Evangeliste_ is perhaps the nearest approach to a failure, the
atmosphere being too alien from anything French to be favourable to the
development of a good story, and perhaps the very subject being unsuited
to anything, either English or French, but an episode. In more congenial
matter, as in the remark in _Numa Roumestan_ as to the peculiar kind of
unholy pleasure which a man may enjoy when he sees his wife and his
mistress kissing each other, Daudet sometimes showed cynic acumen nearer
to La Rochefoucauld than to Laclos, and worthy of Beyle at his very
best. And I have no shame in avowing real admiration for _Sapho_. It
does not by any means confound itself with the numerous studies of the
infatuation of strange women which French fiction contains; and it is
almost a sufficient tribute to its power to say that it does not, as
almost all the rest do, at once serve itself heir to, and enter into
hopeless competition with, _Manon Lescaut_. Nor is the heroine in the
least like either Marguerite Gautier or Iza Clemenceau, while the
comparison with Nana, whose class she also shares, vindicates her
individuality most importantly of all these trials. She seems to me
Daudet's best single figure: though the book is of too specialised a
kind to be called exactly his best book.

He never had strong health, and broke down early, so that his total
production is decidedly smaller than that of most of his fellows.[416]
Nor has he, I think, any pretensions to be considered a novelist of the
very first class, even putting bulk out of the question. But he can be
both extremely amusing and really pathetic; he is never unnatural; and
if there is less to be said about him than about some others, it is
certainly not because he is less good to read. On the contrary, he is so
easy and so good to read, and he has been read so much, that elaborate
discussion of him is specially superfluous. It is almost a pity that he
was not born ten or fifteen years earlier, so that he might have had
more chance of hitting a strictly distinct style. As it is, with all his
pathos and all his fun, you feel that he is of the _Epigoni_ a successor
of more than one or two Alexanders, that he has a whole library of
modern fiction behind--and, in more than one sense of the word,
before--him.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: About: _Le Roi des Montagnes_.]

There was a time when Englishmen of worth and Englishwomen of grace
thought a good de