improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It
is even somewhat lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as
because of the absence of any other attraction. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is
not exactly rose-pink, but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from
its smirches of mud and blood and blackness. In _Lamiel_ there is little
else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which
redeems not merely _Le Rouge et le Noir_ but the less exciting books, is
wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well
as in body, and, except perhaps when she ejaculates (as more briefly
reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, _ce n'est que ca_?" Lamiel
herself is not made interesting.

[Sidenote: The _Nouvelles Inedites_.]

The _Vie de Henri Brulard_, of high importance for a History of
Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject of a historian of the
Novel, though it might be adduced to strengthen the remarks made on
Rousseau's _Confessions_.[144] And the rest of the "resurrected" matter
is also more autobiographical, or at best illustrative of Beyle's
restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to pieces--of "never
being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular language has
it)--than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the first and
by far the most substantive of the _Nouvelles Inedites_, which his
amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published
soon after his death, needs a little notice.

[Sidenote: _Le Chasseur Vert._]

_Le Chasseur Vert_[145] (which had three other titles, three successive
prefaces, and in its finished, or rather unfinished, form is the salvage
of five folio volumes of MS., the rest being at best sketched and at
worst illegible) contains, in what we have of it, the account of the
tribulations of a young sub-lieutenant of Lancers (with a great deal of
money, a cynical but rather agreeable banker-papa, an adoring mother,
and the record of an expulsion from the Polytechnique for supposed
Republicanism) suddenly pitchforked into garrison, soon after the
Revolution of July, at Nancy. Here, in the early years of the July
monarchy, the whole of decent society is Legitimist; a very small but
not easily suppressible minority Republican; while officialdom, civil
and military, forms a peculiar _juste milieu_, supporting itself by
espionage and by what Their Majesties of the present moment, the Trade