
music and of imagery are perhaps more easily
comprehended by an English reader than by an
academic Frenchman.

A matter which might be pursued, in connec-
tion with this, but which time forbids me to do
more than indicate, is that, while in France poetry
has been accustomed to reflect the general tongue
of the people, the great poets of England have
almost always had to struggle against a complete
dissonance between their own aims and interests
and those of the nation. The result has been that

334 FRENCH PROFILES

England, the most inartistic of modern races, has
produced the largest number of exquisite literary
artists.

The expression of personal sensation has always
been dear to the English poets, and we meet with it
in some of the earliest babblings of our tongue.
From Anglo-Saxon times onward, the British bard
never felt called upon to express the aesthetic
emotions of a society around him, as the Provencal
troubadour or Carlovingian jongleur did. He was
driven to find inspiration in nature and in himself.
The mediaeval conquest of England by the French
language did not modify this state of things in any
degree. When the French wave ebbed away from
us in the fourteenth century, it left our poets of pure
English as individual, as salient, as unrepresentative
as ever. What every poet of delicate genius,
whether he be Chaucer or Milton, Gray or Keats,
has felt in the existing world of England, has been
the pressure of a lack of the aesthetic sense. Our
people are not naturally sensitive to harmony, to
proportion, to the due relation of parts in a work
of imaginative artifice. But what is very curious
is that our poets have been peculiarly sensitive to
these very qualities, and that no finer or subtler
artists in language have risen in any country than
precisely the poetic representatives of the densely
unpoetic England.

The result of this fantastic and almost incessant
discord between our poets and our people — a
discord dissolved into harmony only at one
moment around the genius of Shakespeare — the
result of this has been to make our poets, at

FRENCH INFLUENCE 335

critical epochs, sensitive to catch the colour of
literatures alien from their own. In the healthier
moments of our poetry we have gained brightness
by reflections from other literatures, from those of
Greece and Rome, from those of Italy and Spain
and France. In moments when our poetry was
unhealthy it has borrowed to its immediate and
certain disadvantage from these neighbours. But
it will, I think, be found that in the latter case the
borrowing has invariably been of a coarser and
more material kind, and has consisted in a more or
less vulgar imitation. The evil effect of this will,
I believe, be found to be as definite as the effect of
the higher and more illusive borrowing is bene-
ficial. For purposes of convenience I propose in
the following remarks to distinguish these forms
of influence as consisting in colour and in sub-
stance.

A few words may serve to define what I under-
stand here by " substance " and by " colour."
By the first of these I wish to indicate those cases
in which influence has taken a gross and slavish
form, in which there has been a more or less com-
plete resignation of the individuality of the literature
influenced. An instance of this is the absolute
bondage of Spanish drama to French in the
eighteenth century, when a play had no chance
on the stage of Madrid unless it were directly
modelled on Racine or Voltaire. We shall pre-
sently have to point to something similar in the
drama of our own Restoration. These are cases
where an exhausted literature, in extreme decay,
is kept alive by borrowing its very body and essence

23^ FRENCH PROFILES

from a foreign source, the result being that such
Hfe as it presents is not really its own, but provided
for it, ready-made, by the genius of another
country. This species of influence I hold to be
invariably the sign of a diseased and weakly con-
dition.

On the other hand, it is precisely when the
poets of a country desire to clothe in new forms
the personal sensations which are driving them to
creative expression, that they are very likely to
turn to a neighbouring literature, which happens
to be at a stage of aesthetic development different
from their own, for superficial suggestions. The
ornaments of form which they bring back with
them, when they are in this healthy and lively
condition, are what I describe as " colour." In
the early history of European poetry, none of the
great poetic powers disdained to import from
Italy the radiance and tincture of her executive
skill. The introduction of the sonnet to England
and to France, that of blank verse to England,
that of prose comedy to France, these were in-
stances of the absorption by living and vigoi-ous
literatures of elements in the literary art of Italy
which were instinctively felt by them to be
strengthening and refining, but not subjugating.
In these cases influence does nothing to lessen the
importance of that delicate distinction of individual
style which is the very charm of poetry, but
rather gives that distinction a more powerful
apparatus for making its presence felt.

We have a very instructive example of this
wholesome reflex action of one literature upon
another, in the history of the fourteenth century.

FRENCH INFLUENCE 337

No one will pretend that France possessed at that
epoch, or indeed had ever yet possessed, a poet of
very high rank, with the exception of the anony-
mous artist who bequeathed to us the Chanson
de Roland. But, in the thirteenth century, she had
produced that amazing work, Le Roman de la Rose,
half of it amatory, the other half of it satirical,
and the whole of it extraordinarily vivid and
civilising. It would be too much to call the
Roman de la Rose a great poem, or even two great
poems fused into one. But it certainly was one
of the most influential works which ever proceeded
from the pen of man. Its influence, if we look at
it broadly, was in the direction of warmth and
colour. It glowed like a fire, it flashed like a
sunrise. Guillaume de Lorris deserves our eternal
thanks for being the first in modern Europe to
write " pour esgaier les cceurs." He introduced
into poetry amenity, the pulse of life, the power of
Earthly Love.

It is useful for us to compare the Roman de la
Rose with what the best English poets were
writing at the same time. What do we find ?
We find a few dismal fragments of Scriptural
morality and one or two sermons in verse. We
may speculate in what a spirit a dulled English
minstrel of the end of the thirteenth century would
read the bold and brilliant couplets of Jean de
Meung. He would certainly be dazzled, and
perhaps be scandalised. He would creep back to
his own clammy Ayenbite of Inwyt and his stony
Cursor Mundi to escape from so much dangerous
warmth and colour. It seems as though for

Y

338 FRENCH PROFILES

nearly a hundred years England steadily refused
to enter that fair orchard where Beauty and Love
were dancing hand in hand around the thorny hedge
that guarded the Rosebud of the World. But the
revelation came at last, and it is not too much to
say that English poetry, as it has since become,
in the hands of Shakespeare and Keats and Tenny-
son, sprang into life when the English poets first
became acquainted with the gallant, courteous,
and amatory allegory of the Worship of the Rose.

It is very interesting to see that, apparently, it
was no less a person than Chaucer who led
English readers first to the grassy edge of the
fountain of love. The evidence is curiously
obscure, and has greatly exercised Chaucerian
scholars. But the truth seems to be that Chaucer
translated Le Roman de la Rose, as he tells us
himself in the The Legend of Good IVomen, but
that of this translation only a fragment now
survives. The other two fragments, always
printed together with Chaucer's, are now con-
sidered to be not his, and indeed to come from
two different hands. Into this vexed question we
must not go, but it is worth noticing that although
the three fragments which make up the fourteenth-
century Romaunt of the Rose only cover, together,
one-third of the French text, Chaucer constantly
quotes from and refers to passages from other
parts of the poem, showing that he was familiar
with it all.

English poetry, we may observe, had more to
learn from Guillaume de Lorris than from Jean de
Meung, great and more vigorous writer though

FRENCH INFLUENCE 339

the latter might be. What modern EngHsh
poetry, in fact, in its restless adolescence, was
leaning to France for was not so much vigour as
grace. It had satiric vigour of its own in its
apocalyptical Langland. But what beamed and
glowed upon Chaucer from the Roman de la Rose
was its human sweetness, its perfume as of a bush
of eglantine in April sunshine. It was the first
delicate and civilised poem of modern Europe,
and its refinement and elegance, its decorated
beauty and its close observation of the human
heart were the qualities which attracted to it
Chaucer, as he came starved from the chill
allegories and moralities of his formless native
literature.

