Cette sonnette etat celle qui avertissait la soubrette que
sa maitresse reclamait son office.

La jolie fille prit un flambeau et quitta la cuisine.

Here you have four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five
words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following:

"Here her mistress's bell rang, and she left the kitchen."

One might conduct not merely five, but five and twenty novels abreast at
this rate.

[Sidenote: The second.]

Not thus would it be proper to write of Gaboriau. With him, except
incidentally, and when he is diverging from his proper line,[431] one
finds no mere "piffle." He has a business and he does that. Moreover, it
is a business which, if not intrinsically, is historically important. Of
course there had been crime-novels and crime-tales before: there always
has been everything before. But Gaboriau undoubtedly refashioned and
restarted them, and has been ever since the parent or master of a
family, or whole school, of novelists and tale-tellers who have
sometimes seemed, at any rate to themselves, to be pillars, and to be
entitled to talk about politics and religion and morals, and the other
things which, as Chesterfield so delightfully remarked, need no
troublesome preparation in the talker. His place here, therefore, is
secured. If it is not a large place, that is not entirely due to the
mere fact that, as has been frankly acknowledged, the present writer
takes little pleasure in the crime-novel. It is because the kind,
plentiful for those who like it to read, can be conveniently knocked off
in specimen for others. For the latter purpose it would not matter very
much whether _L'Affaire Lerouge_, or _Le Crime d'Orcival_, or _M. Lecoq_
itself, or perhaps even others, were taken. The first named, which was,
I think, one of the first, if not the actual overture of the series, and
which happens to be best known to the historian, will perhaps suffice.

[Sidenote: _L'Affaire Lerouge._]

No one who takes it up, having some little critical aptitude and
experience, will fail to see, very shortly, that it does mean business
and does do it. The murder of Claudine Lerouge is well plunged into; the
arrangements for its detection--professional and amateur--are
"gnostically" laid out; and the plot thickens and presents various sides
of itself, like a craftsmanly made and tossed pancake. If you read it at
all, you will not skip much; first, because the interest, such as it