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ngs after the new day, like the noble author of the _Solitaire_ who will follow them. They are, in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and Paul de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's _Lolotte et Fanfan_, escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and careful study of the four volumes of his _Petit Carillonneur_ (1819) has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not merely _Lolotte_ (the second title of which is _Histoire de Deux Enfants abandonnes dans une ile deserte_), but _Victor ou L'Enfant de la Foret_, _Caelina ou L'Enfant du Mystere_, _Jules ou le Toit paternel_, or any other of the author's score or so of novels would be like. The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun _des enfants_; he writes rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books) loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men, and left to the chances of divine and human assistance, is made to earn his living by framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a _corvee_. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies, and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts--violent and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by Mr. Thomas Day)--beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent musician; an excellent cure; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de Surval, who, close
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