yle, and
evidently imitated from _La Princesse de Cleves_--is about the best
thing she did as literature; but we dealt with that in the last
volume[65] among its congeners. In my youth all girls and some boys knew
_Adele et Theodore_ and _Les Veillees du Chateau_. From a later book,
_Les Battuecas_, George Sand is said to have said that she learnt
Socialism: and the fact is that Stephanie Felicite had seen so much,
felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick
feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of
crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to
complete my idea of her were _Le Comte_ _de Corke_ and _Les Chevaliers
du Cygne_, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their
titles. The first is a collection of short tales, the title-piece
inspired and prefaced by an account of the Boyle family, and all rather
like a duller and more spun-out Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to
Marmontel accounting for this. The concluding stories of each volume,
"Les Amants sans Amour" and "Sanclair," are about the best. _Les
Chevaliers du Cygne_ is a book likely to stir up the Old Adam in some
persons. It was, for some mysterious reason, intended as a sort of
appendix--for "grown-ups"--to the _Veillees du Chateau_, and is supposed
to have incorporated parabolically many of the lessons of the French
Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three volumes and
eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the Empress Irene, and
the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is dead at Roncevaux),
and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the authoress, who
was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually
consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest
flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about
the book, and the whole treatment is in the _pre_-historical-novel
style. Indeed the writer of the _Veillees_ was altogether of the
_veille_--the day just expired--or of the transitional and
half-understood present--never of the past seen in some perspective, of
the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.

[Sidenote: The minor popular novel--Ducray-Duminil--_Le Petit
Carilloneur_.]

The batch of books into which we are now going to dip does not represent
the height of society and the interests of education like Madame de
Genlis; nor high society again and at least strivi