ned with him when
he got rid of the others. These defects are numerous enough and serious
enough. The books are nothing if not uncritical, generally extravagant,
and sometimes (especially in _Jean Louis_) appallingly dull. Scarf-pins,
made of poisoned fish-bones (_Argow le Pirate_), extinction of virgins
under copper bells (_Le Centenaire_), attempts at fairy-tales (_La
Derniere Fee_) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures
largely in _L'Excommunie_ (one of the least bad), _L'Israelite_,
_L'Heritiere de Birague_, _Dom Gigadas_. There is a _Vicaire des
Ardennes_ (remarkably different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind
of introduction to _Argow le Pirate_, and which, again, is not the
worst. When I formerly wrote about these curious productions, after
reading them, I had not read Pigault-Lebrun, and therefore did not
perceive, what I now see to be an undoubted fact, that Balzac was,
sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault's popular footsteps. But
he had not that writer's varied knowledge of actual life or his power of
telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided Pigault's
_grossierete_, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other
defects of his model abode with him.

[Sidenote: _Les Chouans._]

There are not many more surprising things, especially _in pari materia_,
to be found in literary history than the sun-burst of _Les Chouans_
after this darkness-that-can-be-felt of the early melodramas. Not that
_Les Chouans_ is by any means a perfect novel, or even a great one. Its
narrative drags, in some cases, almost intolerably; the grasp of
character, though visible, is inchoate; the plot is rather a polyptych
of separate scenes than a connected action; you see at once that the
author has changed his model to Sir Walter and think how much better Sir
Walter would have done the thing. But there is a strange air of "coming
alive" in some of the scenes, though they are too much separated, as in
the case of the finale and of the execution of the rather hardly used
traitor earlier. These possess a character of thrill which may be looked
for in vain through all the ten volumes of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.
Montauran _is_ a hero in more than one sense, and Mlle. de Verneuil is
still more a heroine. Had Balzac worked her out as he worked out others,
who did not deserve it so well, later, she might have been one of the
great characters in fiction. Even as it is, the "jour sans lendemain,"