It was in the autumn of 1359 that Chaucer, as
a page in the retinue of Prince Lionel, paid what
is supposed to have been his earliest visit to
France. He took his part in the luckless in-
vasion of Champagne, and he was captured by
the French, perhaps at R^thel. Until March 1360,
when King Edward III. ransomed him for the
sum of £i(i, he was a prisoner in France. During
these five or six months we have to think of
Chaucer as a joyous youth of nineteen, little cast
down by the fortunes of war, but full of sentiment,
poetry, and passion. Up to that time, doubtless,
he had read few or none but French books. We
cannot question that he was familiar with the
Roman de la Rose, and it is just possible that it
was at this time that he came in contact with
the lyrical writers whose personal poetry affected
him so much later on. I am inclined, however,

340 FRENCH PROFILES

to think this unlikely, because Eustache Deschamps
was a youth of about Chaucer's own age, and
although Guillaume de Machault was consider-
ably older, there had been little public distribution
of his verses so early as 1360.

We must put the date of Chaucer's coming
under the influence of the French writers of chants
royaux and lais and ballades a httle later. In the
summer of 1369 he was once more in France,
and this time, it would appear, on some pacific
embassage. Perhaps he escaped from the plague
which decimated England in that year, and carried
off even Queen Philippa herself. Perhaps he was
engaged on a diplomatic mission. We have to
walk carefully in the darkness of these mediaeval
dates, which offer difficulties even to the erudition
of M. Marcel Schwob. At all events, Chaucer was
certainly then " in partibus Franciae," and it can
hardly but have been now that he fell under the
influence of Machault, whom he admired so much,
and of Eustache Deschamps, in whom he awakened
so enthusiastic a friendship.^ There was an entente
cordiale indeed when Deschamps and Froissart com-
plimented Chaucer, and Chaucer imitated Machault
and Oton de Granson. We find the English poet
passing through France again in 1373, and again
in 1377. We have vague and accidental record
of at least seven of these diplomatic journeys,
although after 1378 the French interest seems

^ Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly reminds me that, in his celebrated letter to
the Constable of Portugal, the Spanish poet Santillana goes into
raptures about four of the writers whom Chaucer admired — Guillaume
de Lorris, Jean de Meung, Machault, and Granson.

FRENCH INFLUENCE 341

entirely swallowed up in the far more vivid fasci-
nation which Italy exercised over him.

To a poet who was privileged to come beneath
the intellectual sway of Petrarch and Boccaccio at
the glorious close of their careers, it might well be
that such suns would seem entirely to eclipse the
tapers of those who composed ballades and virelais
in the rich provinces north of the Loire. Himself
a man of far greater genius than any French
writer of the fourteenth century, we might be
prepared to find Chaucer disdaining the gentle
balladists of France. He had, to a far greater
degree than any of them, vigour, originality, fulness
of invention. Eustache Deschamps is sometimes
a very forcible poet, but he sinks into insignifi-
cance when we set him side by side with the giant
who wrote the Canterbury Tales. Yet if Chaucer
brought vigour to English poetry, he found in
France, and among these rhetorical lyrists, pre-
cisely the qualities which were lacking at home.
What it was essential for England to receive at
that most critical moment of her intellectual
history was an external, almost a superficial,
matter. She did not require the body and bones
of genius, but the garments with which talent
covers them. These robes are what we name
grace, elegance, melody and workmanship, and
these delicate textiles were issuing in profusion
from the looms of France.

This is the secret of the strong influence exer-
cised on a very great poet like Chaucer, and
through him upon the poetry of England, by a
writer so essentially mediocre as Guiliaume de

342 FRENCH PROFILES

Machault. It was the accomplished tradition, the
picturesque and artistic skill of the lesser poet,
which so strongly attracted the greater. From
Machault English poetry took that heroic couplet
which had hitherto been unknown to it, and
which was to become one of its most abundant
and characteristic forms. In a variety of ways
the prosody of Great Britain was affected by that
of France between 1350 and 1370. The loose
and languid forms in which British poets had
hitherto composed were abandoned in delight at
the close metre of the French, and about 1350
John Gower produced his Cinquante Balades not
merely in the form but in the very language of
Eustache Deschamps. His Mirour de I'Omme, a
long and important poem first printed by Mr.
Macaulay in 1899, is an instance of pure Gallicisa-
tion. Chaucer did not imitate the French thus
grossly. Indeed, he went to France for nothing
interior or essential, but, sensitively conscious that
his own country lacked most of all the aesthetic
graces, he borrowed from writers like Machault
and Granson the external colour and the technical
forms. But the substantial forces which awakened
the splendid bourgeois genius of Chaucer were the
aristocratic influences of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio.

Two hundred years later, at the next great crisis
of English literature, a very similar condition is
apparent, though exposed with less intensity.
The mediccval forms of poetry, allegorical, didactic,
diffuse, had now worn themselves out. There
was a total abandonment of " gardens " of rhe-
toric, of plaisances of morality. These efforts of

FRENCH INFLUENCE 343

exhausted fancy continued to please English
readers longer than they did French ones, and it
is to be noted that their decay was sudden with us,
not gradual as with you. Not only, for instance,
did the transitional rhetoricians of the beginning
of the sixteenth century exercise no influence on
English thought, but there is no evidence that a
single person in England read a line of Jean
Le Maire des Beiges. But a little later all is
different, A recent critic has said that the
writings of Wyatt and Surrey, though not epoch-
making, were " epoch - marking." They were
not men of genius, but they were of eminently
modern taste. They perceived that everybody
was tired of long-winded allegory and rhetoric,
and they set themselves to write verse " in short
parcels," that is to say, in brief lyrics. So they
looked to France, where Wyatt passed, probably,
in 1532. What did he find? Doubtless he
found Clement Marot in the act of putting forth
L Adolescence Clementine. It is probable that Marot,
with his " elegant badinage," was too gay for these
stiff English nobles, so solemn and rigid. His
want of intellectual ambition would strike them,
and they passed on to Italy. But something of
the perfume of France was left upon their fingers,
and they seem to have borrowed, perhaps from
Melin de Saint-Gelais, but more probably from
Marot, the sonnet - form, hitherto unknown in
England. It cannot be pretended that in the great
awakening of English lyrical poetry in the middle
of the sixteenth century France had any great share,
but what there was tended in the aesthetic direc-

344 FRENCH PROFILES

tion. The ugly hardness of the last mediaeval poets
was exchanged for a daintiness of expression, a
graceful lucidity, in the merit of which Clement
Marot's rondeaux and epigrams had a distinct
share.

We have now considered two instances — the
one important, the other slight — in which English
poetry received, at critical moments, a distinct
colour from the neighbouring art of France. In
each case the influence was exercised at a time
when the poetic ambition of our country greatly
exceeded the technical skill of its proficients, and
when the verse-writers were glad to go to school
to masters more habituated to art and grace than
themselves. But we have now another and a
very curious phenomenon to note. Fifty years
later than the revival of Wyatt and Surrey, when
Elizabethan literature was beginning to rise into pro-
minence, several very strenuous efforts were made
to take advantage of contemporary French ac-
complishment, and with one accord these attempts
conspicuously failed. We find in 1580 that the
French were " highly regarded " by the school of
versifiers at Cambridge, and before this Edmund
Spenser had translated the Visions of Joachim Du
Bellay. It might be supposed that this would be
the beginning of a consistent imitation of the
Pleiade by the English poets — just, for instance,
as modern Swedish poetry was at this moment
started by Rosenhane's imitations of Ronsard.
But on the vast wave of Elizabethan literature, now
sweeping up with irresistible force and volume,
we find scarcely a trace of the Pleiade. The one

FRENCH INFLUENCE 345

important writer who borrowed from the French
was Samuel Daniel, whose famous Delia of 1592
obviously owes both its title and its form to
Maurice Sceve's De'lie of 1544. Daniel also
imitates Baif and Pontus de Thyard, and had a
vast admiration for his more immediate contem-
porary, Philippe Desportes.^

The experiments of Jodelle and Garnier in
Senecan drama were examined by the English
dramatists of the end of the sixteenth century —
by Kyd and Daniel in particular — and were
deliberately rejected. The pathway taken by
classical French tragedy was even touched for a
moment, in Titus Andronicus, by Shakespeare him-
self, but it was instantly quitted for the utterly
divergent road which led to Othello and King
Lear. The sententious and rhetorical character
of French drama was rejected by all the great
Elizabethans, and the only contemporary influence
accepted from France by our poetry at this time
was that of Du Bartas, whose violent and grotesque
style gratified a growing taste for exaggeration
among the courtiers. Du Bartas pointed the way
to that decadence which fell only too swiftly for
English poetry, like a plague of insects upon some
glorious summer garden. But it is interesting to
observe that from 1580 to 1620, that is to say
during the years in which the aesthetic sense was
most widely and most brilliantly developed in
English poetry, French influences of the best kind

^ Since this was written, however, Mr. Sidney Lee, in a valuable
essay on " The Elizabethan Sonnet-Literature " (printed in June 1904),
has drawn attention to Lodge's indebtedness to Ronsard.

