. The weakest part of it lies in the characters of
what may be called the hero and heroine of the beginning and
middle--Frederic Servieres and Madeleine his wife. That the former
should fall into the most frantic love before marriage, and almost
neglect his wife as soon as she has borne him a child, may be said to be
common enough in books, and, unluckily, by no means uncommon in life.
But there may be more question about the repetition of the inconsistency
in other parts of the character--extreme business aptitude and fatal
neglect of business, extreme energy and fatal depression over quite
small things, etc. The general combination is not impossible; it is not
even improbable; but it is not quite "made so." And something is the
same with Madeleine, who is, moreover, left "in the air" in so curious a
fashion that one begins to wonder whether the Mrs. Martha Buskbody
attitude, so often jibed at, does not possess some excuse.

[Sidenote: _Toussaint Galabru._]

A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a
way, may be found in _Toussaint Galabru_, the last, perhaps, of M.
Fabre's books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt
some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel
is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten
years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first
half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew's," though he is not
here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and
mother at Bedarieux, M. Fabre's actual birthplace. He plays truant from
Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his
school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow's not too pious father,
who is actually a church _suisse_, but has received an exeat from the
_cure_ to catch a famous hare for that _cure_ to eat. The vicissitudes
of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary
skill as from the boy's point of view, his entire innocence, when he is
brought into contact with very shady incidents, being--and this is a
most difficult thing to do--hit off marvellously well. It is only
towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that
Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance--as
clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does
appear he has his way--with the game shot by others, and with a certain
_metayer's_ wife--after