[Sidenote: Some final words on the matter.]

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

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Its importance here.]

This, however, is the moral side of the matter, with which we have not much to do. As a division of literature these sentimental novels, artificial as they are, have a good deal of interest; and in a History such as the present they have very great importance. They are so entirely different in atmosphere from the work of later times, that reading them has all the refreshing effect of a visit to a strange country; and yet one feels that they themselves have opened that country for coming writers as well as readers. They are often extraordinarily ingenious, and the books to which in form they set the example, though the power of the writers made them something very different in matter—Julie, La Religieuse, Paul et Virginie,[417] Corinne, Rene—give their progenitors not a little importance, or at least not a little interest of curiosity. Besides, it was in the school of Sensibility that the author of Manon Lescaut somehow or other developed that wonderful little book. I do not know that it would be prudent to recommend modern readers to study Sensibility for themselves in the original documents just surveyed. Disappointment and possibly maledictions would probably be the result of any such attempt, except in the case of Xavier de Maistre and Constant. But these others are just the cases in which the office of historical critic justifies itself. It is often said (and nobody knows the truth of it better than critics themselves) that a diligent perusal of all the studies and causeries that have ever been written, on any one of the really great writers, will not give as much knowledge of them as half an hour's reading of their own work. But then in that case the metal is virgin, and to be had on the surface and for the picking up. The case is different where tons of ore have to be crushed and smelted, in order to produce a few pennyweights of metal.

* * * * *

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

[Sidenote: Restif de la Bretonne.]

It may, from different points of view, surprise different classes of readers to find Restif de la Bretonne (or as some would call him, Retif) mentioned here at all—at any rate to find him taken seriously, and not entirely without a certain respect. One of these classes, consisting of those who know nothing about him save at second-hand, may ground their surprise on the notion that his work is not only matter for the Index Expurgatorius, but also vulgar and unliterary, such as a French Ned Ward, without even Ned's gutter-wit, might have written. And these might derive some support from the stock ticket-jingle Rousseau du ruisseau, which, though not without some real pertinency, is directly misleading. Another class, consisting of some at least, if not most, of those who have read him to some extent, may urge that Decency—taking her revenge for the axiom of the boatswain in Mr. Midshipman Easy—forbids Duty to let him in. And yet others, less under the control of any Mrs. Grundy, literary or moral, may ask why he is let in, and Choderlos de Laclos[418] and Louvet de Courray, with some more, kept out, as they most assuredly will be.

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

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

Indeed, this moral intention, so often idly and offensively put forward by those who are themselves mere pornographers, pervades Restif throughout, and, while it certainly sometimes does carry dulness with it, undoubtedly contributes at others a kind of piquancy, because of its evident sincerity, and the quaint contrast with the subjects the author is handling. These subjects make explicit dealing with himself difficult, if not impossible: but his differentia as regards them may, with the aid of a little dexterity, be put without offence. In the first place, as regards the comparison with Rousseau, Restif is almost a gentleman: and he could not possibly have been guilty of Rousseau's blackguard tale-telling in the cases of Madame de Warens (or, as I believe, we are now told to spell it "Vuarrens") or Madame de Larnage. The way in which he speaks of his one idealised mistress, Madame "Parangon," is almost romantic. He is, indeed, savage in respect to his wife—whom he seems to have married in a sort of clairvoyant mixture of knowledge of her evil nature and fascination by her personal charms and allurements, though he had had no difficulty in enjoying these without marriage. But into none other of his scores and hundreds of actual loves in some cases and at least passing intimacies in others,[423] does he ever appear to have taken either the Restoration and Regency tone on the one hand, or that of "sickly sentimentality" on the other. Against commerce for money he lifts up his testimony unceasingly; he has, as his one editor has put it, a manie de paternite, and denounces any vice disconnected with it. With the privileges of Solomon or Haroun al Raschid, Restif would have been perfectly contented: and he never would have availed himself of that of Schahriar before the two divine sisters put a stop to it.

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

Cotytto or Venus Astarte or Ashtoreth,

he might have been a most remarkable novelist, and as it is his mere narrative faculty is such as by no means every novelist possesses. Moreover, he counts, once more, in the advance towards real things in fiction. "A pretty kind of reality!" cries Mrs. Grundy. But the real is not always the pretty, and the pretty is not always the real.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Pigault-Lebrun[425] spent nearly half of his long life in the nineteenth century, and did not die till Scott was dead in England, and the great series of novel-romances had begun, with Hugo and others, in France. But he was a man of nearly fifty in 1800, and the character of his work, except in one all-important point, or group of points, is thoroughly of the eighteenth, while even the excepted characteristics are of a more really transitional kind than anything in Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, whom we have postponed, as well as in Constant and Xavier de Maistre, whom we have admitted. He has no high reputation in literature, and, except from our own special point of view, he does not deserve even a demi-reputation. Although he is not deliberately pornographic, he is exceedingly coarse, with a great deal of the nastiness which is not even naughty, but nastiness pure and simple. There is, in fact, and in more ways than one, something in him of an extremely inferior Smollett. Comparing him with his elder contemporary, Restif de la Bretonne, he is vulgar, which Restif never is. Passing to more purely literary matters, it would be difficult, from the side of literature as an art—I do not say as a craft—to say anything for him whatever. His style[426] is, I should suppose (for I think no foreigner has any business to do more than "suppose" in that matter), simply wretched; he has sentences as long as Milton's or Clarendon's or Mr. Ruskin's, not merely without the grandeur of the first, the beauty of the last, and the weighty sense of the second, but lacking any flash of graceful, pithy, or witty phrase; character of the model-theatre and cut-out paper kind; a mere accumulation of incidents instead of a plot; hardly an attempt at dialogue, and, where description is attempted at all, utter ineffectiveness or sheer rhyparography.[427]

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

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

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

The book which stands first in his Works, L'Enfant du Carnaval, starts with an ultra-Smollettian[429] passage of coarseness, and relapses now and then. The body of it—occupied with the history of a base-born child, who tumbles into the good graces of a Milord and his little daughter, is named by them "Happy," and becomes first the girl's lover and then her husband—is a heap of extravagances, which, nevertheless, bring the picaresque pattern, from which they are in part evidently traced, to a point, not of course anywhere approaching in genius Don Quixote or Gil Blas, but somehow or other a good deal nearer general modern life. Les Barons de Felsheim, which succeeds it, seems to have taken its origin from a suggestion of the opening of Candide, and continues with a still wilder series of adventures, satirising German ways, but to some extent perhaps inspired by German literature. Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage. There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he cannot bring it off.

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

[Sidenote: Angelique et Jeanneton.]

Angelique et Jeanneton itself, as might be expected from the above reference, is, among its author's works, something like Le Reve among Zola's; it is his endeavour to be strictly proper. But, as it is also one of his most Sternian exercises, the propriety is chequered. It begins in sufficiently startling fashion; a single gentleman of easy fortune and amiable disposition, putting his latchkey in the door of his chambers one night, is touched and accosted by an interesting young person with an "argentine" voice. This may look louche; but the silvery accents appeal only for relief of needs, which, as it shortly appears, are those most properly to be supplied by a maternity hospital. It is to be understood that the suppliant is an entire stranger to the hero. He behaves in the most amiable and, indeed, noble fashion, instals her in his rooms, turns himself and his servant out to the nearest hotel, fetches the proper ministress, and, not content with this Good Samaritanism, effects a legitimate union between Jeanneton and her lover, half gives and half procures them a comfortable maintenance, resists temptation of repayment (not in coin) on more than one occasion, and sets out, on foot, to Caudebec, to see about a heritage which has come to Jeanneton's husband. On the way he falls in with Angelique (a lady this time), falls also in love with her, and marries her. The later part of the story, as is rather the way with Pigault, becomes more "accidented." There are violent scenes, jealousies, not surprising, between the two heroines, etc. But the motto-title of Marmontel's Heureusement governs all, and the end is peace, though not without some spots in its sun. That the public of 1799 did not like the book and did like La Folie Espagnole is not surprising; but the bearing of this double attempt on the growth of novel-writing as a regular craft is important.

[Sidenote: Mon Oncle Thomas.]

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

[Sidenote: Jerome.]

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

[Sidenote: The redeeming points of these.]

It may seem that too much space is being given to a reprobate and often dull author; but something has been said already to rebut the complaint, and something more may be added now and again. French literature, from the death of Chenier to the appearance of Lamartine, has generally been held to contain hardly more than two names—those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael—which can even "seem to be" those of "pillars"; and it may appear fantastic and almost insulting to mention one, who in long stretches of his work might almost be called a mere muckheap-raker, in company with them. Yet, in respect to the progress of his own department, it may be doubted whether he is not even more than their equal. Rene and Corinne contain great suggestions, but they are suggestions rather for literature generally than for the novel proper. Pigault used the improperest materials; he lacked not merely taste, but that humour which sometimes excuses taste's absence; power of creating real character, decency almost always, sense very often.[431] But all the same, he made the novel march, as it had not marched, save in isolated instances of genius, before.

