[549] Already mentioned in the case of M. Cherbuliez (v. sup. p. 447).
Note on La Seconde Vie de M. T.
The second part is occupied with two different but connected subjects. Suzanne, the first wife, dies suddenly, and the two daughters, the elder, Annie, quite, and the second, Laurence, nearly grown up—return to the custody of their father, and therefore to the society at least of his second wife, Blanche, who, though of course feeling the awkwardness, welcomes them as well as she can. The situation, though much more awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's Young Stepmother: but M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes his wont, rather "sicklied it over" with political and other discussion.
[551] A pleasant study, in poetic use of imagery and phrase, is the gradation from the bare and grand Lucretian simplicity of silentia noctis, through the "favour and prettiness" (slightly tautological though) of the Virgilian tacitae per amica silentia lunae, to the recovery and intensifying of magnificence in dove il sol tace. By the way, silentia (for the singular undergoes Quintilian's apology for the Latin -um) is one of the few instances in which a Latin word beats the Greek. σιγη is really inferior.
[552] What annoys him most of all is that he should have an uncomfortable feeling about the woman "comme si je l'avais aimée!" He had only, you see, done something else.
[553] They should not have done this, and I do not think they did; it was the couples that jostled them. And even this ought not to have happened. The fastest waltzing (I am speaking of the old deux-temps, which this must have been) conveyed an almost uncanny extra power of vision, and at the same time of avoidance, to the right persons. Indeed, the first three lines of this extract have been objected to as base and inconsistent. I think not; the common out of which you rise to the uncommon is worth indication.
[554] It may be added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka—in the slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double Nirvana—is highly creditable. But I hope they waltzed to the mazurka. It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step; but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above, opportunities that do not exist in the faster and more delirious gyration.
[555] This (which may be called M. Rod's novel-headquarters) occurs also not merely in L'Eau Courante but in Les Roches Blanches, a book which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and the wife of his chief parishioner.
[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was the only lady-member of the quaint Contre-académie formed by E. de Goncourt.