d
back; and _La Mere Sauvage_, the finest of all, how a French mother,
hearing of her son's death, burnt her own house with some Germans
billeted in it, and was, on her frank confession, shot. But _Un Duel_,
though a Prussian officer (_vile damnum_) pays for his brutality with
his life, restores the comic element, partly at the expense of the two
English seconds.[502]

Connected with the war of 1870 too, though not military, is the capital
_Coup d'Etat_, in which a Monarchist French squire checkmates, for the
moment at least, a blatant Republican village doctor.

[Sidenote: Norman stories.]

Very much larger than any other group is, naturally enough, that on
Norman subjects. Maupassant does not flatter his fellow-subjects of the
great Duchy, but he loves them, and knows them, and delights to talk of
them--talking always well and often at his best. There must be, in all,
several volumes-full of these, though they are actually scattered over a
dozen: and it is not easy to go wrong with them. Perhaps a new "Farce du
Cuvier," quite different from those known to readers of Boccaccio and
the Fabliaux (a very drunk peasant sells his wife[503] by weight or
measure to another, and scientifically ascertains the exact sum to be
paid by making her fill a butt with water and putting her into it--the
displacement giving the required result) is the merriest. The story of
the schoolboy who negotiates a marriage between his Latin tutor and a
young person is excellent; and that of "Boitelle," a poor fellow who is
prevented (through that singular abuse of _patria potestas_ so long
allowed by French law) from marrying an agreeable negress, is the most
pathetic. But I myself am rather fond of the _Legende du Mont
Saint-Michel_. At first one is a little shocked at finding "the great
vision of the guarded mount"[504] yoked to the old Scandinavian
troll-and-farmer story of the fraudulent bargain as to alternate upper-
and under-ground crops. But the magnificent opening description of "the
fairy castle planted in the sea"[505] excuses, and is thrown up by, the
sequel. Mont-Saint-Michel is not like Naples. When you have seen it, it
is not your business to die, but to live and remember the sight of it;
and, if you are lucky, your remembrance will have anticipated
Maupassant's words, and be freshened by them.

[Sidenote: Algerian and Sporting.]

Algiers and the Riviera were also fruitful in quantity, rather less so
in quality. But on the for