_Le Capitaine
Fracasse_ or the _Chronique de Charles IX_. But even the lower ways he
could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his
wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but
rather late Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed
and Dumas possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations,
if not in actual temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of
_lingua franca_ suitable to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant
with, _any_ particular time and _any_ particular state of manners. He
could throw in types of the kind so much admired by no less a person
than Sir Philip Sidney--a garrulous old servant, an innocent young girl,
a gasconading coward, a revengeful daughter of Italy, a this and that
and the other. But he could neither make individual character nor vivid
historical scene. And so the thing breaks down.

The barber-hero-villain himself is the most "unconvincing" of barbers
(who have profited fiction not so ill in other cases), of heroes (who
are too often unconvincing), and even of villains (who have rather a
habit of being so).[52] Why a man who is represented as being intensely,
diabolically, wicked, but almost diabolically shrewd, should employ, and
go on employing, as his instrument a blundering poltroon like the Gascon
Chaudoreille, is a question which recurs almost throughout the book,
and, being unanswered, is almost sufficient to damn it. And at the end
the other question, why M. le Marquis de Villebelle--represented as,
though also a villain, a person of superior intelligence--when he has
discovered that the girl whom he has abducted and sought to ruin is
really his daughter; when he has run upstairs to tell her, has knocked
at her locked door, and has heard a heavy body splashing into the lake
under her window,--why, instead of making his way at once to the water,
he should run about the house for keys, break into the room, and at
last, going to the window, draw from the fact that "an object shows
itself at intervals on the surface, and appears to be still in a state
of agitation," the no doubt quite logical inference that Blanche is
drowning--when, and only then, he precipitates himself after her,--this
question would achieve, if it were necessary, the damnation.

[Sidenote: The Pauline grisette.]

The fact is, that Paul had no turn for melodrama, history, or tragic
matter of any kind. He wrote nearly a hundred no