346 FRENCH PROFILES

knocked at its door in vain. In its superfluous
richness, it needed no further gifts. It had colour
enough and substance enough to spare for all the
world.

Very different was the condition of things fifty
years later. English poetry in the Jacobean age
was like a plant in a hothouse, that runs violently
to redundant blossom, and bears the germs of
swift decay in the very splendour of its buds.
Already, before the death of James I., the fresh-
ness was all gone, and the tendency to decline
was obvious. Under Charles I. the development
of literature was considerably warped, and at
length completely arrested, by the pressure of
political events. Then the Civil War broke out,
and the English Court, with its artistic hangers-on,
was dispersed in foreign countries.

As early as 1624, on the occasion of the
Marriage Treaty, the attention of the English
poets may probably have been directed to
Paris, but there had followed grave estrange-
ments between the Courts of France and Eng-
land, and in 1627 a disastrous rupture. The
earliest verses of Edmund Waller celebrate in-
cidents in Buckingham's expedition, and seem to
prove that Waller had even then been made aware
of the reforms in French prosody instituted by
Malherbe. The Civil War broke out in 1642,
and the raising of the king's standard at Notting-
ham was the signal to the Muses to snatch up
their lyres and quit this inhospitable island. The
vast majority of our living poets were Royalists,
and when Charles I. was defeated they either

FRENCH INFLUENCE 347

withdrew into obscurity or left the country.
Suckling was already in Paris ; he was followed
there by Cowley, Waller, Davenant, Denham and
Roscommon, that is to say, by the men who were
to form poetic taste in England in the succeeding
generation. From 1645 to 1660 the English
Court was in Continental exile, and it carried
about it a troop of poets, who were sent, like so
many carrier - pigeons, upon wild diplomatic
errands.

It was a great misfortune for English poetry that
it was flung into the arms of France at this precise
moment. What the poets found in Paris was
not the best that could be given to them, and what
there was of the best they did not appreciate.
Their own taste in its rapid decadence had
become fantastical and disordered. We have but
to look at the early Odes of Abraham Cowley to
see into what peril English style had sunken. It
had grown diffuse and yet rugged ; it had surren-
dered itself to a wild abuse of metaphor, and, con-
scious of its failing charm, it was trying to produce
an impression by violent extravagance of imagery.
Its syntax had all gone wrong ; it had become the
prey of tortured grammatical inversions.

It is strange that in coming to France the English
poets of 1645 d'^i ^^^ see the misfortune of all this.
They should have found, if they had but had eyes
to perceive it, that French poetry was on the high
road to escape the very faults we have just men-
tioned. The fault of poetry such as that of Waller
and Davenant is that it is complicated and yet
not dignified. Well, the English Royalists who
waited upon Queen Henrietta in Paris might have

348 FRENCH PROFILES

observed in the verses of Malherbe and Racan
poetry which was majestic and yet simple, an
expression of true and beautiful sentiments in
language of pure sobriety. But these were the
new classics of France, and the English exiles had
been educated in a taste which was utterly anti-
classic. They could not comprehend Malherbe,
who was too stately for them, but unfortunately
there were other influences which exactly suited
their habits of mind. There can be no doubt
that they were pleased with the posthumous writ-
ings of Th^ophile de Viau, whose nature-painting
has left its mark on Cowley, and unquestionably,
like the rest of the world, they were enchanted
with the fantastic, almost burlesque talent of Saint-
Amant, who ruled the salons of Paris during the
whole of the English Exile, and who seemed to his
admirers of 1650 a very great poet whom it was a
distinction to imitate.

The English ear for rhythm is not constituted
like the French ear. We have a prosodical instinct
which is entirely unlike yours. This was ill com-
prehended, or rather not comprehended at all, by
the English Exiles. They were confronted by
the severity of Malherbe and the uniformity of
Maynard, and they were unable to appreciate
either the one or the other. The English sub-
limity, as exemplified at that very hour by the
majesty of Milton, is obtained by quite other
means. The sympathy of the English poets was
with what is irregular, and they never were genuine
classics, like the French, but merely, in ceasing to
be romantic, became pseudo-classical. The very

FRENCH INFLUENCE 349

type of a pseudo-classic in revolt against romance
is Denham, in his extravagantly-praised Cooper's
Hill. To compare this with the exquisite Retraite
of Racan, with which it is almost exactly con-
temporaneous, is to realise what the difference
is between a falsely and a genuinely classical
poem. Racan's lines seem to be breathed out
without effort from a pure Latin mind ; the
couplets of Denham are like the shout of a
barbarian, who has possessed himself of a toga,
indeed, but has no idea of how it ought to be
worn.

It is noticeable that foreigners are seldom
influenced in their style by their immediate con-
temporaries in another country. The prestige of
public acceptance is required before an alien
dares to imitate. Hence we search almost in
vain for traces of direct relation between the
Parisian Precieux and their British brethren.
There is little evidence that Voiture or Bense-
rade had admirers among the Exiles, although
they returned to England with ideas about pas-
toral, which I think they must have owed to
the ^glogues of Segrais. But it is certain that
they were infatuated by the burlesque writers of
France, and that Scarron, in particular, was
instantly imitated. The Virgile Travesti was ex-
travagantly admired and promptly paraphrased
in England, and in Cotton we had a poet who
deliberately and with great popular success set
out to be the English Scarron. Trivial in French,
these burlesque exercises became in English
intolerably heavy and vulgarly obscene. The

350 FRENCH PROFILES

taste for rhymed burlesque was a poor gift for
the Exiles to bring back with them from the
country which already possessed the Adonis of
La Fontaine.

In offering to their countrymen the forms of
French poetry, without giving them any of its
enchanting dignity and harmony, the English
poets of the Restoration were doing the exact
opposite of what Chaucer had done in the four-
teenth century. They imported the substance
without the colour ; they neglected precisely the
gift which our neighbour has always had to
bestow, namely, the charm of aesthetic propor-
tion. They were partly unfortunate, no doubt, in
the moment of their return to London. It was in
the very year 1660 that the great revival of poetic
taste began in Paris, and, by coming back to their
exciting duties and pleasures at that moment, the
English exiles excluded themselves from participa-
tion in Boileau, Moliere, and Racine. But would
they have learned to appreciate these great masters
if the restoration of the House of Stuart had been
delayed for twenty years ? It is permissible to
believe that they would not.

