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Sterny was to blame! He is much upset by this, and, coming to Vallanches to recuperate, is rewarded later for his good deeds and sufferings,[552] by the hand of a very attractive young woman with a fortune. This poetic justice, however, is by no means the point of the book, which, indeed, has no particular point. It is filled up by details of Swiss hotel-life: of the wicked conduct of English tourists, who not merely sing hymns on Sunday, but dance on wet evenings in the week (nearly the oddest combination of crimes known to the present writer); of a death in climbing of one of the characters which is not in the least required by the story; of the scalding of her arm by a _paysanne_ in a sort of "ragging" flirtation, and the operation on the mortifying member by a cure who knows something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn their chalet into a hotel with no capital to work it, and are bought out, with just enough to cover their outlay and leave them penniless, by the general _entrepreneur_. It is a curious book, but the very reverse of a successful one. [Sidenote: _La Course a la Mort._] The centre, not by any means in the chronological sense (for they were among his earliest), but in the logical and psychological, of M. Rod's novel production, is undoubtedly to be found in the two contrastedly titled books _Le Sens de la Vie_ and _La Course a la Mort_. The first, which, as has been said, received Academic distinction, I approached many years ago without any predisposition against it, and closed with a distinct feeling of disappointment. The other I read more recently with a distinct apprehension of disapproval, which was, if not entirely, to a very large extent removed as I went on. It was strongly attacked as morbid and mischievous at its first appearance in 1885; and the author, some years afterwards, prefixed a defence to his fifth edition, which is not much more effective than such defences usually are. It takes something like the line which, as was mentioned above, Mr. Traill took about Maupassant--that Pessimism was a fact like other facts, and one was entitled to take it as a subject or motive. But it also contained a slip into that obvious but, somehow or other, seldom avoided trap--the argument that a book is "dramatic," and does not necessarily express the author's own attitude. Perhaps not; but the rejoinder that almost all, if not all, M. Rod's books are "sicklied o'er" in this
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