The book itself is an education: the very greatest novel of analysis and character France has produced since Balzac.
New York Commercial Advertiser
“A Living Lie,” published in this country by Fenno, is one of the earlier works of Paul Burget, and one that shows both the weakness and strength of his methods. In an introduction written to the translation, the author speaks of his humble decipleship of Flaubert and Zola, and perhaps none of Bourget’s novels better than this recent translation will show better how closely the student has followed the masters, especially the former. But one man could write “Madame Bovary,” and that was Flaubert, but there are portions of “Mensonges” that would lead one to believe that M. Bourget thought that he might have written it himself. Madame Bovary’s meeting with her lover in a house of ill-fame and Rene’s meetings with his mistress might even seem to some as an illustration of where the pupil had learned his lesson too well.
As for the story itself there is no need of rehearsing that. It is strong, and viewed from the point of fiction is good. But since M. Bourget aspires to be something more than novelist, to be an analyst, a psychologist and feminologist, it would be wrong to ignore what he considers his best labor. Perhaps it would not be malapropos to quote, in relation to M. Bourget’s study of women and women’s mind, what Nietzsche has written, that we are puzzled when we try to probe women’s mind, not because it is so deep, not because it has no bottom—“it is not even shallow.” Which is basely cynical, and anyway it was written by a man who is now in a mad house. But, nevertheless, it is a good sentence to bear in mind when one is reading the works of a feminologist. There is no doubt of M. Bourget’s intuitive powers. True, that too frequently does he affirm with unbecoming and exultant delight and misplaced passion that two and two are four, but often this leads to the higher and more complicated problems, such as four and four are eight. Surely M. Bourget is an analyst, but he spends too much time analyzing very obvious brick walls.
But, “A Living Lie” is good fiction, if it is not good literature. It is well translated.
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