The invasion of the British stage by French
drama between 1665 and 1690, is the most
striking example of the influence of French taste
which the history of English poetry has to offer.
The theatres had been closed by an ordinance of
the Puritan government, and all performance of
plays forbidden throughout England in 1642. So
savage was the enactment that the theatres were
dismantled, in order to make acting impossible,

FRENCH INFLUENCE 351

while all actors in plays, even in private, were
liable to be publicly whipped, and the audiences
individually fined. The result of this savage law
was that the very tradition of histrionics died out
in England, which had been the most theatrical
country in Europe. It was not one of the least
satisfactions to the banished Royalists in Paris that
they could enjoy their beloved entertainment there,
as it was no longer possible to do in London.
They could not sit through performances of
Fletcher and Massinger and Ford, but they could
delight their eyes and their ears with the tragedies
of Scud^ry and Tristan I'Hermite and La Cal-
pren^de. You will remind me that they could do
better than this by attending the dramas of Rotrou
and ten times better by studying those of Corneille
But the curious thing is that while there are de-
finite traces of La Calprenede and Scud^ry on our
English drama, there is not, so far as I know, a
vestige of Rotrou, and the English attitude to
Corneille is very extraordinary. A poetaster,
named Joseph Rutter, translated Le Cid as early
as 1637, that is to say, in the midst of Corneille's
original triumph ; it is interesting to note that
Rutter's version was made at the command of the
English king and queen. This bad translation, which
enjoyed no success, sufficed for English curiosity.
On the other hand, Les Horaces was a great
favourite in England, and was carefully translated
into verse by three or four poets. Some couplets
by Sir John Denham, accompanying the version
made about 1660 by the matchless Orinda, have
a particular interest for us. Denham (who was,

352 FRENCH PROFILES

we must remember, the Racan of the classical
movement in England) says of Les Horaces : —

" This martial story, which through France did come,
And there was wrought on great Corneille's loom,
Orinda's matchless muse to Britain brought,
And foreign verse our English accents taught."

The total ignoring of the Cidy while Les Horaces
received boundless admiration, is a curious fact,
which can only, I think, become intelligible when
we obs^ve that to an English audience in 1665
the chivalry and panache of the former play were
unintelligible, while the showy patriotism and
high-strung amorosity of the other were exactly
to the English taste. Wherever Corneille's psy-
chological study of the human heart became
subtle, he rose above the range of the Royalist
exiles. In the English tragedies of the Restora-
tion we see the predominant part which violent
passion took in the interest of the age. This,
together with the laborious and unflagging em-
phasis which becomes to us so tedious in these
dramatic writers, the English poets borrowed, not
from Corneille, whom they venerated but hardly
comprehended, but from the lesser heroic drama-
tists of the same age.

A little later in the seventeenth century, when
the great men had made their appearance in
France, the English dramatists could no longer
overlook Moliere and Racine ; but the luminous
wit of the one and the harmonious and passionate
tenderness of the other were beyond their reach.
There is evidence of the favour which Quinault,

FRENCH INFLUENCE 353

especially for his Roman tragedies, enjoyed in
London, and there was something in his colour-
less, melodious, and graceful style which attracted
and did not terrify the contemporary English
translator. The want of interest shown by the
London adapters in the successive masterpieces of
Racine is quite extraordinary. A solitary attempt
was made in 1675 by John Crowne, or under his
auspices, to bring Andromaque on the English
stage, but shorn of all its tender beauty. This,
amazing as it sounds, is practically the only
evidence remaining to show that our Gallicised
playwrights were conscious of the existence of
Racine. The fact is, no doubt, that he soared
above their reach in his celestial emotion, his
delicate passion and his penetration into the
human heart. English versification in 1675 was
capable of rough and vigorous effects, music of
the drum and the fife ; but it had no instrument
at its command at that time which could repro-
duce the notes of Racine upon the violin. Here
was an instance of colour which was evanescent
and could not be transferred. The substance of
Moli^re, on the other hand, offered no technical
difficulties. It is extraordinary how many of
Moli^re's plays were imitated or adapted on the
English stage during his life-time or very shortly
after the close of it. Our great Dryden mingled
L'^tourdi with the Amant Indiscret of Quinault, and
as the result produced Sir Martin Mar-all in 1667.
He used the De'pit Amoureux and Les Precieuses
Ridicules in adapting Thomas Corneille's arrange-
ment of El Astrologp fingido of Calderon, in 1668.

z

354 FRENCH PROFILES

The English playwrights, however, had no real ap-
preciation of Moliere, though they stole from him
so freely. The poetess, Mrs. Aphra Behn, being
accused in 1678 of borrowing scenes from the
** Malad Imagenere" (as she called it), admitted
frankly that she had done so, but " infinitely to
Moleer's advantage."

The poetry of France in the third quarter of
the seventeenth century is pre-eminently char-
acteristic of a grave and polished system of
society. The age of Racine was, and could not
but be, an age of extreme refinement. It was
useless for the crude contemporary dramatists of
London to take the substance of the Parisian
masterpieces, since their spirit absolutely evaded
them. English society under Charles II. had
elements of force and intellectual curiosity, but
it lacked exactly what Paris possessed — the orna-
ment of polished, simple, and pure taste. In
the jargon of the time Racine and Moliere were
" correct," while even English poets of genius, such
as Dryden and Otway, hardly knew that " correct-
ness " existed. Hence Boileau, in whom " correct-
ness " took the form of a doctrinal system, made
no impression at all upon the English poetry of
his own time. He could not act upon English
social thought until England ceased to be bar-
barous, and it is, therefore, not until the age of
Queen Anne that the powerful influence of
Boileau, like a penetrating odour, is perceived
in English poetry, and above all in the verse
of Pope. In the First Epistle of the Second Book,
published in 1737, that great poet reviews the

FRENCH INFLUENCE 355

literature of the last seventy years in lines of
extraordinary strength and conciseness : —

" We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms ;
Her arts victorious triumph'd o'er our arms :
Britain to soft refinements less a foe,
Wit grew polite, and numbers learned to flow.
Waller was smooth ; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full-resounding line.
The long majestic march and energy divine.
Though still some traces of our rustic vein
And splay-foot verse remained, and will remain.
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tired nation breath'd from civil war.
Exact Racine and Corneille's noble fire
Showed us that France had something to admire.
Not but the tragic spirit was our own.
And fiiU in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone.
But Otway failed to polish or refine.
And fluent Shakespeare scarce effaced a line."

When Pope wrote these vigorous verses, he had
reached the meridian of his art. He was the
greatest living poet not only of England, but of
the world. He had to look back over a literary
career of nearly forty years, which had been a per-
petual triumph, yet in the course of which he had
been steadily conducted by the genius of Boileau,
who had died in body exactly at the moment
when Pope was giving new lustre to his spirit.
No critic of authority will question that Pope was
a greater writer than Boileau, excellent as the latter
is. In the innumerable instances where direct
comparison between them is invited, the richness
of Pope's language, the picturesque fulness of his
line, transcends the art of Boileau. But there is
always due a peculiar honour to the artist who is

356 FRENCH PROFILES

a forerunner, and this belongs to the author of
Le Lutrin.

The qualities which entered the English poetry of
the eighteenth century came through Pope, but they
had their source in Boileau. From him, enemy
as he was to affectation, pedantry and spurious
emphasis, we learned that a verse, whether good
or bad, should at least say something. Boileau's
attitude of " honest zeal " commended itself, theo-
retically if not always practically, to the mind of
Pope, who is never tired of praising the French-
man, " that most candid satirist." Both imitated
Horace, but even Pope's vanity could not conceal
the fact that he studied the great Roman master
mainly in the l^pttres of Boileau. We have here
an excellent example of the kind of influence of
which we found an example so many centuries
back in Chaucer. Here it is not a dull transference
of material, ill-comprehended, ill-digested, from
one literature to another. It is the capture of the
transient charm, the colour and odour of a living
art. Few exercises in criticism would be more
instructive than an analysis of French influences
on the splendid poetry of Pope. They mainly re-
solve themselves into the results of a patient and
intelligent study of Boileau. If we compare the
Essay on Criticism with the Art Poe'tique we see
the young Pope at the feet of the ancient tyrant
of letters ; if we place Le Lutrin by the side
of The Rape of the Lock we see the knack of
mock-heroic caught, and developed, and raised to
a pinnacle of technical beauty. The Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot is vastly superior to the poem A son

FRENCH INFLUENCE 357

Esprit, but Pope would never have traversed the
road if Boileau had not pointed out the way.
Pope captured the very touch of Boileau, but he
heightened it, and he made it English. How
English he made it can be seen from the fact that
the manner spread, as Pope's and as English, to
the literatures of Italy, Sweden, and even of
Russia.

