[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 caballería, 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 Misérables 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!