, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of
seventeen. He--who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a
commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by
nature--soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the
girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if
not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in
passing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much
for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.

This tragic theme (really a tragic [Greek: hamartia], for there is much
good in Sauvageonne, as she is called, from her tomboy habits, and, with
happier chance and a nobler lover, all might have been well with her) is
handled with no little power, and with abundant display of skill in two
different departments which M. Theuriet made particularly his
own--sketches of the society of small country towns, and elaborate
description of the country itself, especially wood-scenery. In regard to
the former, it must be admitted that, though there is plenty of scandal
and not a little ill-nature in English society of the same kind, the
latter nuisance seems, according to French novelists, to be more
_active_ with their country folk than it is with ours[540]--a thing, in
a way, convenient for fiction. Of the descriptive part the only
unfavourable criticism (and that a rather ungracious one) that could be
made is that it is almost too elaborate. Of two fateful scenes of
_Sauvageonne_, that where Francis Pommeret, the unheroic hero, comes
across Denise (the girl's proper name) sitting in a crab-tree in the
forest and pelting small boys with the fruit, is almost startlingly
vivid. You see every detail of it as if it were on the Academy walls. In
fact, it is almost more like a picture than like reality, which is more
shaded off and less sharp in outline and vivid in colour. As for the
character-drawing, if it does not attain to that consummateness which
has been elsewhere described and desiderated--the production of people
that you _know_--it attains the second rank; the three prominent
characters (the rest are merely sets-off) are all people that you
_might_ know. Denise herself is very near the first rank, and Francis
Pommeret--not, as has been said, by any means a scoundrel, for he only
succumbs to strong and continued temptation, but an ordinary selfish
creature--is nearer than those who wish to think nobly of human natur