d almost wholly desirable widow, whom he is
actually about to marry when, luckily for her, she discovers his
_fredaines_, and "calls off"; and, lastly, a peasant girl, Suzon, whom
he seduces, whom he keeps for six weeks in his uncle's house, after a
fashion possibly just not impossible in a large Parisian establishment;
who is detected at last by the uncle; who runs away when she hears that
Gustave is going to marry Eugenie, and who is at the end produced, with
an infant ready-made, for Paul's favourite "curtain" of Hymen, covering
(like the curtain) all faults. The book has more "scabrous" detail than
_L'Enfant de ma Femme_, and (worse still) it relapses into
Smollettian-Pigaultian dirt; but it displays a positive and even large
increase of that singular readableness which has been noticed. One would
hardly, except in cases of actual novel-famine, or after an immense
interval, almost or quite involving oblivion, read a book of Paul's
twice, but there is seldom any difficulty in reading him once. Only,
beware his moral moods! When he is immoral it is in the bargain; if you
do not want him you leave him, or do not go to him at all. But when, for
instance, the unfortunate Madame de Berly has been frightfully burnt and
disfigured for life by an act of her own, intended to save--and
successful in saving--her _vaurien_ of a lover, Paul moralises thus at
the end of a chapter--

Julie perdit en effet tous ses attraits: elle fut punie par
ou elle avait peche. Juste retour des choses ici-bas.

there being absolutely no such _retour_ for Gustave--one feels rather
inclined, as his countrymen would say, to "conspue" Paul.[43] It is
fair, however, to say that these accesses of morality or moralising are
not very frequent.

[Sidenote: The caricatured _Anglais_.]

But there is one thing of some interest about _Gustave_ which has not
yet been noticed. Paul de Kock was certainly not the author,[44] but he
must have been one of the first, and he as certainly was one of the most
effective and continuous, promoters of that curious caricature of
Englishmen which everybody knows from French draughtsmen, and some from
French writers, of the first half of the nineteenth century. It is only
fair to say that we had long preceded it by caricaturing Frenchmen. But
they had been slow in retaliating, at least in anything like the same
fashion. For a long time (as is again doubtless known to many people)
French literature had mostly ign