It spread, moreover, to the whole of the fashion
of poetry to be written in Pope's own England
through the remainder of the eighteenth century.
Even where that fashion turned to forms more un-
classical or even languidly romantic, a faint varnish
of Pope's precision continued to characterise it.
But during the eighteenth century (that epoch so
curious in the history of poetry, where everything
seemed to combine to hold the imagination in a
static if not in a semi-paralysed condition) there
was no more display of influence from France on
England. What influence there was was exercised
all in the reverse direction. The moral disquisition
in exquisitely-serried couplets gave way in some
degree to descriptive poetry as Thomson devised
it, to lyrical poetry as it was conceived by Gray.
But these writers, eminent enough in their place
and their degree, not only owed nothing to France,
but they exerted an immediate influence on the
poets of that country. The Abb6 Delille, with his
olives and his vines, his corn-fields and his gardens
and his bees, was inspired in the second degree,
no doubt, by Virgil, but in the first degree, unques-
tionably, by the natural descriptions of the English
poets of the preceding generation.

358 FRENCH PROFILES

When we come to the dawn of a new age, when
we examine for exotic impressions the writings of
the pioneers of the romantic revival, we find that
the prestige is still all on the side of Great Britain.
On Cowper and Burns and Blake we discover no
trace of any consciousness of foreign influence,
other than is indicated by an occasional and
usually hostile acknowledgment of the existence
of Voltairfe and Rousseau on the prosaic confines
of the art. Quite different is the case in France,
when we approach a writer in some respects more
modern than either Cowper or Burns, namely,
Andre Ch^nier, the more conventional parts of
whose works display, to an English reader, a far
greater pre-occupation with English poetry than,
I believe, any French critic has noted. In the
latter part of the eighteenth century the deplorable
didacticism of verse, with the tedium of its topo-
graphical and descriptive pieces, of its odes to
Inoculation and to The Genius of the Thames, of
its epics on the cultivation of the sugar-cane,
and the breeding of sheep and the navigation of
sailing-vessels, although it took its start from a
misconception of the teaching of Boileau, had long
ceased to be definitely French, and had become
technically British in character. But the group
of Parisian poets, so solemn and so deadly dull,
who formed the court of Delille after the French
Revolution, were the disciples of the verse of
Thomson, in fact, as much as in theory they were
the pupils of the prose of BufTon.

The reaction against dryness and flatness in
imaginative literature was complete and systematic

FRENCH INFLUENCE 359

in England long before it had been accepted by
the intelligent classes in France. The authority of
Chateaubriand, although most of his important work
was published already, was not in any wide degree
accepted until after 18 10, even if this be not too
early a date to suggest for it, while the formular
tendency of the whole work of the author of Alala
and Rene was rather to the revival of a vivid,
picturesque, and imaginative prose than to the
study of verse. But in England, before 1 8 1 o, the
revolution was complete in the essential art of
poetry itself. Wordsworth and Coleridge had
completed their reform, and it was of a nature
absolutely radical. In 1798 they had determined
that " the passions of men should be incorporated
with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature,"
and they had, working on those lines, added to
the poetry of the world some of its most perfect
and its most durable ornaments. Crabbe, Camp-
bell, even Sir Walter Scott, had completely re-
vealed the nature of their genius before France
was awakened to the full lesson of Chateaubriand.
When the second romantic epoch was revealed in
France, the great era in England was over. The
year 1822, which saw Alfred de Vigny, Victor
Hugo, and Lamartine ascend the Parisian horizon
as a new constellation of unequalled effulgence,
saw the burial of Shelley in that Roman garden of
death where Keats had shortly before been laid,
and saw the retirement of Byron to Genoa, his
latest Italian home.

It was physically impossible, therefore, that the
belated Romantiques in France, at the beginning of

360 FRENCH PROFILES

the nineteenth century, could exercise any influence
over their British brethren, who had been roused
from slumber one watch earlier than they had.
Far north, in the valleys of Somerset, by the Isis
at Oxford, long before there was any motion of
life by the Seine or by the Rhone, the spirit of
living poetry had arisen, singing, from the ground,
and the boyish Lamartine and Vigny, had they
been aware of the fact, might have whispered of
their English predecessors in 1810 : —

" By rose-hung river and light-foot rill

There are who rest not, who think long

Till they discern as from a hill

At the sun's hour of morning song,

Known of souls only, and those souls free,

The sacred spaces of the sea."

The English Romantics of the beginning of the
nineteenth century earnestly and pointedly repu-
diated the influence which French poetry had
exercised in England a hundred years earlier.
This deliberate revolt finds a very interesting
expression in the Sleep and Poetry of Keats, a
poem of much importance in the history of
criticism. Sleep and Poetry was written in 181 6,
six years before the first C6nacle was formed
in Paris, and four years before the publication of
Lamartine's Meditations Poe'tiques. In the course of
it, Keats describes the practice of the Anglo-Gallic
writers of verse in picturesque and stringent lan-
guage, culminating in an attack on the impeccable
Boileau himself. He says : —

FRENCH INFLUENCE 361

*'A schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories : with a puling infant's force
They swayed about upon a rocking-horse
And thought it Pegasus. . . . Ill-fated race !
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face
And did not know it, — no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepit standard out,
Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one BoiLF.AU ! "

During the ninety years which separate us from
the early enthusiasms of Keats and Shelley, it
cannot be said that this influence of France has
to any marked degree asserted itself on the poetry
of England. It would be in the highest degree
fantastic to pretend that it can be traced on the
texture of Tennyson or of the Brownings. It is
a remarkable fact that the genius of Victor Hugo,
although of such overwhelming force among the
Latin nations, failed to awaken the least echo in the
poets of the North. The allusions to Hugo in the
writings of his greatest immediate contemporaries
in England are ludicrously perfunctory and un-
appreciative. Tennyson addressed to him a well-
intentioned sonnet which is a monument of tact-
lessness, in which Victor Hugo is addressed as
" Weird Titan " and in which the summit of
the French poet's performance appears to have
been reached in his having been polite to one of
Tennyson's sons. " Victor in drama, victor in
romance," the English poet sings in artless
wit, and shows no appreciation whatever of the
unmatched victories in the splendour and per-

362 FRENCH PROFILES

fection of lyrical melody. It was Mr. Swin-
burne who, about 1866, earliest insisted on the
supremacy of Victor Hugo : —

" Thou art chief of us, and lord;

Thy song is as a sword
Keen-edged and scented in the blade from flowers ;

Thou art lord and king ; but we

Lift younger eyes, and see
Less of high hope, less light on wandering hours."

In spite, however, of Mr. Swinburne's reiterated
praise of that " imperial soul," and of the respect-
ful study which has been given to the poet in
England for the last forty years, Victor Hugo has
asserted little or no influence on English poetry.
Much lesser talents than his, however, have offered
in the later years of the century a colour to a
certain school of our poets, and it is in Th^ophile
Gautier and Theodore de Banville that our English
Parnassians found something of the same aesthetic
stimulus that their predecessors of the fourteenth
century found in Guillaume de Machault and
Eustache Deschamps.

