[285] A somewhat fuller discussion of this heretical bona patria of literature may be found in the original Essay. I had at one time thought of reprinting it—in text or appendix—here. But perhaps it would be superfluous. I ought, however, to add that I have seen, in French writers, later again than those referred to in the text, some touches of revived interest in Murger.
[286] Translated at length in the Essay.
[287] I have always been a little curious to know whether that remarkable periodical, Cope's Tobacco Plant, which gave us not a little of James Thomson the Second's work, was really, as it might have been, conceived as a follower of Le Castor.
[288] Murger knows this and allows it.
[289] Who, moreover, did work, and that pretty hard, in his Secretaryship, and by no means disdained pay for it—purely "patriotic" as (in his view) it was.
[290] Jérôme Paturot, with Considerations on Novels in General, originally appeared in Fraser for September 1843. Not reprinted in the author's lifetime, or till the supplementary collection of 1885-86. May be found, with some remarks by the present writer, in the "Oxford" Thackeray, vol. vi. pp. 318-342.
[291] It is fair to say that some of the best Alexandriana were still to come.
[292] The retort courteous, if not even the countercheck quarrelsome, "Then why do you notice it?" is pretty obvious. Taking it as the former, it may be answered, "The political novel, if not the most strictly legitimate species of the kind, is numerous and not unimportant. It may therefore be allowed a specimen, and an examination of that specimen."
[293] Malvina, as one might expect, is by this time an "Anti-" of the most stalwart kind; though in the Saint-Simonian salad days, she had (as naturally) taken the other side.
[294] Probably more people know La Croix de Berny, which he wrote with Sandeau, Gautier, and Madame de Girardin, than anything exclusively his.