, and finds
he cannot. Therefore there is a God and a soul. A most satisfactory
conclusion, but a most singular major premiss. Why should there be no
God and no soul because there is (if there is) freewill?[547] But all is
well that ends well: and how can you end better than by being heard to
ejaculate, "Mon Dieu!" (quite seriously and piously, and not in the
ordinary trivial way) by a scientific friend, at the church of
Sainte-Clotilde, during your daughter's wedding?

[Sidenote: _La Grande Marniere._]

_La Grande Marniere_ does not aspire to such heights, and is perhaps one
of the best "machined" of M. Ohnet's books. The main plot is not very
novel--his plots seldom are--and, in parts as well as plots, any one who
cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of
indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous
self-made man towards an improvident _seigneur_ and his somewhat
robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the
usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and
gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on
agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he
possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit and hill which want developing.
There is the again usual cross-action of an at first hopeless affection
on the part of the _roturier's_ son, Pascal Carvajan, a rising lawyer,
for Antoinette de Clairefont. But M. Ohnet--still fertile in
situations--adds a useful sort of conspiracy among Carvajan's tools of
various stations against the house of Clairefont; a conspiracy which
actually culminates in a murder-charge against Robert de Clairefont, the
victim being the pretty daughter of a local poacher, one of the gang,
with whom the Viscount has notoriously and indeed quite openly flirted.
Now comes Pascal's opportunity: he defends Robert, and not merely
obtains acquittal, but manages to discover that the crime was actually
committed by the village idiot, who betrays himself by remorse and
sleep-walking. There is a patient, jilted lover, M. de Croix-Mesnil (it
may just be noted that since French novel-heroines were allowed any
choice at all in marriage, they have developed a faculty of altering
that choice which might be urged by praisers of times past against the
enfranchisement); a comic aunt; and several other promoters of business.
It is no wonder that, given a public for the kind of book, this
particular example o