rhaps not. But in its own presentation, with some
faults hardly necessary to point out, it is both poignant and
_empoignant_, and it gives a special blend of pity and terror, the two
feelings being aroused by no means merely through the catastrophe, but
by the rise and progress of the fatal passion which leads to it. I know
very few, if any, things of the same kind, in a French novel, superior,
or indeed equal to, the management of this, and to the fashion in which
the particular characters, or wants of character, of Julia's mother and
Julia's husband (excellent persons both) are made to hurry on the
calamity[413] to which she was fated.

[Sidenote: _Honneur d'Artiste._]

This tragic undercurrent, surging up to a more tragic catastrophe,
reappears in the two best of the later issues, when Feuillet was making
better head against the burst sewers[414] of Naturalism. _Honneur
d'Artiste_ is the less powerful of the two; but what of failure there
is in it is rather less glaring. Beatrice de Sardonne, the heroine, is a
sort of "Petite Comtesse" transformed--very cleverly, but perhaps not
quite successfully. _Her_ "triangle" consists of herself, a somewhat
New-Yorkised young French lady of society (but too good for the worst
part of her); and her two lovers, the Marquis de Pierrepont, a much
better Lovelace, in fact hardly a Lovelace at all, whom she is
engineered into refusing for honourable love--with a fatal relapse into
dishonourable; and the "Artiste" Jacques Fabrice. He adores her, but
she, alas! does not know whether she loves him or not till too late;
and, after the irreparable, he falls by the hazard of the lot in that
toss-up for suicide, the pros and cons of which (as in a former
instance) I should like to see treated by a philosophical historian of
the duello.

[Sidenote: _La Morte._]

In _La Morte_, on the other hand, the power is even greater--in fact it
is the most powerful book of its author, and one of the most powerful of
the later nineteenth century. But there is in it a reversion to the
"purpose" heresy; and while it is an infinitely finer novel than the
_Histoire de Sibylle_, it is injured, though not quite fatally, by the
weapon it wields. One of the heroines, Sabine, niece and pupil of an
Agnostic _savant_, deliberately poisons the other, Aliette, that she may
marry Aliette's husband. But the Agnostic teaching extends itself soon
from the Sixth Commandment to the Seventh, and M. de Vaudricourt, who,