[Sidenote: Others—Adelaide de Meran and Tableaux de Societe.]

[Sidenote: L'Officieux.]

Yet Pigault could hardly have deserved even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap. He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire substituted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. Adelaide de Meran (his longest single book), Tableaux de Societe, L'Officieux, and others, are of this class; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author has been credited. Adelaide is very strongly reminiscent of Richardson, and more than reminiscent of "Sensibility"; it is written in letters—though all by and to the same persons, except a few extracts—and there is no individuality of character. Pigault, it has been said, never has any, though he has some of type. But by exercising the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details—conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Societe—the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by being in the most frantic state of mutual passion with her husband, though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on the husband's. With his usual unskilfulness in managing character, Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine's almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy and "unconvincing" fashion. As for his throwing in, at the end, another fatal passion on part of their daughter for her mother's lover, it is, though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness, entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl's death. If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing, the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost inviolably constant to happy endings.[432] L'Officieux, if he had only had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux might have been tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a parvenu rich, but brave and extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into fearful scrapes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other people's affairs to do them good. The situations—as where the marquis, having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room, and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining apartment—are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the most of them.

La Famille Luceval—something of an expanded and considerably Pigaultified story a la Marmontel—is duller than any of these, and the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a classical mania on the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent from it.

[Sidenote: Further examples.]

Of the rest, M. Botte, which seems to have been a favourite, is a rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but penniless daughter of an emigre; a noble rustic, who manages to keep some of his exiled landlord's property together, etc. M. de Roberval, though in its original issue not so long as Adelaide de Meran, becomes longer by a suite of another full volume, and is a rather tedious chronicle of ups and downs. There may be silence about the remainder.

[Sidenote: Last words on him.]

The stock and, as it may be called, "semi-official" ticket for Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him, appears to be verve: and the recognised dictionary-sense of verve is "heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition." In the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of "go," which is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label. These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long as we go on calling Chaucer "the father of English poetry" and Wyclif "the father of English prose" we need not boast ourselves too much. But Pigault has this "go"—never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for passages of considerable length, which possess "carrying" power. It undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and justifying his true place in the further "domestication"—if only in domesticities too often mean and grimy—of the French novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The French novel in 1800.]

There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at the end of the eighteenth century. No thoroughly similar point is reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to me, in regard to a particular department of literature. In England—the only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself—the general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations, reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim. She had made earlier "running"; on the whole period of some seven hundred years she had always, till very recently, been in front. But in the novel, as distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic, of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction. Very great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the exceptions of Lesage in Gil Blas, Prevost in that everlastingly wonderful "single-speech" of his, and Rousseau in La Nouvelle Heloise, none had written a great novel. No single writer of any greatness had been a novelist pure and simple. No species[433] of fiction, except the short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.

The main point, where England went right and France went wrong—to be only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as Pigault-Lebrun—was the recognition of the connection—the intimate and all but necessary connection—of the completed novel with ordinary life. Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last three or four or five chapters. There is much and sometimes great literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments. But a real objective novel of ordinary life, such as Tom Jones, or even Humphry Clinker, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in English, you will not find. Of the Scudery romances we need not speak again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than Amadis and its family themselves. Scarron has some and Furetiere more objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at the pattern than at the life-model. Madame de la Fayette has much, and some of her followers a little, real passion; but her manners, descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind. The fairy tales are of course not "real." Marivaux is aiming directly at Sensibility, preciousness, "psychology," if you like, but not at holding up the glass to any ordinary nature as such.[434] And though Crebillon might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or legendary acting of the Comedie Humaine by living persons a hundred years later at Venice.

No writer perhaps illustrates what is being said better than Prevost. No one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest reality, except Manon Lescaut; and that, like La Princesse de Cleves, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy of convention whatever, is simply a study of passion, not of life at large at all. With the greater men the case alters to some extent in proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to such an extent as to affect the general rule. Voltaire avowedly never attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life—save as the merest by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in Julie, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their leaders, and so do all the minor conteurs.

The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here. The failure of a very literary nation—applying the most disciplined literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of which they had led Europe itself—to get out of the trammels which we had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very nature of their own literary character. Until the most recent years, if not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy without a type, a "kind," a set of type-and kind-rules, a classification and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked over. Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type, no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the craftsman except "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it, or, better, recreate it—with variation and decoration ad libitum—as faithfully, but as freely, as you can." Of this great fact even Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice. Indeed the "comic prose epic" notion might reduce to rules like those of the verse. Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from formalising it. But every really great novel has illustrated it; and attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a novelists' code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to welcome them as a Covenant of Faith. It is because Pigault-Lebrun, though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in practice, that he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.

Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown the irrepressible vitality of the French conte, the seven hundred years had not been wasted. The product of the first half of them remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the "gazophile" of the older age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the Comte de Tressan;[435] but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken open and utilised. It is open to any one to contend—it is, indeed, pretty much the opinion of the present writer—that it was this very neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results. For those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may be other explanations. But any intelligent reader can do something for himself if he has the facts before him. It is these facts that it has been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.

They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth. Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the "Middle" period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding—more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen—was born Pantagruelism. In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Heptameron, through all others that we noticed down to Adolphe, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly. How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell.[436]

FOOTNOTES:

[404] We have seen above how things were "shaping for" it, in the Pastoral and Heroic romances. But the shape was not definitely taken in them.

[405] In the following pages, and here only in this volume, the author has utilised, though with very considerable alterations, some previously published work, A Study of Sensibility, which appeared originally in the Fortnightly Review for September 1882, and was republished in a volume (Essays on French Novelists, London, 1891) which has been for some years out of print. Much of the original essay, dealing with Marivaux and others already treated here, has been removed, and the whole has been cut down, revised, and adjusted to its new contexts. But it seemed unnecessary to waste time in an endeavour to say the same thing differently about matters which, though as a whole indispensable, are, with perhaps one exception, individually not of the first importance.

[406] These words were originally written more than thirty years ago. I am not sure that there was not something prophetic in them.

[407] Madame de Fontaines in La Comtesse de Savoie and Amenophis "follows her leader" in more senses than one—including a sort of pseudo-historical setting or insetting which became almost a habit. But she is hardly important.

[408] Readers of Thackeray may remember in The Paris Sketch Book ("On the French School of Painting," p. 52, Oxford ed.) some remarks on Jacquand's picture, "The Death of Adelaide de Comminge," which he thought "neither more nor less than beautiful." But from his "it appears," in reference to the circumstances, it would seem that he did not know the book, save perhaps from a catalogue-extract or summary.

[409] The extreme shortness of all these books may be just worth noticing. Reaction from the enormous romances of the preceding century may have had something to do with it; and the popularity of the "tale" something more. But the causa verissima was probably the impossibility of keeping up sentiment at high pressure for any length of time, incident, or talk.

[410] Vide on the process Crebillon's Les Egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit, as above, pp. 371, 372.

[411] The parallel with "George Eliot" will strike most people.

[412] But for uniformity's sake I should not have translated this, for fear of doing it injustice. "Not presume to dictate," in Mr. Jingle's constantly useful phrase, but it seems to me one of the finest in French prose.

[413] "Craze" has been suggested; but is, I think, hardly an exact synonym.

[414] This may seem to contradict, or at any rate to be inconsistent with, a passage above (p. 367) on the "flirtations" of Crebillon's personages. It is, however, only a more strictly accurate use of the word.

[415] Two remarkable and short passages of his, not quoted in the special notice of him, may be given—one in English, because of its remarkable anticipation of the state of mind of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the other in French, as a curious "conclusion of the whole matter." They are both from Marianne.

"I had resolved not to sleep another night in the house. I cannot indeed tell you what was the exact object of my fear, or why it was so lively. All that I know is that I constantly beheld before me the countenance of my landlord, to which I had hitherto paid no particular attention, and then I began to find terrible things in this countenance His wife's face, too, seemed to be gloomy and dark; the servants looked like scoundrels; all their faces made me in a state of unbearable alarm. I saw before me swords, daggers, murders, thefts, insults. My blood grew cold at the perils I imagined."

* * * * *

"Enfin ces agitations, tant agreables que penibles, s'affaiblirent et se passerent. L'ame s'accoutume a tout; sa sensibilite s'use: et je me familiarisais avec mes esperances et mes inquietudes."

[416] Since, long ago, I formed the opinion of Adolphe embodied above, I have, I think, seen French criticisms which took it rather differently—as a personal confession of the "confusions of a wasted youth," misled by passion. The reader must judge which is the juster view.

[417] By a little allowance for influence, if not for intrinsic value.

