n town; ruins nearly, _mais non tout_, a
country baron; and ends, as far as the book goes, by being a sort of
inferior Lola Montes to a German princeling. It has cost considerable
effort to justify even this short summary. I have found few French
novels harder to read. But there is at least one smart remark--of the
"publicist" rather than the novelist kind--towards the end:

C'est un besoin inne chez les peuplades germaniques; il
faut, bon gre mal gre, qu'ils adorent quelqu'un.

They did not dislike puns and verbal jingles, either in France or in
England in the mid-nineteenth century, as much as their ancestors and
their descendants in both countries have done before and since. A
survivor to-day might annotate "Et quel quelqu'un quelquefois!"

[Sidenote: _Maitre Pierre_, etc. Summing up.]

In fact, to put the matter brutally, but honestly, as far as the present
writer's knowledge extends, Edmond About was not a novelist at all "in
his heart." He was a journalist (he himself admits the impeachment so
far), and he was a journalist in a country where novel- or at least
tale-writing had long established itself as part of the journalist's
business. Also he was really a good _raconteur_--a gift which, though
perhaps few people have been good novelists without it, does not by
itself make a good novelist. As a publicist, too, he was of no small
mark: his _Question Romaine_ could not be left out of any sufficient
political library of the nineteenth century. Some of his shorter tales,
such as _Le Nez d'un Notaire_ and _L'Homme a l'Oreille Cassee_, have had
a great vogue with those who like comic situations described with
lively, if not very refined, wit. He was also a good topographer; indeed
this element enters largely into most of his so-called novels already
noticed, and constitutes nearly all the interest of a very pleasant book
called _Maitre Pierre_. This is a description of the _Landes_ between
Bordeaux and Arcachon, and something like a "puff" of the methods used
to reclaim them, diversified by an agreeable enough romance. The hero is
a local "king," a foundling-hunter-agriculturist who uses his kingdom,
not like Hadji Stavros, to pillage and torment, but to benefit his
subjects. The heroine is his protegee Marinette, a sort of minor Isopel
Berners, with a happier end.[428] The throwing into actual tale-form of
curious and decidedly costly local fashions of courtship is clever; but
the whole thing is a sort o