etch of the
_debacle_ after Waterloo. (It is not wonderful that Beyle should know
something about retreats, for, though he was not at Waterloo, he had
come through the Moscow trial.) This is a really marvellous thing and
intensely interesting, though, as is almost always the case with the
author, strangely unexciting. The interest is purely intellectual, and
is actually increased by comparison with Hugo's imaginative account of
the battle itself; but you do not care the snap of a finger whether the
hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch later, where this same
Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble struggle kills, his
saltimbanque rival in the affections of a low-class actress, and then
has a series of escapes from the Austrian police on the banks of the Po,
has a little more of the exciting about it. So perhaps for some--I am
not sure that it has for me--may have the final, or provisionally final,
escape from the Farnese Tower. And there is, even outside of these
passages, a good deal of scattered incident.

But these interesting plums, such as even they are, are stuck in an
enormous pudding of presentation of the intrigues and vicissitudes of a
petty Italian court,[130] in which, and in the persons who take part in
them, I at least find it difficult to take the very slightest interest.
Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and
who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been
really in love with any woman--though there is one possible exception
precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent,
Clelia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above--is depicted with
extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once
more, excludes passion, humour, gusto--all the _fluids_ of real or
fictitious life. Fabrice is like (only "much more also") the simulacra
of humanity that were popular in music-halls a few years ago. He walks,
talks, fights, eats, drinks, _thinks_ even, and makes love if he does
not feel it, exactly like a human being. Except the "fluids" just
mentioned, it is impossible to mention anything human that he lacks. But
he lacks these, and by not having them lacks everything that moves the
reader.

And so it is more or less with all of them: with the Duchess and Clelia
least perhaps, but even with them to some extent; with the Duchess's
first _cicisbeo_ and then husband, Count Mosca, prime minister of the
D