ith men than is generally thought--that she
cannot _really_ love him, makes him resist her advances. By rebound, she
falls victim for a time to a commonplace Lovelace; but finds no
satisfaction, languishes and dies, while the lover, who would not take
the goods the gods provided, tries to play a sort of altered part of
Colonel Morden in _Clarissa_, and the gods take their revenge for
"sinned mercies." In abstract (it has been observed elsewhere that
Feuillet seldom abstracts well, his work being too much built up of
delicate touches) there may seem to be something of the preposterous in
this; but it must be a somewhat coarse form of testing which discovers
any real preposterousness in the actual story.

[Sidenote: _Julia de Trecoeur._]

It may, however, as has been said, seem to some to belong to the
pathetic-sentimental rather than to the actually tragic; I at least
could not allow any such judging of _Julia de Trecoeur_, though there
are more actual faults in it than in _La Petite Comtesse_, and though,
as has been mentioned elsewhere, the rather repulsive catastrophe may
have been more or less borrowed. The _donnee_ is one of the great old
simple cross-purposes of Fate--not a mere "conflict," as the silly
modern jargon has it. Julia de Trecoeur is a wilful and wayward girl,
as are many others of Feuillet's heroines. Her mother is widowed early,
but consoles herself; and Julia--as such a girl pretty certainly would
do--resents the proceeding, and refuses to live at home or to see her
stepfather. He, however, is a friend of his wife's own cousin, and this
cousin, conceiving a passion for Julia, offers to marry her. Her
consent, in an English girl, would require some handling, but offers no
difficulties in a French one. As a result, but after a time, she agrees
to meet her mother and that mother's new husband. And then the tragedy
begins. She likes at once, and very soon loves, her stepfather--he
succumbs, more slowly, to Moira and Ate. But he is horrified at the
notion of a quasi-incestuous love, and Julia perceives his horror. She
forces her horse, like the Duchess May, but over the cliffs of the
Cotentin, not over a castle wall; and her husband and her stepfather
himself see the act without being able--indeed without trying--to
prevent it. The actual place had nearly been the scene of a joint
suicide by the unhappy lovers before.

Once more, the thing comes badly out of analysis--perhaps by the
analyst's fault, pe