ant_, a novel again of his middle period,
and one which, if it shows some of his less desirable points, shows them
characteristically and with comparatively little offence, while it
exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I believe, call "a range of his
best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul Deligny, is one of his
nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call him insipid or
priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in
the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not
such a madcap as the similarly situated Frederique of _Une Gaillarde_
(_v. inf._), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are
"l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it
may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same
time no prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very
much less of a success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as
reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and
affectionate wife, but treats his lower-class loves shabbily, and allows
himself to be swindled and fooled to the _n_th by an adventuress of
fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this
book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most
gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois,
the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally
manages to make his friends pay the bill, are not bad common form of
farce. One of the best of Paul's own special scenes, the pancake party,
with a bevy of grisettes, is perhaps the liveliest of all such things,
and, but for one piece of quite unnecessary Smollettism or Pigaulterie,
need only scandalise the "unco guid." The whole has, in unusual measure,
that curious _readableness_ which has been allowed to most of our
author's books. Almost inevitably there is a melodramatic end; but this,
to speak rather Hibernically, is made up for by a minute and curious
account, at the beginning, of the actual presentation of a melodrama,
with humours of pit, box, and gallery. If the reader does not like the
book he will hardly like anything else of its author's; if he does, he
will find plenty of the same sort of stuff, less concentrated perhaps,
elsewhere. But if he be a student, as well as a consumer, of the novel,
he can hardly fail to see that, at its time and in its kind, it is not
so trivial a thing as its subjects and their