ne very shortly. It may be sufficient to say that
Claire, treacherously and spitefully informed, by her successful rival,
of the fact that she has been jilted, and shortly afterwards confronted
with the jilter himself, recovers, as it seems to her, to the company,
and I suppose to the author, the whip-hand by summoning the ironmaster
(who is hanging about "promiscuous," and is already known to be attached
to her, though she has given him no direct encouragement) and bestowing
her hand upon him, insisting, too, upon being married at once, before
the other pair. The act is supposed to be that of an exceptionally calm,
haughty, and aristocratic damsel: and the acceptance of it is made by a
man certainly deep in love, but independent, sharp-sighted, and
strong-willed. To be sure, he could not very well refuse; but this very
fact should have weighed additionally, with a girl of Claire's supposed
temperament, in deciding her not to make a special Leap Year for the
occasion. To hand yourself over to Dick because Tom has declined to have
anything to do with you is no doubt not a very unusual proceeding: but
it is not usually done quite so much _coram populo_, or with such
acknowledgment of its being done to spite Tom and Tom's preferred
one.[545]

[Sidenote: _Le Docteur Rameau._]

Two more of "Les Batailles de la Vie" (as, for some not too obvious[546]
reason, it pleased M. Ohnet to _super_-title his novels) may perhaps
suffice to give a basis for a more general judgment of his position. _Le
Docteur Rameau_ is, at least towards its close, one of the most
ambitious, if not _the_ most ambitious of all its author's books. The
hero is one of those atheistic and republican physicians who are apt
rather to _embeter_ us by their frequency in French novels. He is thrown
into the also familiar situation of ascertaining, after his wife's
death, that she has been false, and that his daughter, of whom he is
very fond, is probably or certainly not his own. At the end, however,
things come right as usual. Rameau is converted from hating his
daughter, which is well, and from being an atheist, which is better.
But, unluckily, M. Ohnet devotes several pages, in his own peculiar
style, to a rhetorical exhibition of the logic of these conclusions. It
seems to come to this. There is no God and no soul, because freewill is
sufficient to account for everything. But M. le Docteur Rameau has
willed, in the free-willingest manner, to hate his daughter