the materials into a new pattern as early as 1786. In 1886 M. Feuillet or M. Theuriet would of course have clothed the story-skeleton differently, but one can quite imagine either making use of a skeleton by no means much altered. M. Rod would have given it an unhappy ending, but one can see it in his form likewise.63
Madame de Genlis iterum.
Of Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, it were tempting to say a good deal personally if we did biographies here when they can easily be found elsewhere. How she became a canoness at six years old, and shortly afterwards had for her ordinary dress (with something supplementary, one hopes) the costume of a Cupid, including quiver and wings; how she combined the offices of governess to the Orleans children and mistress to their father; how she also combined the voluptuousness and the philanthropy of her century by taking baths of milk and afterwards giving that milk to the poor;64 how, rather late in life, she attained the very Crown-Imperial of governess-ship in being chosen by Napoleon to teach him and his Court how to behave; and how she wrote infinite books – many of them taking the form of fiction – on education, history, religion, everything, can only be summarised. The last item of the summary alone concerns us, and that must be dealt with summarily too. Mlle. de Clermont– a sort of historico-"sensible" story in style, and evidently imitated from La Princesse de Clèves– is about the best thing she did as literature; but we dealt with that in the last volume65 among its congeners. In my youth all girls and some boys knew Adèle et Théodore and Les Veillées du Château. From a later book, Les Battuécas, George Sand is said to have said that she learnt Socialism: and the fact is that Stéphanie Félicité had seen so much, felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to complete my idea of her were Le Comte de Corke and Les Chevaliers du Cygne, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their titles. The first is a collection of short tales, the title-piece inspired and prefaced by an account of the Boyle family, and all rather like a duller and more spun-out Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to Marmontel accounting for this. The concluding stories of each volume, "Les Amants sans Amour" and "Sanclair," are about the best. Les Chevaliers du Cygne is a book likely to stir up the Old Adam in some persons. It was, for some mysterious reason, intended as a sort of appendix – for "grown-ups" – to the Veillées du Château, and is supposed to have incorporated parabolically many of the lessons of the French Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three volumes and eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the Empress Irene, and the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is dead at Roncevaux), and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the Veillées was altogether of the veille– the day just expired – or of the transitional and half-understood present – never of the past seen in some perspective, of the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.
The minor popular novel – Ducray-Duminil —Le Petit Carilloneur.
The batch of books into which we are now going to dip does not represent the height of society and the interests of education like Madame de Genlis; nor high society again and at least strivings after the new day, like the noble author of the Solitaire who will follow them. They are, in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and Paul de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.66 The most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's Lolotte et Fanfan, escaped67 a long search; but the possession and careful study of the four volumes of his Petit Carillonneur (1819) has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not merely Lolotte (the second title of which is Histoire de Deux Enfants abandonnés dans une île déserte), but Victor ou L'Enfant de la Forêt, Cælina ou L'Enfant du Mystère, Jules ou le Toit paternel, or any other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.
The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun des enfants; he writes rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books) loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously tumbled out of a cabriolet68 by wicked men, and left to the chances of divine and human assistance, is made to earn his living by framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a corvée. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies, and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts – violent and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by Mr. Thomas Day) – beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent musician; an excellent curé; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de Surval, who, close to the end of the book, hides her trouble in the bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of Pigault as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing with them are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of general novel-development and admitting English examples, we may assign to its author a place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the Family Herald: confining ourselves to French only, he has again, like Pigault, something of the credit of making a new start. He may appeal to the taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the same sort of thing as "a vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable of providing general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.
V. Ducange.
L'Artiste et le Soldat.
"The other Ducange," whose patronymic appears to have been Brahain, and who perhaps took the name of the great scholar69 for the sake of contrast, was even more famous for his melodramas70 than for his fiction, one piece especially, "Trente Ans, ou La Vie d'un Joueur," having been among the triumphs of the Porte-Saint-Martin and of Frédérick Lemaître. As a novelist he did not write for children like Ducray-Duminil, and one of his novels contains a boastful preface scoffing at and glorying in the accusations of impropriety brought against him. I have found nothing very shocking in those books of his which I have read, and I certainly have not thought it necessary to extend my acquaintance in search of it. He seems to have been a quarrelsome sort of person, for he got into trouble not only with the moralists, not only with the Restoration government, but with the Academy, which he attacked; and he is rather fond of "scratchy" references such as "On peut mériter encore quelque intérêt sans être un Amadis, un Vic-van-Vor [poor Fergus!], un Han, ou un Vampire." But his intrinsic merit as a novelist did not at first seem to me great. A book worse charpenté than that just quoted from, L'Artiste et le Soldat, I have seldom read. The first of its five volumes is entirely occupied with the story (not badly, though much too voluminously told) of a captain who has lost his leg at Waterloo, and though tended by a pretty and charming daughter,
The treatment of the authors here mentioned,
I am quite prepared to be told that this was somebody else or nobody at all. "Moi, je dis Madame de Genlis."
P. 436.
The kind endeavours of the Librarian of the London Library to obtain some in Paris itself were fruitless, but the old saying about neglecting things at your own door came true. My friend Mr. Kipling urged me to try Mr. George Gregory of Bath, and Mr. Gregory procured me almost all the books I am noticing in this division.
The British Museum (see Preface) being inaccessible to me.
Readers will doubtless remember that the too wild career of this kind of vehicle, charioteered by wicked aristocrats, has been among the thousand-and-three causes assigned for the French Revolution.
Of course the author of the glossaries himself was, by actual surname, Dufresne, Ducange being a seignory.
It should be observed that a very large number of these minor novels, besides those specially mentioned as having undergone the process, from Ducray's downwards, were melodramatised.
