[500] They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite unknown in England, is rather common in France.
[501] If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this admirable story, it may be well to say that the title is the nickname of a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or cartel of non-combatants passing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses passage to the whole party, unless she will give him a cast of her office. The story is told as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked attitude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.
[502] Maupassant does not caricature us (at least our men) very extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say, "Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally mysterious Aoi of the Chanson de Roland?). But I cannot make it like the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says, "Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know, phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The curious thing is that "Oh-a" actually is a not unfrequent, though slovenly, pronunciation.
[503] Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so often reproached is of French—at least Norman—origin.
[504] The other one, of course, but here one must admit the superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French antecedents.
[505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes no bad blank-verse line.
[506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostly inferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially Le Pain Maudit, are very amusing, and Lui? is a curious and melancholy anticipation of Le Horla. La Maison Tellier, which opens and titles another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock me.) Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, La Femme de Paul, which closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of Mlle. Giraud ma Femme (v. inf.); only the male person, instead of drowning his she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist meticulousness.
[507] V. sup. p. 269 sq.
[508] For the "Terror" group see below.
[509] Curiously enough, a few days after writing the above I came across, in the last Diabolique of that curious flawed genius, Barbey d'Aurevilly (v. sup. p. 453), the words which redress, by long anticipation, the wrong done by his fellow Norman: "Les ailes du nez, aussi expressives que des yeux."