is,
is continuous; and, secondly, for one of those reasons which keep
would-be sinners in other paths of rectitude--that, _if_ you skip, you
will almost certainly find you have lost your way when you come down
from skipping. Some oddities--partly, but not entirely, connected with
the strange and well-known differences between French and English
criminal procedure--will, of course, strike an Englishman--the
collaboration of professional _juge d'instruction_ and amateur detective
being perhaps the most remarkable. The love-affair, in which the Judge
himself and the plotted-against Albert de Commarin are rivals, though a
useful poker to stir the fire, is not quite a well-managed one: and the
long harangue of Madame Gerdy, between her resurrection from brain-fever
and her death, seems a little to strain probability. But no one of these
things, nor all together, need be fatal to the enjoyment of the book on
the part of, as was once said, "them as likes" the kind.[432]

[Sidenote: Feydeau--_Sylvie_.]

Short notice may again serve for another novelist enormously popular in
his day; very characteristic of the Second Empire; a favourite[433] for
a time (rather inexplicably) of Sainte-Beuve; but not much of a rose,
and very much of many days before yesterday--Ernest Feydeau. He did one
thing, _Sylvie_, as different as possible from Gerard's book of the same
name, but still, as it seems to me, good enough, though it never enjoyed
a tenth part of the popularity of his more "scabrous" things, though
itself is very far from prudish, and though it makes no appearance in
some lists and collections of his work. Feydeau (it is a redeeming
point) was one of "those about" Gautier, and _Sylvie_ is by no means
unlike a pretty free and fairly original transfer from _Les
Jeune-France_. The hero is a gentleman, decadent by anticipation and
romantic by survival to the very _n_th. He abides in a vast chamber,
divanned, and hung with Oriental curtains: he smokes endless tchibouks,
and lives chiefly upon preserved ginger. To him enters Sylvie, a sort of
guardian angel, with a rather Mahometan angelism, who devotes herself to
him, and succeeds, by this means and that, in converting him to a
somewhat more rational system of life and "tonvelsasens," as Swift would
say. It is slight enough, but very far from contemptible.

[Sidenote: _Fanny._]

As has been said or hinted, however, this was not at all the sort of
thing that brought or, so long as he