o is a prominent statesman and
gives up not merely his wife but his political position for this new
love of his, starts as an actual supporter of the repeal of the divorce
laws. To an English reader, of course, the precise problem would not
have the same charm of novelty, except in his capacity as a reader of
French novels. But, putting that aside, the position is obviously
capable of being treated with very considerable appeal. The struggles of
the husband, who _has_ loved his wife--M. Rod had not the audacity or
the strength to make him love her still--between his duties and his
desires; the indignant suffering of the wife; and most of all, the
position of the girl who, by ill-fortune or the fault of others, finds
herself expending, on an at first illicit and always ill-famed love,
what she might have devoted to an honourable one, certainly has great
capabilities. But I did not think when I read it first, and I do not
think now when I have read it again, that these various opportunities
are fully taken. It is not that M. Rod has no idea of passion. He is
constantly handling it and, as will be seen presently, not without
success occasionally. But he was too much what he calls his eidolon in
one book, "Monsieur le psychologue," and the Psyche he deals with is too
often a skinny and spectacled creature--not the love of Cupid and the
mother of Voluptas.[550]

[Sidenote: _La Sacrifiee._]

If he has ever made his story hot enough to make this pale cast glow, it
is in _La Sacrifiee_. This is all the more remarkable in that the
beginning of the book itself is far from promising. There is a rather
unnecessary usher-chapter--a thing which M. Rod was fond of, and which,
unless very cleverly done, is more of an obstacle than of a "shoe-horn."
The hero-narrator of the main story is one of the obligatorily atheistic
doctors--nearly as great a nuisance as obligatorily adulterous
heroines--whom M. Rod has mostly discarded; and what is more, he is one
of the pseudo-scientific fanatics who believe in the irresponsibility of
murderers, and do not see that, the more irresponsible a criminal is,
the sooner he ought to be put out of the way. Moreover, he has the
ill-manners to bore the company at dinner with this craze, and the
indecency (for which in some countries he might have smarted) to condemn
out loud, in a court of justice, the verdict of the jury and the
sentence of the judge on his pet. Neither can one approve the haste with
wh