[275] Especially in the next chapter but one.
[276] Or was it Comte that was "naught" and Fourier that was "void"? I am sure the third person, namely, Cabet, was "puerile"; but I do not think I could read Aurora Leigh again, even to make sure of the distribution of the other epithets.
[277] The real old Constantia has, I believe, ceased to exist. It was a delicious vin de liqueur, but you might as well ice Madeira or a brown sherry.
[278] Thackeray pays Sue the very high compliment of having "tried almost always [to attain], and in Mathilde very nearly succeeded in attaining, a tone of bonne compagnie," I found the particular book difficult to get hold of. Apropos of French naval novels, will somebody tell me who wrote Le Roi des Gabiers, an immense feuilleton-romance, which I remember reading a vast number of years ago? I think he had (or took) a Breton name, and wrote others. But the navy, even with Jean Bart and Surcouf and the Bailli, has never attracted any of the great French novelists.
[279] I ought perhaps to say that the second volume does not seem to me to be quite equal to the first. The "sixteen years allowed for refreshment" do not justify themselves.
[280] In La Lionne (which is not to be confused with Le Lion Amoureux, a "psychological" diploma-piece praised by some) there are chapters and chapters of love-making "of a sort." But it is not the right sort.
[281] The famous or legendary chamber at Glamis—and perhaps another not so generally known story of a mansion farther north still, where you see from the courtyard a window the room belonging to which cannot be found from the inside—will occur. But Soulié, though he might have heard of the former, is very unlikely to have known the latter, which comes nearer to his arrangement.
[282] The contact here with the Peau de Chagrin need hardly be dwelt upon.
[283] A little more on this subject may be given later to Gaboriau and Ponson du Terrail.
[284] Reprinted in Essays on French Novelists.