But our hour is over, and this brief and imper-
fect discourse must come to an end. We have
very lightly touched on the events of six hundred
years. Are we to speculate, imperfect prophets
that we are, on the future relations of the two great
countries of the west, which, far beyond all others,
have always been in the vanguard of liberty and
light ? That is a feat of daring beyond my limited
imagination. But I cannot help nourishing a
confident belief that in the future, as well as in

FRENCH INFLUENCE 363

the past, the magnificent literatures of France and
of England will interact upon one another, that
each will at the right psychological moments flash
colour and radiance which will find reflection on
the polished surface of the other. To facilitate
this, in ever so small and so humble a degree, must
be the desire of every lover of England and of
France. And in order to adopt from each what
shall be serviceable to the other, what is most
needful must be a condition of mutual intelligence.
That entente cordiale which we value so deeply, and
which some of us have so long laboured to pro-
mote,— it must not be confined to the merchants
and to the politicians. The poets also must insist
upon their share of it.

INDEX

Abbi Constantin, M, Ludovic

Hal^vy, 274
Abbi Mouret, Zola's, 132
Abbd RoideUt, Fabre, F., 160
Abbi Tigrane, Fabre's, 153, i6o,

161, 162, 163, 166, 179
Addison, Joseph, 184
Adelaide du Guesclin, Voltaire,

45.58
Aiss6, Mademoiselle, 35-67
Alcaforada, Mariana, 72. See Mari-
ana
Alexis, Paul, 131, 133, 141
Alfieri, 98

Amaidie, d'Aurevilly's, 94-95
Amant Indiscret, Quinault's, 353
Amour Impossible, d'Aurevilly, 95
Amour Marin, M. Paul Fort's,

327
Amoureuses, Les, Daudet, 114, 126
Andromaque, Racine's, 353
Anneau d Amithyste, 269
Annunzio, G. de, 196, 246
Aphrodite, M. Pierre Louys, 271
Apres-Midi d'un Faune, Mallarm^'s,

307. 309
Arithuse, M. de R6gnier, 294,

295
Argental, Comte d', 38, 51, 52,

60
Armand, the actor, 53
Arnold, Matthew, 2, 30, 197, 301
Art Poitique, Boileau, 356
Asse, M. Eugfene, 49, 88
Atala, Chateaubriand, 359
Athies, A un Dinerd', d'Aurevilly,

96, 105, 106

Au Maroc, P. Loti, 225
Aumont, Due d', 57
Aurevilly, Jules Barbey d', 93-107
Avec Trois Mille Cent Francs,

Daudet, 113
Aventures du Grand Sidoine, Zola,

134
d'Aydie, Chevalier Blaise Marie,

45-48, 51, 55, 56, 57, 60-61. 62,

63, 64, 65
Aziyadi, P. Loti, 204, 219

BaTf, 345

Ballades Franfaises, M. Paul Fort's,

325
Balthasar, A. France, 191
Balzac, Honors de, 127, 160, 246,

267, 270

(John Louis Guez), 69, 70

Banville, Theodore de, 362
Barante, M. de, 49
Barbauld, Mrs., 290
Barbin, Paris publisher, 71
Bamabi, Fabre F., 160
Barr^s, M. Maurice, 261, 271
Barrie, Mr., 268
Batilliat, M. Marcel, 300
Baudelaire, C, 318, 319, 324, 329,

333
Bazin, M. Ren6, 273-290
Beauvois, M. , 72, 73, 75, 76, 88,

89, 90
B^darieux, 154, 155, 159, 172,

180
Beerbohm, Mr. Max, 100
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 354
Beja, 72, 75, 77, 88, 91

36s

366

INDEX

Benserade, 349

Bercail, Fabre, F. , Le, 160

Bernard, Claude, 152

Berry, Mde. la Duchesse de, 45

Blake. William, 358

Boccaccio, 341, 342

Boileau, 85, 350, 354, 3SS-357. 3S8.

361
Boissier, M. Gaston, 69
Boissonade, M. , 72
Bolingbroke, Lady. See Villette

Lord, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 58

Bonheur dans le Crime, Le, d'Aure-

villy, 98, 105, 106
Bon Plaisir, M. de R6gnier's Le,

302
Boufflers, 130
Bouillon, Duchesse de, 59
Boule de Suif, M. Maupassant,

142
Bourges, M. itl^mir, 272
Bourget, M. Paul, 94, 113, 138,

180, 269, 239-270
Bournonville, Mme. la Princesse

de, 52
Bouton, Noel, Count of St. L^ger-

sur-Dheune, 73. See Chamilly
Bridges, Mr. Robert, 323
Browning, Elizabeth, 249, 361
Brutnmell, Du Dandyisme et de

Georges, 94, 100, 101
Brunetifere, M. , 269
Buffon, 358
Bunbury , Miss Lydia, later Comtesse

de Vigny, 13, 14

Sir Edward, 13

Burle, Zola's Le Capitaine, 145,

146
Burns, Robert, 358
Byron, Lord, 5, 10, 11, 13, 31, 98,

99. loi, 315, 359

Calandrini, Madame, 48, 49, 55,

56, 59, 61, 62, 66
Calpren^de, Gautier La, 351
Campbell, Thomas, 359
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, 341
Cantilines, Les, Moreas', 186

Carlyle, Thomas, 100, 195
Carnet de Danse , Zola's, 131
C^ard, M. Henri, 142
Celle qui m'aime, Zola, 133, 134,

13s
Chamilly, Marquis of, 71, 72, 74,

75. n< 78, 86, 88
Chanson de Roland, 6, 337
Chapone, Mrs., 290
Charcot, the physician, no
Chariot d^ Or, A. Samain's, 320
Chateaubriand, F. de, 5, 94, 95,

359
Chats, Les Paradis des, Zola,

138
Chatterton, Thomas, 19, 20;

Vigny's tragedy, 21
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 334, 338-342,

356
Ch^nier, Andr^, 2, 5, 19, 296, 301,

358
Cherbuliez, V., 268
Chesterfield, Lord, 212
Chevrier, Fabre, F. , 160, 177,

180
Christianisme, Ginie du, Chateau-
briand, 5
Chrys ant heme, Loti's Madame, 204
Cid, Corneille's, 351
Cinq-Mars, Vigny, 12
CM des Eaux, M. Henri de R6g-

nier's, 297-302
Claretie, M. Jules, 118, 153
Cmie, Mile. Scud6ry, 69
Coignard, M. Jirdme, A. France,

191
Coleridge, S. T., 7, 333, 359
Complications Sentimentales , Paul

Bourget, 250-252
Contes d Ninon , Zola, 135
Contes d Ninon, Zola's Nouveaux ,

136-139
Contes Choisis, Daudet, 114, 128
Contes de Lundi, Daudet, 113
Copp6e, M. Fran9ois, 320
Corneille, P. , 69

Thomas, 353

Cotton, Charles, 349

INDEX

367

Cowley, Abraham, 347

Cowper, William, 358

Crabbe, George, 315, 359

Cr6billon, 130

Critne (f Amour, Un, Bourget,

236
Criticism, Pojie's Essay on, 356
Crowne, John, 353

Dame Romaine, La, Vigny, 5
Dandy davant les Dandy s, Un,

d'Aurevilly, 100
Daniel, Samuel, Delia, 345
Dante, 2, 132, 342
Daudet, Alphonse, 108-128, 268
M. Ernest, Mon Frtre et Moi,

III, 112
Davenant, Sir William, 347
D3dcles, M. Verhaeren, Les, 314
Deffand, Madame du, 44, 45, 46,

59, 66
Delavigne, Casimir, 16
Delille. The Abb6, 357, 358
Delpit, M. Albert, 121
Deluge, Le, Vigny, 9
Denham, Sir John, 347, 349, 351 ;

