[434] The labour of reading the book has been repaid by a few useful specimens of Feydeau's want of anything like distinction of thought or style. He makes his hero (whom he does not in the least mean for a fool, though he is one) express surprise at the fact that when he was in statu pupillari he liked fredaines, but when he became his own master did not care about them! Again: "Were I to possess the power and infinite charm of HIM [sic] who invented the stars I could never exactly paint the delightful creature who stood before me." Comment on either of these should be quite needless. Again: "Her nose, by a happy and bold curve, joined itself to the lobes, lightly expanded, of her diaphanous nostrils." Did it never occur to the man that a nose, separately considered from its curve and its nostrils, is terribly like that of La Camarde herself? I wasted some time over the tedious trilogy of Un Début à L'Opera, M. de Saint Bertrand, Le Mari de la Danseuse. Nobody—not even anybody qui Laclos non odit—need follow me.
[435] Their author wrote others—Babolin, Autour d'une Source etc. But the wise who can understand words will perhaps confine themselves to Mr., Mme. et Bébé and its sequel.
[436] Cf. inf. on M. Rod.
[437] There is a paper on Cherbuliez in Essays on French Novelists, where fuller account of individual works, and very full notice, with translations, of Le Roman d'une Honnéte Femme and Meta Holdenis will be found.
[438] History of Criticism, vol. iii. See also below.
[439] The author of the Fleurs du Mal himself might have been distinguished in prose fiction. The Petits Poëmes en Prose indeed abstain from story-interest even more strictly than their avowed pattern, Gaspard de la Nuit. But La Fanfarlo is capitally told.
[440] Hugo might do this; hardly a Hugonicule.
[441] There used to be a fancy for writing books about groups of characters. Somebody might do worse in book-making than "Great Editors," and Veuillot should certainly be one of them.
[442] The inadvertences which characterise him could hardly be better instanced than in his calling the eminent O'Donovan Rossa "le député-martyr de Tipperary." In English, if not in French, a "deputy-martyr" is a delightful person.
[443] Its articles are made up—rather dangerously, but very skilfully—of shorter reviews of individual books published sometimes at long intervals.