[418] On representations from persons of distinction I have given Laclos a place in an outhouse (see "Add. and Corr."). But I have made this place as much of a penitentiary as I could.

[419] I must apologise by anticipation to the official French critic. To him, I know, even if he is no mere minor Malherbe, Restif's style is very faulty; but I should not presume to take his point of view, either for praise or blame.

[420] There is a separate bibliography by Cubieres-Palmezeaux (1875). The useful Dictionnaire des Litteratures of Vapereau contains a list of between thirty and forty separate works of Restif's, divided into nearer two than one hundred volumes. He followed Prevost in Nouveaux Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite as he had followed Marivaux in the Paysan Perverti. He completed this work of his own with La Paysanne Pervertie; he wrote, besides the Pornographe, numerous books of social, general, and would-be philosophical reform—Le Mimographe, dealing with the stage; Les Gynographes, with a general plan for rearranging the status of women; L'Andrographe, a "whole duty of man" of a very novel kind; Le Thesmographe, etc.,—besides, close upon the end and after the autobiography above described, a Philosophie de M. Nicolas. His more or less directly narrative pieces, Le Pied de Fanchette, Lucile, Adele, La Femme Infidele, Ingenue Saxancour, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as La Vie de Mon Pere, his most respectable book, is wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that the notice in Vapereau, while not bearing very hard on Restif on the whole, repeats the words cynisme and cynique in regard to him. Unless the term is in part limited and in part extended, so as to mean nothing but "exposure of things generally kept secret without apparent shame," it is entirely misplaced. Not merely outside of, but actually in his erotomania, Restif was a sentimental philanthropist of the all but most genuine kind, tainted indeed with the vanity and self-centredness which had reached their acme in Rousseau, but very much more certainly sincere, and of a temperament as different as possible from what is commonly called cynicism.

[421] There are, however, contradictory statements on this point.

[422] Nicolas [Edme] Restif being apparently his baptismal name, and "de la Bretonne" merely one of the self-bestowed agnominal nourishes so common in the French eighteenth century. He chose to consider the surname evidence of descent from the Emperor Pertinax; and as for his Christian name he seems to have varied it freely. Rose Lambelin, one of his harem, and a soubrette of some literature, used to address him as "Anne-Augustin," Anne being, as no doubt most readers know, a masculine as well as a feminine prenom in French.

[423] Some, and perhaps not a few of their objects, may have been imaginary "dream-mistresses," created by Morpheus in an impurer mood than when he created Lamb's "dream-children." But some, I believe, have been identified; and others of the singular "Calendar" affixed to Monsieur Nicolas have probably escaped identification.

[Sidenote: His life and the reasons for giving it.]

[424] It has not been necessary (and this is fortunate, for even if it had been necessary, it would have been scarcely possible) to give biographies of the various authors mentioned in this book, except in special cases. Something was generally known of most of them in the days before education received a large E, with laws and rates to suit: and something is still in a way, supposed to be known since. But of the life of Pigault, who called himself Lebrun, it may be desirable to say something, for more reasons than one. In the first place, this life had rather more to do with his work than is always the case; in the second, very little will be found about him in most histories of French literature; in the third, there will be found assigned to him, in the text—not out of crotchet, or contumacy, or desire to innovate, but as a result of rather painful reading—a considerably higher place in the history of the novel than he has usually occupied. His correct name—till, by one of the extremest eccentricities of the French Chats-Fourres, he was formally unbegot by his Roman father, and the unbegetting (plus declaration of death) confirmed by the Parlement of Paris—was the imposing one of Charles Antoine Guillaume Pigault de L'Epinoy. The paternal Pigault, as may be guessed from his proceedings, was himself a lawyer, but of an old Calais family tracing itself to Queen Philippa's protege, Eustache de Saint-Pierre; and, besides the mysterious life-in-death or death-in-life, Charles Antoine Guillaume had to suffer from him, while such things existed, several lettres de cachet. The son certainly did his best to deserve them. Having been settled, on leaving school as a clerk in an English commercial house, he seduced his master's daughter, ran away with her, and would no doubt have married her—for Pigault was never a really bad fellow—if she had not been drowned in the vessel which carried the pair back to France. He escaped—one hopes not without trying to save her. After another scandal—not the second only—of the same kind, he did marry the victim, and the marriage was the occasion of the singular exertion of patria potestas referred to above. At least two lettres de cachet had preceded it, and it is said that only the taking of the Bastille prevented the issue, or at least the effect, of a third. Meanwhile, he had been a gentleman-trooper in the gendarmerie d'elite de la petite maison du roi, which, seeing that the roi was Louis Quinze, probably did not conduct itself after the fashion of the Thundering Legion, or of Cromwell's Ironsides, or even of Captain Steele's "Christian Hero." The life of this establishment, though as probably merry, was not long, and Pigault became an actor—a very bad but rather popular actor, it was said. Like other bad actors he wrote plays, which, if not good (they are certainly not very cheerful to read), were far from unsuccessful. But it was not till after the Revolution, and till he was near forty, that he undertook prose fiction; his first book being L'Enfant du Carnaval in 1792 (noticed in text). The revolutionary fury, however, of which there are so many traces in his writings, caught him; he went back to soldiering and fought at Valmy. He did not stay long in the army, but went on novel-writing, his success having the rather unexpected, and certainly very unusual, effect of reconciling his father. Indeed, this arbitrary parent wished not only to recall him to life, which was perhaps superfluous, but to "make an eldest son of him." This, Pigault, who was a loose fish and a vulgar fellow, but, as was said above, not a scoundrel, could not suffer; and he shared and shared alike with his brothers and sisters. Under the Empire he obtained a place in the customs, and held it under succeeding reigns till 1824, dying eleven years later at over eighty, and having written novels continuously till a short time before his death, and till the very eve of 1830. This odd career was crowned by an odd accident, for his daughter's son was Emile Augier. I never knew this fact till after the death of my friend, the late Mr. H. D. Traill. If I had, I should certainly have asked him to write an Imaginary Conversation between grandfather and grandson. Some years (1822-1824) before his last novel, a complete edition of novels, plays, and very valueless miscellanies had been issued in twenty octavo volumes. The reader, like the river Iser in Campbell's great poem, will be justified for the most part in "rolling rapidly" through them. But he will find his course rather unexpectedly delayed sometimes, and it is the fact and the reasons of these delays which must form the subject of the text.—There is no doubt that Pigault was very largely read abroad as well as at home. We know that Miss Matilda Crawley read him before Waterloo. She must have inherited from her father, Sir Walpole, a strong stomach: and must have been less affected by the change of times than was the case with her contemporary, Scott's old friend, who having enjoyed "your bonny Mrs. Behn" in her youth, could not read her in age. For our poor maligned Afra (in her prose stories at any rate, and most of her verse, if not in her plays) is an anticipated model of Victorian prudery and nicety compared with Pigault. I cannot help thinking that Marryat knew him too. Chapter and verse may not be forthcoming, and the resemblance may be accounted for by common likeness to Smollett: but not, to my thinking, quite sufficiently.

[425] He had a younger brother, in a small way also a novelist, and, apparently, in the Radcliffian style, who extra-named himself rather in the manner of 1830—Pigault-Maubaillarck. I have not yet come across this junior's work.—For remarks of Hugo himself on Pigault and Restif, see note at end of chapter.

[426] At least in his early books; it improves a little later. But see note on p. 453.

[427] For a defence of this word, v. sup. p. 280, note.

[428] It may be objected, "Did not the Scuderys and others do this?" The answer is that their public was not, strictly speaking, a "public" at all—it was a larger or smaller coterie.

[429] It has been said that Pigault spent some time in England, and he shows more knowledge of English things and books than was common with Frenchmen before, and for a long time after, his day. Nor does he, even during the Great War, exhibit any signs of acute Anglophobia.

[430] Pigault's adoration for Voltaire reaches the ludicrous, though we can seldom laugh with him. It led him once to compose one of the very dullest books in literature, Le Citateur, a string of anti-Christian gibes and arguments from his idol and others.

[431] Yet sometimes—when, for instance, one thinks of the rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's Eric, or the spiritus vulgaritatis fortissimus of Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur—one feels a little ashamed of abusing Pigault.

[432] There was, of course, a milder and perhaps more effective possibility—to make the young turn to the young, and leave Madame de Francheville no solace for her sin. But for this also Pigault would have lacked audacity.

[433] For the story "species" of Gil Blas was not new, was of foreign origin, and was open to some objection; while the other two books just named derived their attraction, in the one case to a very small extent, in the other to hardly any at all, from the story itself.

[434] Not that Jacob and Marianne are unnatural—quite the contrary—but that their situations are conventionalised.

[435] Corps d'Extraits de Romans de Chevalerie. 4 vols. Paris, 1782.

