ioned counter-attack on Naturalism, in which, as
usual, some of the Naturalist methods and weapons themselves were used;
but it had a distinct character of its own. Unless I mistake, it was not
at first very warmly welcomed by "mortal" French criticism. There may
have been something in this of that curious grudge[549] against
Swiss-French, on the part of purely French-French, men of letters which
never seems to have entirely ceased. But there was something more than
this, though this something more was in a way the reason, some might say
the justification, of the grudge. M. Rod was exceedingly serious; the
title of his laureated book is of itself almost sufficient to show it;
and though the exclusive notion of "the gay and frivolous Frenchman"
always was something of a vulgar error, and has been increasingly so
since the Revolution, Swiss seriousness, with its strong Germanic
leaven, is not French seriousness at all. But he became, if not exactly
a popular novelist to the tune of hundreds or even scores of editions, a
prolific and fairly accepted one. I think, though he died in middle age
and produced other things besides novels, he wrote some twenty or thirty
stories, and his production rather increased than slackened as he went
on. With the later ones I am not so well acquainted as with the earlier,
but there is a pervading character about these earlier ones which is not
likely to have changed much, and they alone belong strictly to our
subject.

[Sidenote: _La Vie Privee de Michel Teissier._]

Next to _Le Sens de la Vie_ and perhaps in a way, as far as popularity
goes, above it, may be ranked, I suppose, _La Vie Privee de Michel
Teissier_, with its sequel, _La Seconde Vie de M. T._ These books
certainly made a bold and wide separation of aim and subject from the
subject and the aim of most French novels in these recent years. Here
you have, instead of a man who attempts somebody else's wife, one who
wishes to get rid--on at least legally respectable terms--of his own,
and to marry a girl for whom he has, and who has for him, a passion
which is, until legal matrimony enfranchises it, able to restrain itself
from any practical satisfaction of the as yet illicit kind. He avails
himself of the then pretty new facilities for divorce (the famous "Loi
Naquet," which used to "deave" all of us who minded such things many
years ago), and the situation is (at least intentionally) made more
piquant by the fact that Teissier, wh