according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carrying
out. If Hugo himself had made _Les Orientales_ studies of Montmartre and
the Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilege
he asserted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more than
to Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we may
take it first.

[Sidenote: Leon Cladel--_Les Va-nu-pieds_, etc.]

At more times in my life than one I have striven to like--or at any rate
to take an interest in--_Les Va-nu-pieds_. Long ago it had for me the
passport of the admiration of Baudelaire,[439] to whom and to Victor
Hugo (this latter circumstance an important _visa_ to the former) Cladel
announced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate,
inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me
from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace
book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the
absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and
sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not
for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and
that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it NE
VARIETUR (_sic_).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness,
literary jargon, and positive _argot_--not quite contemptible, but, like
some actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me,
though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes,
grimes, etc. The address of the dedication, "Mienne," and nothing more,
is rather nice, and some of the local scenes (Cladel was passionately
patriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worth
reading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book
(_Les Va-nu-pieds_ is a collection) called _Crete-Rouge_--the regimental
nickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war of
the Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her sex is discovered
by the Prussians, than she would have done forty and odd years later.
The end-scenes of this book, with her Druid-stone marriage to a comrade,
are really good. Of _Le Bouscassie_, _Titi-Froissac IV_, and _La Fete
Votive de Saint-Bartholomee Porte-Glaive_ I shall not say much. The
"province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel's
hopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his