[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 agréables que pénibles, s'affaiblirent et se passèrent. L'âme s'accoutume à tout; sa sensibilité s'use: et je me familiarisais avec mes espérances et mes inquiétudes."
[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 Cubières-Palmézeaux (1875). The useful Dictionnaire des Littératures 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 Prévost in Nouveaux Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité 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, Adèle, La Femme Infidèle, Ingénue Saxancour, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as La Vie de Mon Père, 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.