nfants du Boulevard_) did not inspire me
with any desire to look up this earlier novel; and _La Pucelle de
Belleville_, another of Paul's attempts to depict the unconventional but
virtuous young person, has very slight interest as a story, and is
disfigured by some real examples of the "coarse vulgarity" which has
been somewhat excessively charged against its author generally. _Frere
Jacques_ is a little better, but not much.[55]

Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once
"got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have
read, for instance, in succession, _M. Dupont_, which, even in the
Belgian piracy, is of 1838, and _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_, which must
be some quarter of a century later--so late, indeed, that Madame Patti
is mentioned in it. The title-hero of the first--a most respectable
man--has an _ingenue_, who loves somebody else, forced upon him,
experiences more recalcitrance than is usually allowed in such cases,
and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical injustice, is butchered to
make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does not so very distinctly
deserve his Eugenie. It contains also one Zelie, who is perhaps the
author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or most
disagreeable, grisette. _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_ gives us a whole
posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls--pretty,
middling, and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and
_couci-couci_ (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula,"
because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion
almost noble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a
mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of
Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down
with fifteen thousand francs for an old mistress (she has lost her
beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of the
extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or
half-first; a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances
of Marie's mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You
might change over some of the personages and scenes of the two books;
but they are scarcely unequal in such merit as they possess, and both
lazily readable in the fashion so often noted.

If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the
answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself