he will give him a cast of her office. The story is told
as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked
attitude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though
they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.

[502] Maupassant does not caricature us (at least our men) very
extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say,
"Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a
diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally
mysterious _Aoi_ of the _Chanson de Roland_?). But I cannot make it like
the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says,
"Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some
dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know,
phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The
curious thing is that "Oh-_a_" actually is a not unfrequent, though
slovenly, pronunciation.

[503] Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so
often reproached is of French--at least Norman--origin.

[504] The _other_ one, of course, but here one must admit the
superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French
antecedents.

[505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes
no bad blank-verse line.

[506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostly
inferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially _Le Pain
Maudit_, are very amusing, and _Lui_? is a curious and melancholy
anticipation of _Le Horla_. _La Maison Tellier_, which opens and titles
another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite
worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when
one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or
even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock _me_.)
Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, _La Femme de Paul_, which
closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of _Mlle. Giraud
ma Femme_ (_v. inf._); only the male person, instead of drowning his
she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents
suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist
_meticulousness_.

[507] _V. sup._ p. 269 _sq._

[508] For the "Terror" group see below.

[509] Curiously enough, a few days _after_ writing the above I came
across, in the last _Diabolique_ of that curious fla