[436] The link between the two suggested at p. 458, note, is as follows. That Victor Hugo should, as he does in the Preface to Han d'Islande and elsewhere, sneer at Pigault, is not very wonderful: for, besides the difference between canaille and caballeria, the author of M. Botte was the most popular novelist of Hugo's youth. But why he has, in Part IV. Book VII. of Les Miserables selected Restif as "undermining the masses in the most unwholesome way of all" is not nearly so clear, especially as he opposes this way to the "wholesomeness" of, among others—Diderot!



APPENDICES



CHRONOLOGICAL CONSPECTUS OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF FRENCH FICTION NOTICED IN THIS VOLUME

11TH CENTURY

Vie de Saint Alexis (probably).

Roland and one or two other Chansons (possibly).

12TH CENTURY

Most of the older Chansons.

Arthurian Legend (in some of its forms).

Roman de Troie, Romans d'Alexandre (older forms).

13TH CENTURY

Rest of the more genuine Chansons.

Rest of ditto Arthuriad and "Matter of Rome."

Romans d'Aventures (many).

Early Fabliaux (probably).

Roman de la Rose and Roman de Renart (older parts).

Prose Stories (Aucassin et Nicolette), etc.

14TH CENTURY

Rehandlings, and younger examples, of all kinds above mentioned.

15TH CENTURY

Ditto, but only latest forms of all but Prose Stories, and many of the others rendered into prose.

Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. First edition, 1480, but written much earlier.

Petit Jehan de Saintre, about 1459, or earlier.

Jehan de Paris. Uncertain, but before 1500.

16TH CENTURY

Rabelais. First Book of Pantagruel Second of the whole, 1533; Gargantua, 1535; rest of Pantagruel at intervals, to the (posthumous) Fifth Book in 1564.

Marguerite de Navarre. Heptameron. Written before (probably some time before) Marguerite's death in 1549. Imperfectly published as Les Amants Fortunes, etc., in 1558; completely, under its permanent title, next year.

Bonaventure Desperiers. Cymbalum Mundi, 1537; Contes et Joyeux Devis, 1558, but written at least fourteen years earlier, as the author died in 1544.

Helisenne de Crenne. Les Angoisses, etc., 1538.

Amadis Romances. Date of Spanish or Portuguese originals uncertain. Herberay published the first part of his French translation of Amadis itself in 1540.

Many of the small pastoral and adventurous stories noticed at the beginning of Chapter VIII. appeared in the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century, the remainder in the first quarter of the seventeenth. But of the Greek and Spanish compositions, which had so great an influence on them and on the subsequent "Heroic" School, the work of Heliodorus had been translated as early as 1546, and the Diana of Montemayor in 1578.

17TH CENTURY

Honore d'Urfe. L'Astree, 1607-19. (First three parts in Urfe's lifetime, fourth and fifth after his death in 1625.)

"Heroic" Romance, 1622-60, as regards its principal examples, the exact dates of which are given in a note to p. 176. Madame de Villedieu wrote almost up to her death in 1683.

Fairy Tales, etc. The common idea that Perrault not only produced the masterpieces but set the fashion of the kind is inexact. Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes des Fees appeared in 1682, whereas Perrault's Contes de ma Mere L'Oye did not come till fifteen years later, in 1697. The precise dates of the writing of Hamilton's Tales are not, I think, known. They must, for the most part, have been between the appearance of Galland's Arabian Nights, 1704, and the author's death in 1720. As for the Cabinet and its later constituents, see below on the eighteenth century.

Sorel, Ch. Francion, 1622; Le Berger Extravagant, 1627.

Scarron, P. Le Roman Comique, 1651.

Cyrano de Bergerac. Histoire Comique, etc., 1655.

Furetiere, A. Le Roman Bourgeois, 1666.

La Fayette, Madame de. La Princesse de Cleves, 1678. Her first book, La Princesse de Montpensier (much slighter but well written), had appeared eighteen years earlier, and Zaide or Zayde in 1670, fathered by Segrais.

Fenelon. Telemaque, 1699.

18TH CENTURY

Cabinet des Fees, containing not only the authors or translators mentioned under the head of the preceding century, but a series of later writings down to the eve of the Revolution. Gueulette's adaptations and imitations ranged from the Soirees Bretonnes, published in 1712 during Hamilton's lifetime, to the Thousand and One Hours, 1733, the other collections mentioned in the text coming between. It may be worth mentioning that, being an industrious editor as well as tale-teller and playwright, he reprinted Le Petit Jehan de Saintre in 1724 and Rabelais in 1732. Caylus's tales seem to have been scattered over the middle third of the century from about 1730 to his death in 1765. Cazotte's Diable Amoureux (not in the Cabinet) is of 1772—he had written very inferior things of the tale kind full thirty years earlier. Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont (who was long an actual governess in England) wrote her numerous "books for the young" for the most part between 1757 (Le Magazin des Enfants) and 1774 (Contes Moraux).

Lesage. Le Diable Boiteux, 1707; Gil Blas de Santillane, 1715-35.

Marivaux. Les Effets Surprenants, 1713-14; Marianne, 1731-36; Le Paysan Parvenu, 1735.

Prevost. Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite, 1728-32, followed by Manon Lescaut, 1733; Cleveland, 1732-39; Le Doyen de Killerine, 1735; Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne, 1741.

(It may not be impertinent to draw attention to the fact that Prevost, like Defoe—though not quite to the same extent, and in the middle, not towards the end of his career—concentrated the novel-part of an enormous polygraphic production upon a few years.)

Crebillon fils. Lettres de la Marquise, 1732; Tanzai et Neadarne, 1734; Les Egarements, 1736; Le Sopha, 1745; La Nuit et le Moment, 1755; Le Hasard au Coin du Feu, 1763; Ah! Quel Conte! 1764.

Voltaire's Tales were distributed over a large part of his long and insatiably busy life; but none of his best are very early. Zadig is of 1747; Micromegas of 1752; Candide of 1759; L'Ingenu and La Princesse de Babylone of 1767 and 1768 respectively.

Rousseau. La Nouvelle Heloise, 1760; Emile, 1762.

Diderot. Les Bijoux Indiscrets, 1748. Jacques le Fataliste and La Religieuse were posthumously published, but must have been written much earlier than their author's death in 1784.

Marmontel. Contes Moraux appeared in the official or semi-official Mercure de France, with which the author was connected from 1753-60, being its manager or editor for the last two of these years. Belisaire came out in 1767.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Paul et Virginie, 1787; La Chaumiere Indienne, 1790.

"Sensibility" Novels:—

Madame de Tencin. Le Comte de Comminge, 1735; Les Malheurs de l'Amour, 1747.

Madame Riccoboni. Le Marquis de Cressy, 1758; Lettres de Julie Catesby, 1759; Ernestine, 1762.

Madame Elie de Beaumont. Le Marquis de Roselle, 1764.

Madame de Souza. Adele de Senanges, 1794.

Madame de Genlis. Mlle. de Clermont, 1802.

Madame de Duras. Ourika, 1823; Edouard, 1825.

Xavier de Maistre. Voyage autour de ma Chambre, 1794; Le Lepreux de la Cite d'Aoste, 1812; Les Prisonniers du Caucase, La Jeune Siberienne, 1825.

Benjamin Constant. Adolphe, 1815.

Restif de la Bretonne. Le Pied de Fanchette, 1769; Adele, 1772; Le Paysan Perverti, 1775-76; Les Contemporaines, 1780-85; Ingenue Saxancour, 1789; Monsieur Nicolas, 1794-97.

Pigault-Lebrun. L'Enfant du Carnaval, 1792; Les Barons de Felsheim, 1798; Angelique et Jeanneton, Mon Oncle Thomas, La Folie Espagnole, 1799; M. Botte, 1802; Jerome, 1804; Tableaux de Societe, 1813; Adelaide de Meran, 1815; M. de Roberval, L'Officieux, 1818.



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

(Although it is probably idle to attempt to satisfy or placate the contemporary helluo of bibliography, it may be respectful to other readers to observe that this is not intended to deal with the whole subject, but only as a companion, or chrestomathic guide, to this book itself.)

CHAPTER I

Apollonius of Tyre. Ed. Thorpe. London, 1834.

English Novel, The. By the present writer. London (Dent), 1913.

French Literature, A Short History of. By the present writer. Oxford, 1882, and often reprinted.

Greek Romances, The. Most convenient editions of originals—Didot's Erotici Graeci, Paris, 1856, or Teubner's, ed. Herscher, Leipzig, 1858. English translations in Bohn's Library. For those who prefer books about things to the things themselves, there is a very good English monograph by Wolff (Columbia University Series, New York).

Hymn of St. Eulalia. Quoted in most histories of French literature, e.g. that entered above, pp. 4, 5.

Life of St. Alexis. Ed. G. Paris and L. Pannier. Paris, 1872-87.

