A true lover does not desire the embrace of any one save his companion in love.
Love rarely endures when made public.
Easy acceptance renders love contemptible; a slow acceptance causes it to be held dear.
A man full of love is ever full of fear.
Love can deny nothing to a lover.
There is nothing to prevent one woman from being loved by two men, nor one man by two women.
In the last quoted of these remarkable laws (which were the work of women and of a few men who wished to please women), it will be observed that no authority or countenance is given to the loving of two women by one man. Our author regards the effect of these courts and their code as on the whole beneficial. His judgment may be sound, monstrous as the code seems to us, recognizing and even sanctioning as it did relations of the sexes not formed according to civil laws; for, as he says, "it refined the inevitable evil, substituted an easy for an almost impracticable moral code, and being compelled to draw a new line between venial offences and coarse licentiousness, exacted a rigid obedience to those laws." There is also some force in his plea that the courts of love "rescued woman from what would have become a condition of intolerable degradation, elevated affection rather than passion into the place of honor, and encouraged devotion in the stronger sex, grace and propriety in the weaker." It is undoubtedly true that when society became more rigid in sexual morality, and the mediæval code of love disappeared, there remained the tenderness and courtesy for the fairer and weaker sex which that code had done so much to develop.
Mr. Van Laun's first volume brings us down only to the Renaissance. But at that period the characteristic trait of French literature developed itself strongly. That trait is satire; not the bloody scourge of Juvenal, but a light, caustic, reserved, and almost pleasant although malicious satire—malicious in the French sense of malice, which is not so strong a word as its English counterpart. The difference between the French spirit and the English is shown by the fact that with free thought in the English race came stubborn dissent; in the French, light-hearted satire. "Satire," as Mr. Van Laun justly says, "is at the root of the French character, an instinct among the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who loved to fight and to talk well." This satire broke out in the sixteenth century with a brightness and causticity which has ever since distinguished French literature. The leader was Marguerite, sister to Francis I., the well-known Queen of Navarre. Her "Heptameron" is a strange book for a woman, and not a bad woman, a lady, and a queen, to have written. In it "she vents her contemptuous scorn upon husbands, although [perhaps because] she was married; against monks, though she was an ardent devotee of religion; against lawyers and doctors, though she was a queen." But it is most happily added that "her shrewdest satire of all is unconsciously pointed against herself; for she stands revealed to us a very woman, the rivals for whose favor are God and the devil, and who affords to neither of these more than a short coquettish glance."
It was at this period that the present school of French literature had its beginning; the spirit then so strongly manifested, the tendency to clearness, brightness, and high finish of style which then appeared among French writers, have since that time been the signs and tokens of the French mind and hand in literature. All that goes before is rude or fantastic or pedantic; then French literature rises in its splendor; we can hardly say its grandeur. Mr. Van Laun's first volume is full of interest which, however, is rather historical than literary; in the succeeding part of his work we may look for criticism more acceptable to the general reader.
—We pass easily from this history of the earliest days of French literature to its very latest, and we may add, one of its most characteristic productions. Alphonse Daudet's novel, "Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé," has suddenly attained one of those rare and brilliant successes which seem possible only in France. Within an incredibly short time sixty thousand copies of it were sold, and it was "crowned" by the French Academy; whatever that may mean, whether an actual crowning of either book or author, it certainly does imply the awarding of the highest honors by the most eminent literary tribunal in France. It has now been reproduced here in a translation which leaves nothing to be desired, whether as a transfusion of the French spirit of the book, or as an example of a fine English narrative style.[10 ] Indeed, it unites these two most important requisites of a good translation in a rare and remarkable manner. As to the book itself, although it is a very good novel, and carries upon its face the evidence that it is a careful study of a certain phase of French life, we are at a loss to account for its phenomenal success. It is all about Sidonie, who may be called its heroine, as Becky Sharp is the heroine of "Vanity Fair." Now Sidonie is a pretty, vulgar, vile-souled shop girl who uses her beauty to make her way to a certain sort of bourgeois fashionable life, but who is really a far more infamous creature than many a common harlot. For she is not wanton; she is not merely venal; she is pitilessly selfish and fiendishly malicious. She has no honesty of any kind—of mind, heart, soul, or body. A baser, viler creature in female, and therefore in human form, it would be impossible to conceive. For to all grovelling, debasing vice she adds a monstrous, cold-hearted cruelty. With all this she is not remarkable for anything except a pretty, blooming face and a low cunning. What need to familiarize us with the life of such a creature? She ruins the happiness of two men, one of a noble soul and the other a weak-minded creature; she breaks up a family; she brings her principal victim to suicide; and all this not even for a grand passion, but that she may have fine dresses, diamonds, and a social success. This is very barren business. We do not care to have such a life as this laid before us with all the particularity of treatment which belongs to the realistic school. But granted that we did desire it, we must confess that we could not wish for it better done. The life-portraiture, inner as well as outer, is perfect and minute to admiration. The end is brought about in fine melodramatic style. Around Sidonie are grouped several personages lovable and unlovable, admirable and unadmirable, but all painted with perfect, clear conception and firm, minute touch. The distinctive Frenchness of the author is manifest in every page. It is shown particularly in the absence of any touch of humor in the portraiture of Sidonie. Unlike Becky Sharp, she hems no little shirt in public until a little Rawdon has long outgrown it. The hard portrait of her hard soul has no such softening touch as that. The book is of a bad sort; but of its sort most admirable.