ce of congruity. Still, the minor
characters are not only more in number, but more interesting than is
always the case; and the book, if you skip the obstetrics, is readable
throughout. Yet it is, to use wine-language, not above "Maupassant
_premier bourgeois_," except in some of the earlier love-scenes.

[Sidenote: _Fort comme la Mort._]

In _Fort comme la Mort_ the author rises far above these two books,
powerful as they are in parts. The basis is indeed the invariable and
unsatisfactory "triangle." But the structure built on it might almost
have been lifted to another, and stands foursquare in nearly all
respects of treatment. The chief technical objection that can be brought
against it is that there is a certain want of air and space; the
important characters are too few, the situations too uniform; so that a
kind of oppression results. Olivier Bertin, one of the most popular of
Parisian painters though no longer young, a great man of society, etc.,
has, for many years, been the lover of the Countess de Guilleroy, and,
of course, the dear friend of her husband. We are introduced to them
just at the time when a sort of disgust of middle age is coming over
him, as well as a certain feeling that the springs of his genius are
running low. He is not tired of the Countess, who is passionately
devoted to him; and, except that they do not live together, their
relations are rather conjugal than anything else. Just at this moment
her daughter Annette comes home from a country life with her
grandmother, and proves to be the very double of what her mother was in
her own youth. Bertin, without ceasing to love the mother, conceives a
frantic passion for the daughter; and the vicissitudes of this take up
the book. At last the explosives of the situation are "fused," as one
may say, by one of the newspaper attacks of youth on age. Annette's
approaching marriage, and this _Figaro_ critique of his own
"old-fashioned" art, put Bertin beside himself. Either hurrying
heedlessly along, or deliberately exposing himself, he is run over by an
omnibus, is mortally hurt, and dies with the Countess sitting beside him
and receiving his last selfishness--a request that she will bring the
girl to see him before he dies.

The story, though perhaps, as has been said, too much concentrated as a
whole, is brilliantly illuminated by sketches of society on the greater
and smaller scale: of Parisian club-life; of picture-shows; of the
diversions of t