On a tour which he and Hugo, accompanied by their wives, made together in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent. Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies, and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses, coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country, stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But whilst the women were in the salle-à-manger some carriers, coming in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other. At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row; and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom they had no connection whatever.
"What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not marked?"
"If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite satisfied with the effect produced.
He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang.
The world in which he lives is the world in which Oberon and Titania dance, in which strains from the Thousand and One Nights blend with the melodies of Ariel's celestial orchestra, in which Puck makes his bed in a rosebud, whilst all the flowers perfume the summer night. It is a world in which all the personages of real, wide-awake life appear, but grotesquely magnified or grotesquely diminished, to suit the comprehension of the child and the requirements of the fantast.
Here, as Nodier himself somewhere says, we have Odysseus the far-travelled, but he has shrunk into Hop-o'-my-thumb, whose tremendous voyage consists in swimming across the milk-pail; here is Othello, the terrible wife-murderer, only his beard is not black but blue—he has turned into the notorious Bluebeard; here is Figaro, the nimble lackey who flatters the grandees so cleverly, only he is transformed into Puss in Boots, a less entertaining personage, though almost as interesting from the psychological point of view.
No author of the French Romantic period is more closely related to the German and English Romanticists than Nodier. Any one who does not know his works may form some idea of them by recalling Sir Walter Scott's ghost stories and Hoffmann's audacious fantasies. But these, of course, do not convey an idea of Nodier's artistic individuality. His peculiarity is, that in his representation of Romantic subjects he is not what we are in the habit of calling Romantic, but, on the contrary, severely Attic, classically simple, sparing in the matter of colour, and devoid of passion; there is none of the Scotch mist we are conscious of in Sir Walter, or of the fumes of the Berlin wine-vaults which we inhale in reading Hoffmann. His peculiarity as a stylist is that, whilst the young Romanticists around him were sensualising language and supplanting the idea by the picture, he himself transcribed his wildest Romantic fancies into the clear and simple language of Pascal and Bossuet. Enthusiastic champion as he was of the new tendency in literature, in the matter of style he remained old-fashioned, and expressed the fantastic imaginations of the nineteenth century in the severe, perspicuous language of the seventeenth. Audacious to the verge of insanity in his fantasies, he is sober and clear in his style. As Prosper Mérimée has cleverly said, a fanciful tale by Nodier is like "the dream of a Scythian, told by an old Greek poet."
His Inès de Las Sierras is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power; and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects. It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before, but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were, ironically. A story like Inès de Las Sierras, however, is what most exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction, that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his Semiramis) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight.
La Fée aux Miettes seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales. There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious fever-patient.
In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy, simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful, dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he sails in is called the Queen of Sheba. He wanders about the world dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours is madness.