did keep it, kept Feydeau's vogue.
_Fanny_, with which he "broke out" considerably more than "ten thousand
strong," as far as sale of copies went, is certainly not a book of the
"first-you-meet" kind. There is some real passion in its handling of the
everlasting triangle. But it is passion of the most morbid and least
"infinite" kind possible. Whenever Feydeau's heroes are sincere they
have a peculiar kind of sentimental immorality--a sort of greasy
gush--which is curiously nauseous. His Aphrodite, if the goddess will
pardon the profanation of her name, is neither laughter-loving, nor
tragic (as Aphrodite can be), nor Uranian in the sense, not of being
superior to physical passion, but of transcending it. She is not
exactly Pandemic, for Feydeau, like Malvolio, does talk, or tries to
talk, of ladies; but she is something like the patroness of the old
Sensibility novel "gone to the bad."

[Sidenote: Others--_Daniel_.]

_Madame de Chalis_, according to a memory of many years which I have not
thought it worth while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancid
and mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failed
over) _Daniel_, I thought it incumbent on me to gird myself up to its
eight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldom
taken up. The hero--a prig of the first water--marries one of those
apparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, never
fail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorce
her, but he is able to return her on her mother's hands. Going to
Trouville (about which, then a quite new-fashioned resort, there is a
great deal in the book), he meets a beautiful girl, Louise de Grandmont,
and the pair fall--not merely hopelessly, which is, in the
circumstances, a matter of course, but, it would seem, innocently--in
love with each other. But in such a case scandal must needs come; and it
is engineered by revenge of the discarded wife and the mother-in-law, by
the treachery of some of Daniel's friends and the folly of others, as
well as, it must be added, by his own weak violence, thoughtless
conduct, and general imbecility. All this is developed at enormous
length, and it ends in a general massacre, Louise's uncle being killed
in a duel which Daniel ought to have fought (he is no coward, but a
hopeless blunderer), the girl herself dying of aneurism, and Daniel
putting an end to himself in her grave, much more messily and to quite
in