elt nothing but an immense
oblivion--the oblivion of a void which was swallowing us up.

And doubtless it was so, as has been seen of many in the Time of
Roses.[554]

[Sidenote: _Le Menage du Pasteur Naudie._]

To take one or two more of his books, _Le Menage du Pasteur Naudie_,
though less poignant than _La Sacrifiee_ and with no approach to the
extra-novelish merit of _La Course a la Mort_, starts not badly with an
interesting scene, no less a place than La Rochelle, very rarely met,
since its great days, in a French novel--a rather unfamiliar society,
that of French Protestantism at Rochelle itself and Montauban--and a
certainly unusual situation, the desire of a young, pretty, and wealthy
girl, Jane Defos, to marry an elderly pastor who is poor, and, though a
widower, has four children.

That nothing but mischief can come of this proceeding--as of an abnormal
leap-year--is clear enough: whether the way in which the mischief is
brought about and recounted is good may be more doubtful. That a person
like M. Naudie, simple, though by no means a fool, should be taken in by
a very pretty girl falling apparently in love with him--even though, to
the general dangers of the situation, are added frank warnings that she
has been given to a series of freakish fancies--is not unnatural; that
she should soon tire of him, and sooner still of the four step-children,
is very natural indeed. But the immediate cause of the final
disruption--her taking a new fancy to, and being atheistically converted
by, a cousin who, after all, runs away from temptation--is not very
natural, and is unconvincingly told. Indeed the whole character of Jane
is insufficiently presented. She is meant to be a sort of Blanche Amory,
with nothing real in her--only a succession of false and fleeting
fancies. But M. Rod was not Thackeray.

[Sidenote: _Mademoiselle Annette._]

[Sidenote: _L'Eau Courante._]

With two or three more of his later-middle books (it does not seem
necessary to deal with the very latest, which are actually beyond our
limit, and could not alter the general estimate very favourably) the
preparation of judgment may cease. _Mademoiselle Annette_ is the history
of a "house-angel" and her family, and the fortunes and misfortunes they
go through, and the little town of Bielle on the Lake of Geneva.[555] It
is told, rather in M. Ferdinand Fabre's way, by a bystander, from the
time when the heroine was his school-dame and, as such d