CHAPTER II

Alexander Legends ("Matter of Rome"). The most important editions of romances concerning Alexander are Michelant's of the great poem from which, according to the most general theory, the "Alexandrine" or twelve-syllabled verse takes its name (Stuttgart, 1846), and M. Paul Meyer's Alexandre le Grand dans la Litterature Francaise au moyen age (2 vols., Paris, 1886), a monograph of the very first order, with plentiful reproduction of texts.

Arthurian Legend, The. No complete bibliography of this is possible here—a note of some fulness will be found in the writer's Short History (see above on Chapter I.). The most important books for an English reader who wishes to supplement Malory are M. Paulin Paris's abstract of the whole, Les Romans de la Table Ronde (5 vols., Paris, 1869-77), a very charming set of handy volumes, beautifully printed and illustrated; and, now at last, Dr. Sommer's stately edition of the "Vulgate" texts, completed recently, I believe (Carnegie Institution, Washington, U.S.A.).

Chansons de Gestes. The first sentence of the last entry applies here with greater fulness. The editions of Roland are very numerous; and those of other chansons, though there are not often two or more of the same, run to scores of volumes. The most important books about them are M. Leon Gautier's Les Epopees Francaises (4 vols., Paris, 1892) and M. Bedier's Les Legendes Epiques (4 vols., Paris, 1908-13).

Sainte-More, B. de. Roman de Troie. Ed. Joly. Rouen, 1870. Edited a second time in the series of the Societe des Anciens Textes Francais.

CHAPTER III

The bibliography of the Romans d'Aventures generally is again too complicated and voluminous to be attempted here. A fair amount of information will be found, as regards the two sides, French and English, of the matter, in the writer's Short Histories of the two literatures—French as above, English (Macmillan, 9th ed., London, 1914), and in his Romance and Allegory, referred to in the text. Short of the texts themselves, but for fuller information than general histories contain, Dunlop's well-known book, reprinted in Bohn's Library with valuable additions, and Ellis's Early English Romances, especially the latter, will be found of greatest value.

Partenopeus de Blois. 2 vols. Paris, 1834.

CHAPTER IV

Nouvelles du 13'e et du 14'me Siecle. Ed. L. Moland et Ch. d'Hericault. Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. 2 vols. Paris, 1856.

CHAPTER V

Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les. Numerous editions in the cheap collections of French classics.

Fabliaux. Ed. A. de Montaiglon et G. Raynaud. 6 vols. Paris, 1872-88.

Jehan de Paris. Ed. Montaiglon. Paris, 1874.

Petit Jehan de Saintre. Ed. Guichard. Paris, 1843.

Roman de la Rose. Ed. F. Michel. Paris, 1864.

Roman de Renart. The completest (but not a complete) edition of the different parts is that of Meon and Chabaille (5 vols., Paris, 1826-35). The main or "Ancien" Renart was re-edited by E. Martin (3 vols., Paris and Strasbourg, 1882-87).

CHAPTER VI

Rabelais. Editions of the original very numerous: and of Urquhart's famous English translation more than one or two recently. The cheapest and handiest of the former, without commentary, is that in the Collection Garnier. Of commentaries and books on Rabelais there is no end.

CHAPTER VII

Amadis Romances. No modern reprints of Herberay and his followers. Southey's English versions of Amadis and Palmerin are not difficult to obtain.

Desperiers, B. Contes et Joyeuse Devis, etc. Ed. Lacour. 2 vols. Paris, 1866.

Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron. Editions again numerous, including cheap ones in the collections.

Moyen de Parvenir, Le. Ed. Jacob. Paris, 1860. (For Helisenne de Crenne see text, and Reynier—v. inf. on next chapter.)

CHAPTER VIII

The general histories and bibliographies of M. Reynier and Herr Koerting, as well as the monographs of MM. Chatenay, Magne, and Reure, will be found registered in the notes to text, and references to them in the index. The original editions are also given in text or note. Modern reprints—except of the fairy stories and one or two others—are almost entirely wanting. For the Greek Romances see above under Chapter I. The Astree, after its first issues, appeared as a whole in 1637 and 1647, the latter being the edition referred to in "Add. and Corr." But the later eighteenth-century (1733) version of the Abbe Souchay is said to be "doctored." I have not thought it worth while to look up either this or the earlier abridgment (La Nouvelle Astree of 1713), though this latter is not ill spoken of. For the Cabinet des Fees (41 vols., Geneva, 1785-89) see text.

CHAPTER IX

Sorel. Francion is in the Collection Garnier, Le Berger Extravagant and Polyandre only in the originals.

Scarron. Le Roman Comique. The 1752 edition (3 vols.) is useful, but there are reprints.

Furetiere. Le Roman Bourgeois. Collection Jannet et Picard, 1854.

Cyrano de Bergerac. Voyages, etc. Ed. Jacob. Paris, 1858.

Mme. de la Fayette. La Princesse de Cleves. Paris, 1881.

CHAPTER X

For those who wish to study Lesage and Prevost at large, the combined Dutch Oeuvres Choisies, in 54 vols. (Amsterdam, 1783), will offer a convenient, if not exactly handy, opportunity. Separate editions of the Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas are very, and of Manon Lescaut fairly, numerous.

Marivaux. Oeuvres. 12 vols. Paris, 1781.

Crebillon fils. Oeuvres Completes. 7 vols. Londres, 1772.

CHAPTER XI

The work, in novel, of Voltaire and Rousseau is in all the cheap collections of Didot, Garnier, etc. Of that of Diderot there have recently been several partial collections, but I think no complete one. It is better to take the Oeuvres, by Assezat and Tourneux, mentioned in the text (20 vols., Paris, 1875-77).

Marmontel's Oeuvres appeared in 19 vols. (Paris, 1818), and I have used, and once possessed, a more modern and compacter issue in 7 vols. (Paris, 1820?). The Contes Moraux appeared together in 1770 and later.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Oeuvres. 12 vols. 1834. Very numerous separate editions (or sometimes with La Chaumiere Indienne) of Paul et Virginie.

CHAPTER XII

Minor "Sensibility" novels. Most of them in a handsome 7-vol. edition (Paris, n.d.) in Garnier's Bibliotheque Amusante. This also includes Marivaux.

X. de Maistre. Editions numerous.

B. Constant. Adolphe. Paris, 1842; and with Introduction by M. Anatole France (1889); besides M. de Lescure's noticed in text.

Restif de la Bretonne. Selection of Les Contemporaines, by Assezat. 3 vols. Paris, 1875-76.

Pigault-Lebrun. Edition mentioned in text.



INDEX

(The dates given in this Index are confined to persons directly dealt with in this volume. Those of the more important books noticed will be found in the Chronological Conspectus. In other respects I have made it as full as possible, in an Index nominum, as regards both authors and titles.)

Abbot, The, xiii

Abdalla, Les Aventures d', 258, 259

Acajou et Zirphile, 267

Achilles Tatius, 37, 157 note, 220 note, 350

Addison, 107, 232, 339

Adelaide de Meran, 465

Adolphe, 372 note, 429, 437, 438, 442-451, 472

AElfric, 73 note

Aeneid, The, 2 note

Ah! Quel Conte! 371 sq.

Aime-Martin, 425

Aisse, Mlle., 355 note

Alcandre Frustre, 243

Alcibiade ou le moi, 415, 416

Alcidamie, 242

Alcidiane, 236

"Alcidonis of Megara," 419, 424 note

Alciphron, 389

Alexander, Romances of, 19, 20, 473

Alexis, Vie de Saint, 6-8, 475, 479

Aliscans, 14

Allen, Mr. George, 412 note

Almahide, 176 note, 225, 226

Amadas et Idoine, 71

Amadis of Gaul, 42 note, 57, 134, 145-150, 171, 175, 197, 201, 220, 221, 236, 287 note, 353, 409, 476, 481

Amenophis, 430 note

Amis et Amiles, 13, 14, 77, 146

Amory (author of John Buncle), 277, 454

Amours Galantes, 243-245

Amyot, Jacques (1513-1593), 133, 144

Anacharsis, 212 sq.

