r. Dinmont, and part by an ancient countess.
We never get any clear idea _why_ Jeanne le Hardouey was bewitched, and
_why_ the Chevalier-Abbe de la Croix-Jugan suffered and diffused so
gruesome a fate.[451] Yet the fate itself is enough to make one close,
with the sweet mouth, remarks on this very singular failure of a genius.
Few things of the sort in fiction are finer than the picture of the
terrible unfinished mass (heralded over the desolate moor at uncertain
times by uncanny bell-ringing), which the reprobate priest (who has been
shot at the altar-steps before he could accomplish the Sacrifice of
Reconciliation[452]) endeavours after his death to complete, being
always baffled before the consecrating moment.

[Sidenote: Champfleury.]

Cladel had a considerable, and Barbey d'Aurevilly an almost exclusive,
fancy for the tragical. On the other hand, Champfleury (who, no doubt
partly for a bibliographical memory,[453] prefixed the Champ- to his
actual surname) occupies, as has been said, a curious, but in part far
from unsatisfactory, position in regard to our subject, and one blessed
by the Comic Spirit. His confessed fictions are, indeed, not very
successful. To take one volume only, _Madame Eugenio_, the title-story,
_not_ the first in order, but the longest, is most unfortunately, but
far too accurately, characterised by a phrase towards its end, "ce
_triste_ recit," the adjective, like our "poor," being capable of two
different meanings. _Histoire du Lieutenant Valentin_, on the other
hand--a story of a young soldier, who, leaving Saint-Cyr in
cholera-time, has to go to hospital, and, convalescing pleasantly while
shelling peas and making rose-gays for the Sisters, is naively surprised
at one of them being at first very kind and then very cold to him--is a
miss of a masterpiece, but still a miss, partly owing to too great
length. And so with others.

[Sidenote: _Les Excentriques._]

But in his much earlier _Les Excentriques_ (not unnaturally but wrongly
called "_Contes_ Excentriques" by some), handling what profess to be
true stories, he shows a most excellent narrative faculty. Whether they
are true or not (they rather resemble, and were perhaps inspired by,
some things of Gautier and Gerard) matters little--they are quite good
enough to be false. They are, necessarily, not quite equal, and there
may be for some tastes, not for all, too much of the Fourierism and
other queernesses of the mid-nineteenth centur