vels, and I neither
pretend to have read the whole of them, nor, if I had done so, should I
feel justified in inflicting abstracts on my readers. As always happens
in such cases, the feast he offers us is "pot-luck," but, as too seldom
happens, the luck of the pot is quite often good. With the grisette, to
whom he did much to give a niche (one can hardly call it a shrine) in
literature, whom he celebrated so lovingly, and whose gradual
disappearance he has so touchingly bewailed, or with any feminine person
of partly grisettish kind, such as the curious and already briefly
mentioned heroine of _Une Gaillarde_,[53] he is almost invariably happy.
The above-mentioned Lucile is not technically a grisette (who should be
a girl living on her own resources or in a shop, not in service) nor is
Rose in _Jean_, but both have the requirements of the type--_minois
chiffonne_ (including what is absolutely indispensable, a _nez
retrousse_), inexhaustible gaiety, extreme though by no means
promiscuous complaisance, thorough good-nature--all the gifts, in short,
of Beranger's _bonne fille_, who laughs at everything, but is perfectly
capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not seldom
marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher _spear_," the English
"garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very
successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate
extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge
two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette
of _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_, who outwits in the cleverest way three
would-be gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and
extracts thumping solatia from these for their victims.[54]

[Sidenote: Others.]

On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous book which
suggested the title of this--_L'Homme aux Trois Culottes_, symbolising
and in a way giving a history of the times of the Revolution, the
Empire, and the Restoration, and finishing with "July"--seems to me
again a failure. As I have said, Paul could not manage history, least of
all spread-out history like this; and the characters, or rather
personages, though of the lower and lower-middle rank, which he _could_
manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others may have been, or
may be, more fortunate with them.

So, too, _Le Petit Fils de Cartouche_ (which I read before coming
across its first part, _Les E