Anastasius, 290

Anatomy (Burton's), 206 note

Angelique et Jeanneton, 462, 463

Angoisses, Les. See H. de Crenne

Annette et Lubin, 415

Apollonius of Tyre, 3, 479

Apollonius Rhodius, 1 note, 2 note, 37, 274

Apologie pour Herodote, 143

Apology, the Platonic, 388

Apuleius, 2, 251 note

Arabian Nights, The, 246 sq., 258 sq., 305, 313 sq., 318, 371 sq., 476

Arcadia, the, 103, 165, 166, 174

Argenis, 152 note

Aristaenetus, Letters of, 327

Aristides (of Smyrna), 350 note

Aristophanes, 136

Aristotle, 331

Arnalte and Lucenda, 145 note

Arnold, Mr. Matthew, vi, 156, 364, 385

Arnoult et Clarimonde, 161, 162

Artamene. See Grand Cyrus, Le

Arthurian Legend, The, 3, 20-54, 73, 104, 105

Arthur of Little Britain, 146, 147

Ascham, 26 note, 61

Asseneth, 80, 81, 87

Assezat, M., 454

Astree, the, xii, xiii, 152-157, 162, 167-175, 197, 212 note, 218 note, 220, 226 note, 229, 234, 277 note, 476, 481

As You Like It, 48, 174

Aubignac (F. Hedelin, Abbe d', 1604-1676), 238, 239

Aucassin et Nicolette, 24, 59, 61, 74, 79, 87, 475

Augier, E., 458 note

Aulnoy (Marie Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d', 1650?-1705), 154, 246 sq., 273, 476

Auneuil, Mme. d', 258

Austen, Miss, 287, 428-434, 471

Avellaneda, 327

Aventures de Floride, Les, 162

Babouc, 383

Bacon, 298

Bailey, Mr. P. J., 384

Balfour, Mr. A. J., 115

Balzac, H. de, 288, 353

Barclay (author of Argenis), 152 note

Barons de Felsheim, Les, 461

Bassa, L'Illustre, 223-225, 281

Baudelaire, xiv

Beaconsfield, Lord, 306

Beauchamps, P. F. G. de (1689-1761), 265 note, 266

Beauvau, P. de, 81

Beckford, 306

Bedier, M., 13 note, 480

Behn, Afra, 242, 458 note

Belier, Le, 308 sq.

Belisaire, 413

Bellaston, Lady, 343

Belle et la Bete, La, 253

Bentley, 194

Beowulf, 11

Berger Extravagant, Le, 277, 278, 476, 482

Bergerac. See Cyrano de B.

Bergeries de Juliette, Les, 157, 159, 160

Berkeley, 389

Berners, Lord, 146

Beroalde de Verville (Francois, 1558-1612), 111, 162, 163

Berte aux grands Pies, 15

Besant, Sir W., 121

Bevis of Hampton, 71

Beyle, 442

Bibliotheque Universelle des Romans, 206 note

Biche au Bois, La, 254

Bijoux Indiscrets, Les, 403, 405, 411

Black Arrow, The, 82

Blair, H., 71

Blancandin et l'Orgueilleuse d'Amours, 71

Blonde d'Oxford, 102 note

Boccaccio, 16, 18, 81, 93

Boileau-Despreaux (Nicolas, 1636-1711), 175, 240, 295, 330, 331

Bonhomme, M. H., 257 note

Borrow, 456

Bors, Sir, 53

Bossuet, 40 note

Boswell, 386 note, 422 note

Botte, M., 467, 472 note

Bouchet, G. (1526-1606), 143

Bouchet, J. (1475-1550), 143 note

Bovary, Madame, 446

Brantome (Pierre de Bourdeilles, 1540?-1614), 135, 136, 140

Brown, Tom, 281

Browne, W., 236

Browning, R., 52, 74, 234, 404 note

Brunetiere, M., 161 note, 274 note, 410 note

Buncle, John, 277

Burney, Miss, 347, 468

Burton (of the Anatomy), 206 note

Bussy-Rabutin, Roger, Comte de (1618-1693), 243

Butler, Mr. A. J., xi

Butler, S., 139 note

Byron, 393

Cabinet de Minerve, Le, 163

Cabinet des Fees, Le, 246-272, 419, 427 note, 476, 477, 481

Cabinet d'un Philosophe, Le, 339

Cafe de Surate, Le, 426

Callisthenes, the pseudo-, 17

Campanella, 298

Camus (de Pontcarre), Jean (1584-1653), 153, 237, 238

Candide, 379 sq., 461, 477

Capitaine Fracasse, Le, 279-280

Caritee, La, 176 note, 235, 236

Carlyle, 130, 139 note, 243, 402 notes, 403 and note, 414

Carmente, 244, 245

"Carte de Tendre," the, 226

Cassandre, 176 note, 233-234

Catullus, 176 note, 220

Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe de Tubieres de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Comte de (1692-1765), 262-264, 477

Cazotte, Jacques (1720-1792), 270 note, 477

Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, 92-100, 472, 475, 480

Ce qui plait aux Dames, 377 note

Cervantes, 124, 284 note

Chanson de Geste, The, 9-16

Chapelain, 178

Chat Botte, Le, 254

Chateaubriand, 234 note, 430, 459, 464

Chateau de la Misere, Le, 280

Chatenet, M. H. E., 243 note

Chaucer, 16, 18, 22, 61 note, 81, 91, 103, 220, 319, 351 note, 377 note, 467

Chaumiere Indienne, La, 426

Cheminees de Madrid, Les, 328

Chenier, A., 464

Chevalier a la Charette, 24-28

Chevalier au Lyon, 24, 25

Cholieres, 143

Chrestien de Troyes (12th cent.), 21-29, 37, 106

Citateur, Le, 462 note

Citheree, 176 note

Clarendon, 459

Clelie, 176 note, 226-229

Cleopatre, 176 note, 230-232

Cleveland, 353-357

Clidamant et Marilinde, 160, 161

Cliges, 24

Coleridge, 31 note

Collins, Wilkie, 294 note

Colonel Jack, 463

Colvin, Sir Sidney, 239 note

Comedie Humaine, the, 469, 470

Compere Mathieu, Le, 412 note

Comte de Comminge, Le, 431, 451

"Comte de Gabalis," the, 257 note

Comtesse de Savoie, La, 430 note

Confessions, Rousseau's, 391 sq.

Congreve, xiv, 376 note

Conquest of Granada, The, 225

Conrart, 201

Constant-Rebecque, Henri Benjamin de (1767-1830), 429, 430, 437, 438, 442-452,482

Contemporaines, Les, 454

Contes et Joyeux Devis, 141, 142, 476, 481

Contes Moraux (Marmontel's), 414-424

Conversation du marechal d'Hocquincourt avec le Pere Canaye, 307 note

Corbin, J., 162

Corinne, 452, 465

Corneille, 219, 278 note, 296, 318 note

Cosi-Sancta, 387

Courtebotte, Le Prince, 262, 263

Courthope, Mr. W. J., xi

Courtils de Sandras, 153

Cousin, V., 177 and note

Crawley, Miss Matilda, 458 note

Crebillon fils, Claude Prosper Jolyot de (1707-1777), xiv, 325, 350 note, 353, 354, 364, 376, 403, 406, 415, 419, 450 note, 453, 459, 469, 477, 482

Crebillon pere, Prosper Jolyot de, 365

Crenne, H. de (16th cent.), 150 note, 476

Cressy, Le Marquis de. See Histoire du Marquis de Cressy

Crispin Rival de son Maitre, 329

Crocheteur Borgne, Le, 387

Croxall, 244

Ctesias, 179

Cupid and Psyche, 58, 59

Cymbalum Mundi, 140, 141, 476

Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien (1609-1655), 275, 286 note, 295-298, 476, 482

Cyropaedia, 187 note, 197 note

Cyrus. See Grand Cyrus

Dante, xi, xii, 45, 49, 119 notes, 150 note, 179, 274 note

Daphnis and Chloe, 155, 159

Davenant, 393

Decameron, the, 93

Defoe, 292, 329, 358, 456

Dekker, 275

De Launay, Mlle. See Staal-Delaunay, Mme.

De Quincey, 399, 456

Desperiers, Bonaventure (?-1544?), 137, 140-142, 380, 476, 481

Deux Amis de Bourbonne, Les, 403

Diable Amoureux, Le, 270, 271 notes, 477

Diable Boiteux, Le, 326 sq., 477

Diablo Cojuelo, El, 329

Diana (Montemayor's), 157, 165, 476

Dickens, 15, 245, 262 and note, 285, 326, 348 note, 364, 394, 395 note

Dictionnaire Philosophique (Voltaire's), 411 note

Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), 225, 375, 386 note, 391 note, 400-411, 425, 426, 453, 470, 472 note, 482

Disraeli, Mr., 37

Dobson, Mr. A., 246, 317 note, 417

Donne, 150 note, 206 note, 220

Don Quixote, 57, 277, 333, 461, 472

Don Silvia de Rosalva, 269

Doon de Mayence, 15

Doyen de Killerine, Le, 353-357

Dryden, 44 note, 200, 203, 215, 226, 230, 377 note, 393

Duclos, Charles Pinot (1704-1772), 267

Du Croset (c. 1600), 162

Du Fail, Noel (16th cent.), 143

Dulaurens, H. J. (1719-1797), 412 note

Dumas, 98, 181, 245, 279, 286

Dunlop, 165

Du Perier (c. 1600), 161

Duras, Mme. de (Claire de Kersaint, 1778-1844), 430, 449, 450

Du Souhait (c. 1600), 160 note

Earthly Paradise, The, 14

Edgeworth, Miss, 237, 386, 412

Edouard, 449

Effets de la Sympathie, Les, 338, 340

Egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit, Les, 371 sq., 443 note

Elie de Beaumont, Mme. (Marie Louise Morin Dumesnil, ?-1783), 436

Ellis, G., 57, 480

Elton, Prof., ix note

Emile, 392, 393, 478

Encyclopaedia Britannica, vii

Encyclopedie, The, 411

Endimion, Gombauld's, 229

Endymion, Keats's, 239

"Engouement," 449, 450

Epistle to the Pisos, 219

Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 116, 124

Erec et Enide, 24, 25

Eric (Dean Farrar's), 465 note

Ernestine, 435

Escuteaux, Sieur des (c. 1600), 157 note, 160, 161

Esmond, Beatrix, 49

Essai sur les Romans (Marmontel's), 413

Essay on Criticism (Pope's), 327

Estevanille Gonzales, 328

Etudes de la Nature, 424 note

Eulalia, Legend of St., 4, 5, 479

Euphues, 103, 116

Eustathius (Macrembolites or -ta, sometimes called Eumathius, 12th cent.), 18, 350

Evelina, 435

Evenemens Singuliers, 237, 238

Expedition Nocturne, 437 sq.

