oney, and everybody
else's that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527]
allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures
his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a
pauper--is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Theven
Falgouet, the Breton _buveur d'eau_,[528] who is introduced to us at
actual point of starvation, and who dies, self-transfixed on the sharp
spikes of the Carmelite _grille_, is perhaps not _im_possible, and
occasionally pathetic. But the author seems, in his immaturity as a
craftsman, never to have made up his mind whether he is producing an
"alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary _etudiant_ and aspirant
in letters. Of the two heroines, the noble damsel Claire de
Pierrerue--object of Falgouet's love at first sight, a love ill-fated
and more insane than even love beseems--is quite nice in her way; and
Rose Keller--last of grisettes, but a grisette of the Upper House, an
artist grisette, and, as some one calls her, the "soeur de charite de
la galanterie"[529]--is quite nice in hers. But Rose's action--in
burning, to the extent of several hundred thousand francs' worth, notes
and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis's
fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring--may pair off with
Falgouet's repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the
_guanches_,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is
undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in
getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in _L'Abbe
Tigrane_, but which has been completely conquered[531] in _Norine_ and
_Cathinelle_.

[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Celestin._]

This mixed quality makes itself felt in others of Fabre's books. Perhaps
there is none of them, except _L'Abbe Tigrane_ itself, which has been a
greater favourite with his partisans than _Mon Oncle Celestin_. Here we
have something of the same easy autobiographic quality, with the same
general scene and the same relations of the narrator and the principal
characters, as in other books; but "Mr. the nephew" (the agreeable and
continuous title by which the faithful parishioners address their
beloved pastor's boy relative) has a different uncle and a different
_gouvernante_, at least in name, from those in _Norine_ and
_Cathinelle_. The Abbe Celestin, threatened with consumption, exchanges
the living in which he has worked for many years