Cooper s Hill, 349
Ddpit Amoureux, Moli^res, 353
Diracines, M. Harris' Les, 261,

271
Deschamps, Emile, 6

Eustache, 340, 341, 342, 362;

Disert, Le, P. Loti's, 203, 204, 205-

207, 208, 209, 210, 216
Desportes, Philippe, 345
Dessous des Cartes, Le, d'Aurevilly,

105, 106
Destinies, Les, Vigny, 3
Destouches, N., 36, 58
De Toute son Ame, M. Ren6 Bazin,

281-283
Diaboliques, Les, d'Aurevilly, 106
Dickens, Charles, 102, 103, 121,

246
Don Juan, Le Plus Bel Amour de,

d'Aurevilly, 99, 106
Donne, John, 311
Dorval, Marie, 16-17, 18, 21

Double Conversion, La, Daudet, 114
Double Maitresse, La, M. Henri de

R^gnier, 302
Dryade, La, Vigny, 5
Dryden, John, 183, 353, 354, 355
Du Bartas, 345

Du Bellay, Joachim, Visions, 344
Dubreuil, M. I'Abb^, 156, 157
Duchesse Bleue, La, M. Bourget 's

244-249, 269
Dumas, Alexandre, 27, 32, 267

i&loa, Vigny, 7, 10, 11-12, 16
Embarrassments, Mr. Henry

James's, 244
Empedocles, Matthew Arnold, 301
Endymion, Keats's, 300
English poetry, the influence of

France upon, 330-363
EnsorceUe, L\ d'Aurevilly, 96
d! Epicure, Le Jardin, A. France,

191, 198
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope's.

356
Espinasse, Mademoiselle de L', 36,

37.48
]&tape, L', Bourget, 260-265
itoiles, Les, Daudet, 115
Jitourdi, Molifere's, 353
Avangeliste, Daudet, no, 119

Fabre, Abb^ Fulcran, 155, 156

Ferdinand, 153-181, 268

Fantome d Orient, P. Loti, 203,

221, 227
Fie Amoureuse, La, TaAsl, 130
Ferriol, Baron d'Argental, Charles

de, 37. 38, 41, 44, 56
Madame de, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47,

51, 56, 62, 6s
Feuillet, O. 150, 268
Fielding, H., 246
Figures et Choises qui passaient, P.

Loti, 220-227
Fitzjames, Duchess of, 57
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Mr. James, ix,

340
Flaubert, G., 118, 127, 142, 270

368

INDEX

Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire, 318

319
Fleury, Cardinal de, 55
Forces Tumultueuses, Les, M. Ver-

haeren, 315
Forgeron, Le, Zola's, 138
Fort, M. Paul, 324-329
France, M. Anatole, 174, 189-201,

269
Friendship's Garland, Matthew

Arnold, 269
Froissart, 340
Fromont Jeune et Risler Ahii,

Daudet, III, 119, 120, 121

GaliUe, P. Loti's La, 216, 217,

218, 219-220, 227, 234
Gamier, Th^ophile, 11, 131, 362
Gay, Delphine, 7, 13
Gesvres, Due de, 39, 40
Ghil, M. Ren6, 293
Gilbert, poet, 19, 20
Goethe, 95, 103
Goncourt, Edmond de, 117, 118,

137, 180, 268
Gower, John, Cinquante Balades,

342
Grandeur et Servitude Militaires,

Vigny, 6, 24-25
Granson, Oton de, 340. 342
Gray, Thomas, 59, 334, 357
Grignan, Madame de, 50, 70
Gu6rin, Maurice de, 94, 95
Guerres, Zola's Trois, 143-144
Guilleragues, Pierre Girardin de,

85,86

Hal^vy, M, Ludovic, 273
Hardy, Mr. T., 155, 172, 176, 180,

268
Harland, Mr. Henry, 183, 184
Hennique, M. L6on, La Devouie,

142
Herbert, Edward, 311
Heredia, M. de, 295, 323
Hirodiade, Mallarm<5, 305, 309
Hervieu, M. Paul, 270

Histoire Comigue, A. France, i

200, 201
Histoire d^une Grecque Modeme

Pr^vot, 58
Histoire san Nom, Une, d'Aurevilly

97
Homme d' Affaires, Un, Bourget

270
Hommes, Les CEuvres et les, d'Aute

villy, 103
Horace, 356
Horaces, Les, 351, 352
Howel, James, 68, 69
Hugo, Victor, i, 5, 6, 8, 10, 16, 93,

184. 315. 329, 359. 361, 362
Humble Amour, M. Ren6 Bazin,

285
Huysmans, M. Joris Karel, 142,

271

Ibsen, H., 189, 196

Idylle Tragique, Une, Bourget, 251

Immortel, L\ Daudet, 119

Isez, the surgeon, 53

Italie, Bourget's Sensations d\

253
Italiens d'Aujourd'hui, Les, M.
Bazin, 289

Jack, Daudet, 113, 119, 120
James, Mr. Henry, 45, 120, 202,

244, 247, 251, 269
Jardin de t Infante, Au, A. Sa-

main's, 320, 321-323
Jean Gourdon, Zola's Les Quatre

Journies de, 139-141
Jean Le Maire des Beiges, 343
Jephtd, La Fille de, Vigny, 6
Jeux Rustiques et Divins, Les. M.

H. de R^gnier's, 295
Jonson, Ben, 311
Jusserand, M., 75

Kean, Edmund, 15

Keats, 7, 109, 295, 299, 300, 302,

334. 338. 359, 360
Kyd, Thomas, 345

INDEX

369

Lacordaire, 162, 163

La Fontaine, Jean de, Adonis, 350

Lamartine, A. de, 2, 319, 359, 360

Lammenais, F. de, 13

Langland, William, 339

La Terre, Zola's, 129

Lauzun, 99, 100

Leblond, C^Mnie, 47, 63

Lecouvreur, Adrienne, 59

Lee, Mr. Sidney, 345

Ulia, George Sand, 95

Le Lutrin, Boileau, 356

Lemaltre, M. Jules, 119, 153, 269

Le Petit Chose, Uaudet, in, 112,

1T4, 121, 122, 126
Les Precieuses Ridicules, Moli^re's,

353
L' Estrange, Sir Roger, Five Love

Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier,

90
Lettres de mon Moulin, Daudet,

114, 115, 126
Lettres Portugaises, 68, 71
Littiraire, A. France's La Vie, 191,

269
Lodge, Thomas, 345
Lorris, Guillaume de, 337, 338
Loti, Pierre, 138, 202-238, 268, 284
Loves of the Angels, Moore's, 10, n
Lucifer, Fabre, F., 160, 162, 166,

179
Lys Rouge, Le, A. France's, 191, 195

Macaulay, Mr. G. C, 342
Machault, Guillaume de, 340, 342,

362
Madame Corentine, M. Ren6 Bazin,

283-284
Maeterlinck, M., 313, 314
Maintenon, Madame de, 85
Malherbe, F., 346
Mallarm6, St^phane, 182, 293, 294,

305-312
Mannequin S Osier, Le, A. France,

191. 193
Manon Lescaut, 58, 119
Mariage de Loti, Le, P. Loti, 202,

221

Mariana Alcaforada, the Portuguese

Nun, 72-89
Marot, Clement, 344 ; L' Adolescence

Climentine, 343
Ma Tante Giron, M. Ren6 Bazin,

273. 274, 27s
Matelot, P. Loti, 203, 227
Maupassant, M. Guy de, 113, 127,

141, 142, 150, 242, 244, 270
Ma Vocation, Fabre, 155
Medailles dArgile, M. R^gnier,