Fabliaux, The, 91, 92

Facardins, Les Quatre, 262, 308, 313, 316-320

Famille Luceval, La, 467

Faramond, 176 note, 234, 235

Farrar, Dean, 465 note

Fausses Confidences, Les, 339

Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe, (1651-1715), 153, 237, 260, 323, 324, 477

Ferrier, Miss, 429

Festus, 384

Fielding, 285, 326, 349, 375, 451, 471

Finette, 251, 252

FitzGerald, E., 118, 176 note

Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Prof., ix note

Fleur d'Epine, 308 sq.

Floire et Blanchefleur, 3, 59, 71

Folengo, 124

Folie Espagnole, La, 462, 463

Fontaines, Mme. de (Marie Louise Charlotte de Pelard de Givry, ?-1730), 430 note

Fontenelle, 350 note, 384

Forsyth, Dr., 455

Fortnightly Review, vii, 306 note, 428 note

Fortunes of Nigel, The, 361

Foulques Fitzwarin, 81-87

Four Flasks, The, 419

France, M. A., 328

Francion, 275-277, 476

Froissart, 135

Fuerres de Gadres, xi, 20

Fuller, 320

Funestine, 265, 266

Furetiere, Antoine (1620-1688), 154, 275, 277, 286-295, 469, 482

Galland, Antoine (1646-1715), 246 sq., 476

Gargantua (and Pantagruel), Chap. VI., passim

Gautier, M. Leon, 279, 280, 286, 296, 480

Gawain and the Green Knight, 56

Genin, F., 402 and note

Genlis, Mme. de (Stephanie Felicite du Crest de St. Aubin, 1746-1830), 436

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 17

George Eliot, 445 note

Gesta Romanorum, 89

Gilbert, Sir W., 172 note, 181, 329, 393

Gil Blas, 325 sq., 374, 461, 462, 468, 457

Gladstone, Mr., 176 note

Godfrey de Lagny (12th cent.), 24 note, 29

Goethe, 456

Gombauld, J. Ogier de (1570-1666), 229, 239-241

Gomberville, Marin le Roy de (1600-1674), 176 note, 177 note, 229, 235-237

Gomersal, 399 note

Gongora, 159 note

Gracieuse et Percinet, 250, 251

Grand Cyrus, The, 154 note, 170, 176-223, 280, 281, 284, 318

Grantley, Archdeacon, xii, 121

Graves, 277, 333

Gray, 276, 365, 375

Grecque moderne, Histoire d'une, 353-358

Greek Romances. See Romances, Greek

Greg, Mr., 155 note

Grimm, F. M., 408 note, 410

Grotesques, Les, 296

Gueulette, Thomas Simon (1683-1766), 258-266, 379, 477

Guevara, 329, 372

Guido de Columnis, or delle Colonne, 18, 87

Guillaume d'Angleterre, 24

Guinevere, Queen (character of), xi, xii, 25-54 passim, 182 note

Gulliver's Travels, 110, 384

Guzman d'Alfarache, 328

Hamilton, Anthony (1646?-1720), 153, 154, 248, 264, 266 note, 275 and note, 305-325, 369 note, 371 note, 378, 379 note, 380, 385, 476

Hamilton, Gerard, 275 note

Hamlet, 331

Hammond, Miss Chris., 412 note

Hardy, Mr. Thomas, 272, 348

Hasard au Coin du Feu, Le, 366 sq.

Hawker, 41 and note

Hegel, 139 note

Heliodorus, 179, 476

Heloise, La Nouvelle, see Julie

Henley, Mr. W. E., 259 note, 460

Henryson, 18, 156 note

Heptameron, The, 136-143, 472, 476, 481

Herberay des Essarts, Nicolas (?-1552?), 145 sq., 476, 481

Herodotus, 1, 2, 178

Heureusement, 419, 463

Heureux Orphelins, Les, 373

Heywood, J., 192 note

Histoire de Jenni, 386

Histoire du Marquis de Cressy, 432, 433

Histoire Veritable (B. de Verville's), 163

Holbach, Mme. d', 408, 410 and note

Homer, 1, 71, 274, 275

Hope, T., 290

Hudgiadge, Sultan, 260 note, 262

Hugo, Victor, xiii, 228, 458, 472 note

Hume, 207 note

Humphrey Clinker, 469

Hunt, Leigh, 91, 413 note

Hunt, Rev. W., ix note, xiii

Huon de Bordeaux, 14

Hysminias and Hyasmine, 18, 37, 157 note, 220 note, 265 note

Ibrahim, 176 note, 223-225

Ibsen, 39 note, 362

Idylls of the King, Chap. II. passim

Iliad, The, 11, 71

Illustres Fees, Les, 257

Incas, Les, 413

Interlude of Love, 192 note

Jacques le Fataliste, 404-407

James, G. P. R., 233

Jeannot et Colin, 386

Jehan de Paris, 101-103, 475, 480

Jerningham, E., 423 note

Jerome, 464

Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, Le, 339

Johnson, Dr., 107, 139 note, 155, 178, 218 note, 265 and note, 276, 377, 381, 386 note

Joinville, 135

Jonathan Wild, xv, 101

Joseph Andrews, 375, 415, 426 note

Joubert, 412

Jourdains de Blaivies, 14

Journee des Parques, La, 328

Julie, 393-400, 436, 452, 468, 470, 477

"Katherine and Gerard," story of, 94-99

Ker, Mr. W. P., ix note, xii, 119 note

Kinglake, 306 note

Kingsley, Charles, xii, 52, 244

Kipling, Mr., 195, 208, 380

Knight of the Sun, The, 147

Knollys, 417

Kock, Paul de, 461

Koerting, H., 133 note, 165 sq., 236 notes, 274 note

La Calprenede, Gauthier de Costes de (1610?-1633), 176 note, 197 note, 227, 230-235

Laclos (Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de, 1741-1803), xiv, xv, 453

La Comtesse de Ponthieu, 77-80, 86

La Croix, Petro de, 259 note

"Lady of the Lake," The, 30 note

La Fayette, Mme. de (Marie Madeleine Pioche de Lavergne, 1634-1693), 154, 273, 298-300, 318, 325, 376, 426, 428, 429, 436, 451, 469, 477, 482

La Fontaine, 92, 175

La Force, Mlle. de (Charlotte Rose de Caumont de, 1654?-1724), 257

La Harpe, 240

La Jeune Siberienne, 437 sq.

Lamartine, 464

Lamb, Charles, 28, 320, 455 note

Lamoracke, Sir, 53

La Morliere (Charles Louis Auguste de La Rochette Chevalier de, 1719-1785), vi note

Lancelot, Sir (character of), xi, xii, 25-54 passim, 182 note

Landor, 331

Lang, Mr. A., 246

Lannoi, J. de, 162

La Princesse de Cleves, 223, 244, 298-300, 470

La Rochefoucauld, 299 and note

Larroumet, M. G., 339 note

La Salle, Antoine de (1398-1462?), 93, 101, 102, 106

Latin Stories (Wright's), 73 note

Lavington, Argemone, 49

Lawrence, G., 51 note

Le Blanc et le Noir, 385, 386

Le Breton, M., 274 note

Le Brun "Pindare," 462

L'Ecumoire, 371 sq.

Legend of the Rhine, A, 339 note

Leigh Hunt, 413 note

L'Empereur Constant, 74, 75, 86

L'Enchanteur Faustus, 308 sq.

L'Enfant du Carnaval, 457 note, 461

Lepreux de la Cite d'Aoste, Le, 437 sq.

Le Prince de Beaumont, Marie, Mme. (1711-1780), 268, 477

Le Prisonnier de Caucase, 437 sq.

