er the
Republic; supposed but not real victim of the Septembriseurs; atheist;
winner and loser of several fortunes; and at last _particulier_ of Paris
under a feigned name, with an apartment full of _bric-a-brac_, a drawer
full of little packets of money, after the expenditure of the last of
which he proposes to blow his brains out; tall man of stature and of his
hands, etc., etc. The book is in a way one of purpose, inculcating the
danger of wooing opera-girls, and instancing it with three very weak
young men, another duke, a rich young _parvenu_, and a musician. Of
these the first and the last are, with their wives, rather arbitrarily
saved from the clutches into which they have fallen, by the mysterious
"M. Luc," while the other comes to a very bad end. The novel, which is
in five volumes, is, like most of those mentioned in this section, not
of the kind that one would read by preference. But it is a very fair
specimen of the "below stairs" romance which sometimes prepares the way
for others, fit to take their places above stairs. And so it has its
place here.[76]

[Sidenote: The importance of these minors not inconsiderable.]

It has been pointed out more than once that though neglect of such books
as these may be perfectly natural and probable in the average reader,
such neglect--and still more any contempt of them--is, though it may not
be unnatural, utterly unscholarly and uncritical from the point of view
of history. Their authors themselves learnt something from their own
mistaken experiments, and their successors learnt a good deal more.
They found that "sculduddery" was not a necessary attraction. Ducray
does not avail himself of it, and Ducange seems to have left it off.
They did not give up, but they came less and less to depend upon,
extravagant incident, violent peripeteias, cheap supernaturalities, etc.
But the most important thing about them perhaps is the evidence they
give of learning what has been called their "business." Already, to a
great extent if not wholly, that earliest obsession and preoccupation of
the novelist--the idle anxiety to answer the question, "How do you know
all these things?"--has begun to disappear. This is rather less the case
with another foolish fancy--the belief that it is necessary to account
not merely for what we call the consequents, but for the antecedents of
all the characters (at least those of any importance) that you
introduce. There can be no doubt that this was o