[369] As I have received complaints, mild and other, of the frequency of my unexplained allusions, I may here refer explicitly to Mr. Traill's Recaptured Rhymes; and if anybody, after looking up the book, is not grateful to me, I am sorry for him. For the commoner practice here I can only plead that I follow the Golden Rule. Nothing pleases me so much as an allusion that I understand—except one that I don't and have to hunt up.
[370] Rather too big a title for an adventurer to meddle with, surely?
[371] He has found out a secret about her. When she learns his crimes and his fate, she puts an end to herself in a way which I fear Octave Feuillet borrowed, rather unceremoniously, though he certainly improved it, in Julia de Trécœur (v. inf.). I did not read Trois Hommes Forts till many years after I had read and praised Feuillet's work. Also, is it absolutely blasphemous to suggest that the beginning of the book has a faint likeness to that of Les Misérables much later?
[372] V. sup. last chapter, passim.
[373] One remembers, as so often, Dr. Johnson to Boswell: "This lady of yours, Sir, is very fit for," etc.
[374] This is, I think, the best of his short stories. Thérèse is rather a sermon on the somewhat unsavoury text of morbid appetite in the other sex, than a real story. The little Histories Vraies, which he wrote with a friend for the Moniteur in 1864, are fairly good. For the formally entitled Contes et Nouvelles and the collection headed by Ilka, v. inf.
[375] He represents himself as suffering forty-eight hours of very easy imprisonment for not mounting guard as a "National," and writing the story to pass the time.
[376] The author has shown his skill by inducing at least one very old hand to wonder, for a time at least, whether Dr. Servans is a quack, or a lunatic, or Hoffmannishly uncanny, when he is, in fact, something quite different from any of these.
[377] The other, Clémentine (who is not very unlike a more modern Claire d'Orbe), being not nearly so "candid" as her comrade Marie, continues honest.
[378] V. sup. Vol. I. p. 204.