Le Roi Flore et La Belle Jehane, 75, 76, 86

Lesage, Alain Rene (1668-1747), 259 and note, 325-337, 374, 375, 468, 472, 477, 482

Lescure, M. de, 442

Le Sot Chevalier, 91

Lespinasse, Mlle. de, 257, 403 note, 441

Lettres d'Amabed, 386

Lettres Atheniennes, 373, 374

Lettres de la Marquise de M——, 372

Lettres du Marquis de Roselle, 437

Levis, Pierre Marc Gaston Duc de (1755-1830), 313 note

Levite d'Ephraim, Le, 399 note

Lewis, "Monk," 271 note

L'Homme aux Quarante Ecus, 385

Liaisons Dangereuses, Les, xiv, xv

L'Ingenu, 385, 475

Livy, 2

L'Officieux, 465-467

Longinus, 328

Longus, 172 note

Louis XI., 92

Louvet de Coudray, 453

Lubert, Mlle. de. (1710-1779), 266

Lucian, 2, 141, 142, 298, 328, 380

Lucius of Patrae, 2

Lussan, Mlle. de (1682-1758), xiii, 265

Lycidas, 156

Lyndsay, Sir D., 100 note

Lyonne, the Abbe de, 328

Macarise, 238

Macaulay, 265 and note, 311 note

Macdonald, G., 52

Mackenzie, H., 414

M. de Beauchesne, 329

Mlle. de Clermont, 436

Magne, M. E., 241

Maintenon, Mme. de, 279, 342 note

Mairet, 167

Maistre, Joseph de, 126, 438

Maistre, Xavier de (1763-1852), 405 note, 430, 437-441, 452, 459

Malachi's Cove, 41 note

Malory, 26 sq.

Man Born to be King, The, 74

Manon Lescaut, 304, 325, 352-364, 372 note, 374, 389, 413 note, 470, 477, 482

Mansfield Park, 429

Map or Mapes, Walter, 23 sq., 29, 106, 226 note

Marguerite de Valois (the eldest) (1491-1549), 126, 136-143, 475, 481

—— (the middle), 299

—— (the youngest) (1553-1615), 158, 159

Maria del Occidente, 416

Marianne, 340, 342 note, 345-352, 374, 436, 446, 450 note, 477

Marini, 159 note

"Marion de la Briere and Sir Ernault de Lyls," story of, 84-86

Mari Sylphe, Le, 419, 424 note

Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de (1688-1763), 318, 325, 326, 337-352, 365 note, 366, 374, 375, 428, 450, 454 note, 469, 477, 482

Marlowe, xiv

Marmion, 83

Marmontel, Jean Francois (1723-1799), 375, 377, 412-424, 428, 458, 463, 470, 482

Marot, 137, 138, 155

Marquis des Arcis, Le, 403, 406, 407

Marriage a la Mode (Dryden's), 200

Marriage of Kitty, The, 191 note

Marryat, 336

Martial, 136

"Matter of Britain, France, and Rome," the, 3, Chap. II. passim

Maupassant, 2

Melanges Litteraires (Pigault-Lebrun's), 458

Memnon, 384

Memoires de Grammont, 306

Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite, 353-358

Memoirs (Marmontel's), 413

Memoirs of Several Ladies, 454

Meraugis de Portlesguez, 71

Meredith, Mr. George, 2, 37, 49, 91, 350 note

Merimee, 438

Meyer, M. Paul, 479

Micromegas, 380 note, 384, 477

Middleton, 275

Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 26

Milady Catesby, 435

Mill, J. S., 400

Milton, 30 note, 139, 155, 274, 275, 378 note, 459

Minnigrey, 460

Moliere, F. de (?-1623?), 161

Moliere, Henriette de, 242, 243

Moliere, J. B. P. de, 219, 282, 296, 330, 368

Mon Oncle Thomas, 463, 464

Monsieur Nicolas, 454, 456

Montaigne, 133, 136 note, 184

Montemayor, 157, 165, 476

Montreux, N. de (c. 1600), 157-160

Moore, T., 241

Mordred, Sir, 50 note

More, M. F., 298

Morgane-la-Fee, 39

Morley of Blackburn, Lord, 402 note

Morris, Mr. Mowbray, 265 note, 385

Morris, Mr. W., 14, 38 note, 52, 74

Mort d'Agrippine, La, 296

Moyen de Parvenir, 111, 162, 276, 481

Mr. Midshipman Easy, 453

Mr. Sludge the Medium, 404 note

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy, 180 note

Muguet, Le Prince, 264

Murat, Mme. de (Henriette Julie de Castelnau, 1670-1716), 257 note

Naigeon, 412

Nennius, 17

Nerval, G. de, 271 note

Nerveze, A. de (c. 1600), 157 note, 160

Neveu de Rameau, Le, 403, 404

Newton Forster, 189

Nonnus, 274

Northanger Abbey, 450 note

Nouveaux Contes Orientaux, 260 note, 261

Nouvelle Heloise, La. See Julie.

Nuit et le Moment, La, 366 sq., 477

Odyssey, The, 1, 11, 71

Ogier de Danemarche, 14

Old Mortality, 176

"Ollenix du Mont Sacre." See Montreux, N. de

Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield, Les, 386

Othello, 364

Ourika, 449

Ovid, 2

Pajon, xiii, 267

Palerne, Guillaume de (William of), 60

Palmerin of England, 146-150

Palombe, 237

Palomides, Sir, 53

Pantagruel, Chap. VI. passim

Paradoxe sur le Comedien, 408 note

Paris, M. Gaston, 22, 23

Paris, M. Paulin, 22, 23, 38, 480

Partenopeus (-pex) de Blois, 3, 57-71, 480

Pasquier, 150 note

Pathelin, 101

Paul et Virginie, 425, 426-452

Paysan Parvenu, Le, 340-345, 454

Paysan Perverti, Le, 340, 454

Peau d'Ane, 252

Pedant Joue, Le, 296

Pensees (Joubert's), 412

Pepys, 135, 317 note, 456

Percevale le Gallois, 24

Perrault, Charles (1628-1703), 154, 246 sq., 273

Petit Jehan de Saintre, 100-102, 475, 480

Petronius, 2

Phedre, 331

Philocalie, 162

Philocaste, 162

Philosophe Soi-distant, Le, 419-423

Pigault-Lebrun, Charles Antoine Guillaume P. de L'Epinoy (1753-1835), 456-471, 472 note, 482

Pigault-Maubaillarck, 458 note

Planche, G., 353, 360

Plato, 1 note, 82, 165, 166, 387, 388

Plutarch, 234

Polexandre, 176 note, 236, 237

Polite Conversation, 110

Pollock, Mr. W. H., 408 note

Polyandre, 277, 278, 482

Polyxene, 161

Pope, 29, 37, 194, 327

Pornographe, Le, 454 note, 455

Pour et Contre, Le, 352

Praed, 187 note

Precieuses Ridicules, Les, 220

Preschac, Sieur de (early 18th cent.), 258

Prevost (Antoine Francois P. d'Exilles, 1697-1763), 325, 352-364, 366, 373, 375, 426, 428, 468, 470, 477

Prevost, Pierre, 394

Pride and Prejudice, 287

Prince Cheri, Le, 253

Princesse de Babylone, La, 385, 389, 390, 478

Princesse de Cleves, La, 275, 298-305, 308, 364, 413 note, 482

Prior, 91

Prudentius, 5

Puisieux, Mme. de, 403

Pyramus, Denis (early 13th cent.), 58

Quatre Facardins, Les. See Facardins

Quatre Fils d'Aymon, Les, 15

Queenhoo Hall, 291 note

Quentin Durward, 94 note

Quinze Joies de Mariage, Les, 101

Rabelais, Francois (1495?-1553?), xii, Chap. VI., 134-144 passim, 276, 298, 307, 321, 425, 372, 476, 481

Racine, 219, 272, 288, 296

Radcliffe, Mrs., 468

Rasselas, 377, 381

Reade, Charles, 98

Rebecca and Rowena, 339 note

Recamier, Mme., 442, 443

Regnard, 330 note

Regrets sur ma Vieille Robe de Chambre, 403

Reine Fantasque, La, 265

Relations (A. Hamilton's), 306 note

Religieuse, Histoire d'une (Marivaux's), 347

Religieuse, La (Diderot's), 407-411, 452

Rene, 452, 464

Restif de la Bretonne (Nicolas Edme, 1734-1806), 340, 452-456, 459, 472 note, 482

Reure, the Abbe, 163 sq.

Reve de D'Alembert, 403 note

Reve, Le (Zola's), 462

Reynier, M. G., 145 note, 150, 150 note, 157-163

Rhodanthe and Dosicles, 265 note

Rhys, Sir John, 31

Riccoboni, Mme. (Marie Jeanne Laboras de Mezieres, 1714-1792), 340, 430, 432-436

Richardson, xvi, 26, 208, 225, 349, 356 note, 375, 395, 398, 404, 465