removal, so that he may acquire as little influence as
possible anywhere. At last, in a very striking interview with his
bishop, he succeeds in clearing his character, and enters on the way of
promotion. The cabals continue; but later, on the overthrow of
Bonapartism, he is actually raised to the episcopate. His violent
temper, however, is always giving handles to the enemy, and he finally
determines that life is intolerable. After trying to starve himself, he
makes use of the picturesque but dangerous situation of his palace, and
is crushed by falling, in apparent accident, through a breach in the
garden wall with a precipice beneath--"falling like Lucifer," as his
lifelong enemy and rival whispers to a confederate at the end. For the
appellation has been an Ultramontane nickname for him long before, and
has been not altogether undeserved by his pride at least. It has been
said that the book is powerful; but it is almost unrelievedly gloomy
throughout, and suffers from the extremely narrow range of its interest.

[Sidenote: _Sylviane_ and _Taillevent_.]

Those who are not tired of the Cevenol atmosphere--which, it must be
admitted, is quite a refreshing one--will find a lighter example in
_Sylviane_, once more recounted by "Mr. the nephew," but with his
movable uncle and _gouvernante_ shifted back to "M. Fulcran" and
"Prudence"; and in _Taillevent_, a much longer book, which is
independent of uncle and nephew both. _Sylviane_ has agreeable things in
it, but perhaps might have been better if its form had been different.
It is a long _recit_ told by a gamekeeper, with frequent
interruptions[533] and a very thin "frame." _Taillevent_ ends with two
murders, the second a quite excusable lynch-punishment for the first,
and the marriage of the avenger just afterwards to the daughter of the
original victim, a combination of "the murders _and_ the marriages"
deserving Osric's encomia on sword furniture. So vigorous a conclusion
had need have a well-stuffed course of narrative to lead up to it, and
this is not wanting. There is a wicked--a _very_ wicked--Spaniard for
the lynched-murderer part; an exceedingly good dog-, bear-, and
man-fight in the middle; an extensive and well-utilised wolf-trap in the
woods; bankruptcies; floods; all sorts of things; with a course of
"idyllic" true love running through the whole. There _is_ a _cure_--a
rather foolish one; but the ecclesiastical interest in itself is almost
absent from the book