uite non-moral, and not possessed of much common sense.
His princess Micheline is a silly jilt before marriage and a sillier
"door-mat" (as some women call others) of a wife. Her rival, and in a
fashion foster-sister (she has been adopted before Micheline's birth),
does things which many people might do, but does not do them in a
concatenation accordingly. The jilted serious young man Pierre accepts a
perfectly impossible position in reference to his former _fiancee_ and
his supplanter, and gives more proofs of its impossibility by his
conduct and speech than was at all necessary. The conversation is very
flat, and the descriptions are chiefly confined to long, gaudy
inventories of rich parvenus' houses, which read like auctioneers'
catalogues.

But the worst part of the book, and probably that which at its
appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the
_abonne_--or, more surprisingly, the Immortals--is the flatness of style
which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows
insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly
enough, of "le style a la fois pretentieux et plat, familier aux
reporters." But was he trying--there is no sign of it--to parody these
unfortunate persons when he himself described dinner-rolls as "Ces
boules dorees qui sollicitent l'appetit le plus rebelle, et accommodees
dans une serviette damassee artistement pliee, parent si elegamment un
couvert"? Or when he tells us that at a ball "Les femmes, leurs
splendides toilettes gracieusement etalees sur les meubles bas et
moelleux, causaient chiffons sous l'eventail, ou ecoutaient les
cantilenes d'un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur
chuchotaient des galanteries a l'oreille." This last is really worthy of
the feeblest member of our "_plated_ silver fork school" between the
time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of Dickens and Thackeray.

[Sidenote: _Le Maitre de Forges._]

In the year 1902, _Le Maitre de Forges_, which was then just twenty
years old, had reached its three hundred and sixty-seventh edition. Six
years later Fromentin's _Dominique_, which was then forty-five years
old, had reached its twenty-seventh. The accident of the two books lying
side by side on my table has enabled me to make this comparison, the
moral of which will be sufficiently drawn by a reference to what has
been said of _Dominique_ above,[543] and by the few remarks on M.
Ohnet's most popular book w