s _les militaires_, and has been entrusted with money
to help them by the Empress Josephine. The second, "without with your
leave or by your leave" of any kind,[71] jumps back to give us, under a
different name for a long time, the early history of this captain, which
occupies two whole volumes and part of a third (the fourth of the book).
Then another abrupt shift introduces us to the "artist," the younger
brother, who bears a _third_ name, itself explained by another jump back
of great length. Then a lover turns up for Suzanne, the captain's
daughter, and we end the fifth volume with a wedding procession in ten
distinct carriages.

[Sidenote: _Ludovica._]

_Ludovica ou Le Testament de Waterloo_, a much later book, was, the
author tells us, finished in June 1830 under the fiendish tyranny of
"all-powerful bigots, implacable Jesuits, and restored marquises"; but
the glorious days of July came; a new dynasty, "jeune, forte, sincere"
(Louis Philippe "young and sincere"!), was on the throne; the ship of
state entered the vast sea of liberty; France revived; all Europe seemed
to start from its shroud--and _Ludovica_ got published. But the author's
joy was a little dashed by the sense that, unlike its half-score of
forerunners, the book had not to battle with the bigots and the Jesuits
and the "restored marquises"--the last a phrase which has considerable
charms of suggestion.

All this, of course, has its absurd side; but it shows, by way of
redemption, that Ducange, in one of the many agreeable phrases of his
country, "did not go to it with a dead hand." He seems, indeed, to have
been a thoroughly "live" person, if not a very wise one: and _Ludovica_
begins with a rousing situation--a crowd and block in the streets of
Paris, brought about by nobody quite knows what, but ending in a
pistol-shot, a dead body, the flight of the assassin, the dispersal of
the crowd by the _gendarmes_, and finally the discovery by a young
painter, who has just returned from seeing his mother at Versailles, of
a very youthful, very pretty, and very terrified girl, speaking an
unknown tongue, and not understanding French, who has fled for refuge
into a dark alley ending in a flight of cellar-steps. It is to the point
that among the confused cries attending the disturbance have been some
about a girl being carried off.

It must be admitted that this is not unpromising, and I really think
_Ludovica_ (with a caution as to the excessive prolixity