Many years ago somebody was passing the small tavern which, dating for aught I know to the times of Henry Esmond, and still, or very lately, surviving, sustained the old fashion of a thoroughfare, fallen, but still fair, and fondly loved of some—Kensington High Street, just opposite the entrance to the Palace. The passer-by heard one loiterer in front of it say to his companion in a tone of emotion, and almost of awe: "There was beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and everything you can imagine." This pheme occurred to me when, after more than half a century, I read again Amédée Achard's Belle-Rose. I had taken it up with some qualms lest crabbed age should not confirm the judgment of ardent youth; and for a short space the extreme nobility of its sentiments did provoke the giggle of degeneracy. But forty of the little pages of its four original volumes had not been turned when it reassured me as to the presence of "beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and everything you can imagine" in its particular style of romance. The hero, who begins as a falconer's son and ends as a rich enough colonel in the army and a Viscount by special grace of the Roi Soleil, is a sapeur, but far indeed from being one of those graceless comrades of his to whom nothing is sacred. At one time he does indeed succumb to the sorceries of a certain Geneviève de Châteaufort, a duchess aux narines frémissantes. But who could resist this combination? even if there were a marquise of the most beautiful and virtuous kind, only waiting to be a widow in order to be lawfully his. Besides, the Lady of the Quivering Nostrils becomes an abbess, her rather odd abbey somehow accommodating not merely her own irregularly arrived child (not Belle-Rose's), but Belle-Rose himself and his marchioness after their marriage; and she is poisoned at the end in the most admirably retributive fashion. There are actually two villains—a pomp and prodigality (for your villain is a more difficult person than your hero) very unusual—one of whom is despatched at the end of the second volume and the other at the actual curtain. There is the proper persecuting minister—Louvois in this case. There are valiant and comic non-commissioned officers. There is a brave, witty, and generous Count; a lover of the "fatal" and ill-fated kind; his bluff and soldierly brother; and more of the "affair of the poisons" than even that mentioned above. You have the Passage of the Rhine, fire-raisings, duels, battles, skirmishes, ambuscades, treachery, chivalry—in fact, what you will comes in. And you must be a very ill-conditioned or feeble-minded person if you don't will. Every now and then one might, no doubt, "smoke" a little reminiscence; more frequently slight improbabilities; everywhere, of course, an absence of any fine character-drawing. But these things are the usual spots, and very pardonable ones, of the particular sun. I do not remember any French book of the type, outside the Alexandrian realm, that is as good as Belle-Rose;[306] and I am bound to say that it strikes me as better than anything of its kind with us, from James and Ainsworth to the excellent lady[307] who wrote Whitehall, and Whitefriars, and Owen Tudor.
Souvestre, Féval, etc.
It must, however, be evident that of this way in making books, and of speaking of them, there is no end.[308] Fain would I dwell a little on Émile Souvestre, in whom the "moral heresy," of which he was supposed to be a sectary, certainly did not corrupt the pure milk of the tale-telling gift in such charming things as Les Derniers Bretons, Le Foyer Breton, and the rather different Un Philosophe sous les Toits; also on the better work of Paul Féval, who as certainly did not invariably do suit and service to morality, but Sue'd and Soulié'd it in many books with promising titles;[309] and who, once at least, was inspired (again by the witchery of the country between the Baie des Trépassés and the Rock of Dol) to write La Fée des Grèves, a most agreeable thing of its kind. Auguste Maquet (or Augustus MacKeat) will come better in the next chapter, for reasons obvious to some readers no doubt already, but to be made so to others there. And so—for this division or subdivision—an end, with one word more on Pétrus Borel's Champavert.
Borel's Champavert.
Borel, whose real Christian name, it is almost unnecessary to say, was Pierre, and who was a sort of incarnation of a "Jeune-France" (beginning as a bousingot—not ill translated by the contemporary English "bang-up" for an extreme variety of the kind—and ending as a sous-préfet), wrote other things, including a longer and rather tedious novel, Madame Putiphar. But the tales of Champavert,[310] which had the doubly-"speaking" sub-title of Contes Immoraux, are capital examples of the more literary kind of "rotting." They are admirably written; they show considerable power. But though one would not be much surprised at reading any day in the newspaper a case in which a boatman, plying for hire, had taken a beautiful girl for "fare," violated her on the way, and thrown her into the river, the subject is not one for art.
FOOTNOTES:
[262] It will be observed that I use the words referred to in this note with more discrimination than is always the case with some excellent folk. I sympathise with Cadoudal most of the three, but I quite recognise that Bonaparte had a kind of right to try, and to execute him. So, if Pichegru had been tried, he might have been executed. The Enghien business was pure murder. In some more recent instances these distinctions have not, I think, been correctly observed by public speakers and writers.
[263] This philosophe inconnu (as his ticket-name goes in French) is, I fancy, even more unknown in England. I have not read much of him; but I think, if it had come in my way, I should have read more.
[264] Without doing this, it my be suggested that the contrast elsewhere quoted "Mérimée était gentilhomme; Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas," was likely to make its unfavourable side specially felt in this connection. He seems to have disgusted even the Princess Mathilde, one of the staunchest of friends and certainly not the most squeamish or prudish of women. Nor, in another matter, can I approve his favourite mixture of rum and curaçao as a liqueur. I gave it a patient trial once, thinking it might be critically inspiring. But the rum muddles the curaçao, and the curaçao does not really improve the rum. It is a pity he did not know the excellent Cape liqueur called Vanderhum, which is not a mixture but a true hybrid of the two.