299
Miditations Poitiques, Lamartine,

360
Meung, Jean de, 337, 338, 340
Milton, John, 2, 13, 334, 348
Mirour de COmme, 342
Moines, Les, M. Verhaeren, 314
Mo'ise, Vigny, 8
Moli&e, 58, 350, 352, 353-354
Mon Frire Yves, P. Loti, 228
Montagne, M. Paul Fort's, 327
Montaigne, M., 192
Montesquieu, 36
Moore, T., 10, 11, 13; The Loves

of the Angels, 10, 11
Mor6as, M. Jean, 184, i86, 187-188
Moreau, H6g6sippe, 23
Morice, M. Charles, 184
Motteville, Madame de, Memoirs,

82
Moulin, Zola's L'Attaque du, 142,

143
Musset, Alfred de. Confession dun
Enfant du Siicle, 291

Nabab, Le, Daudet, 119, 127

Nana, Zola's, 129

Nichina, La, M. Hughes Rebell,

271
Nodier, C, 6, 13
Noellet, Les, M. Bazin, 284
Notre Caeur, Maupassant, 244
Nouveaux Lundis, Sainte-Beuve, 3
Numa Roumestan, Daudet, 119,

120, 127
Nun's Love Letters. See Portuguese

Letters ; see Mariana Alcaforada
2 A

37°

INDEX

Oncle Cilestin, Mon, Fabre, 156,

160
Orme du Mail, L', A. France, 191,

192, 193, 194
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 324
Othello, Shakespeare's, 266, 345
Otway, Thomas, 354, 355
Outre-. Mer, M. Bourget, 252, 259

PALtoLOGUE, M., 13, 27

Parabere, Madame de, 43, 48, 51,

57, 64, 66
Paris, Gaston, 269
Paris Sentimental, M. Paul Fort's,

327, 328-329
Parnasse Contemporain, 307
Parnassians, 295, 298, 307, 323
Pascal, 190
Pater, Walter, 179
Picheur (Tlslande, P. Loti, 227,

228, 284
Pekin, P. Loti's, 234-238
Pellissier, operatic star, 52
Penruddock, Mrs., 70
Perraud, Cardinal, 153
Petrarch, 341, 342
Philips, Katherine, " Orinda," 351,

352
Philosophe Marii, Li, Destouche,

S8
Pichot, M. Am^d^e, 159
Pliiade, the, 344
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Raven,

translated by S. Mallarm^, 306 ;

also Poems, 307, 324
Poimes, Anciens et Romanesques,

M. R^gnier, 295
Poimes, Vigny, S, 6, 7
Polyphime, A. Saraain, 320
Pont-de-Veyle, Marquis de, 38, 52,

60
Pontmartin, M. de, 92
Pope, Alexander, 2, 354-355. 356-

357
Portuguese Letters, 68-90
Pritre Marii, Le, d'Aurevilly, 96,

97
Provost, M. Marcel, 270

Provost d'Exiles, Abb^, 47, 58
Propos d^Exil, P. Loti, 227
Province, M. Bazin's En, 289
Prudhomme, M. Sully, 298

Qu^LEN, Archbishop de, 163
Quinault, 352

Racan, 348, 349

Racine, 329, 333, 335, 350, 352, 353,

354. 355
Ramuntcho, P. Loti, 221, 226, 227-

233
Rape of the Lock, The, Pope, 356
Raphael, 12
Ravenel, M., 49
R^gnier, M. Henri de, 293-304
Renan, E., 153, 197, 292
Reni, Chateaubriand, 359
Rideau Cramoisi, Le, d'Aurevilly,

99. 105
Rieu, Mademoiselle, 40, 45, 46
Rod, M. Edouard, 272
Rois en Exit, Les, Daudet, 119
Rollinat, Maurice, 319
Roman de Louis XL, M. Paul

Fort's, 326
Roman de la Rose, Lorris, 337, 338,

339
Roman dun Enfant, P. Loti, 224
Roman (Tun Spahi, Loti's, 205,

228
Roman Experimental, Zola's, 267
Ronsard, P., 344, 345
Roscommon , Earl of, 347
Rose et Ninette, Daudet, 119
Rosny, 271
Rdtisserie de la Reine Pidauque, A.

France, 191
Rotrou, 351
Rougon - Macquart series of Zola,

129, 13s, 136, 137, 149, 267
Rousseau, J. J., 88, 358
Route d'Emeraude, M. Eugene

Demoldei", 271
Ruffec, Due de, 52
Ruskin, John, 35
Rutter, Joseph, 351

INDEX

371

Saint-Amant, 348

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 3, 17, 37,

160
Sainte Claire, Le Putts de, A.

France, 191
Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 343
Saint-Simon, L. de Rouvroi, Ducdc,

71. 85, 86
Saint- Victor, Paul de, 106
Samain, Albert, 318-324
Sand, George, 18, 133, 155, 160,

267
Sandeau, Jules, 160
Santillana, Spanish poet, 340
Sapho, Daudet's, 109, no, 119, 120,

121, 122
Sarcelle Bleue, La, M. Ren6 Bazin,

277-280
Scarron, Paul, no, 349
Serve's, Maurice, Dilie, 345
Schomberg, Count of, 73
Scott, Sir Walter, 12, 13, 359
Scud^ry, 351

Mademoiselle de, 69

S^ch^, M. L^on, 4, 13
Segrais's Eglogues, 349
Serao, Madame Matilde, II paese di

Cuccagna, 247
S^vign6, Madame de, 36, 37, 50, 70,

82
Shakespeare, 13, 15, 334, 338, 345,

3SS
Shelley, P. B., 2, 219, 359
Sir Martin Mar-all, Dryden's,

353
Sleep and Poetry, Keats, 360
Smollett, T., 303
Soumet, A., 13
Southey, Robert, 13
Spectator, The, 91
Spenser, Edmund, 344
Stanley, Dean, Sinai and Palestine,

207
Stello, Vigny, 18

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 180, 268
Suckling, Sir John, 347
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 343,

344

Swift, Dean, 194, 197

Swinburne, Mr. A. C, 306, 333,

362
Symons, Mr. Arthur, 182

Taine, H., 153, 154, 163, 179, 262,

263
Tarascon, 124, 128
Tencin family, 35, 38, 43, 48, 57
Tennyson, 197, 295, 338, 361
Terminations, Mr. Henry James,

224, 247
Terre qui Meurt, La, M. Bazin,

285-289, 290
Thais, A. France, 190
Thirise Raquin. Zola's, 136
Thyard, Pontus de, 345
Tissot, M. Ernest, 104
Tocqueville, A. de, 252, 255
Toussaint Galabru, Fabre, 176
Trebutien, M., 94
Trois A mes iA rtistes. See Duchesse

Bleue
Trollope, Anthony, 120, 159

Ulbach, Louis, 136, 137

Vacances dun Jeune Homme Sage,

Les, M. de R^gnier, 302-304
Vaines Tendresses, Les, M. Sully

Prudhomme, 298
Vathek, Beckford, with preface by

Mallarm6, 307
Verhaeren, M. Emile, 313-318
Verlaine, Paul, a first sight of, 182-

188
Versailles-aux-Fantimes, M. Marcel

Batilliat, 300
Viau, Thtophile de, 348
Vieille Maitresse, Une, d'Aurevilly,

97
Vigny, Alfred de, 1-34, 301, 319,

359. 360
Villes Tentaculaires, M. Verhaeren,

316
Villette, Marquise de, 41, 42,

46-47
VogU6, M. Melchior de, 242

372

INDEX

Voiture, Vincent, 69, 70, 349
Voltaire, 36, 42, 45, 49, 53, 58, 59,

64. 335. 358
Voyageuses, M. Paul Bourget, 239-
244, 247, 250

Waller, Edmund, 346, 347, 355
Whitman, Walt, 325, 329

Wordsworth, William, 2, 19, 30,

325. 359
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 343, 344

Yeats, Mr. W. B. , 323, 326

Zola, Emile, 117, 118, 129-152,
189, 246

THE END

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