very long book--it fills three of the tightly printed
volumes of the old Michel-Calmann-Levy collection, with some three or
four hundred pages in each; and we have not got, in the above survey, to
more than the middle of the second. But in its afternoon and evening
there is some light. The creature Anzoleto recurs; but his immediate
effect is good,[182] for it starts the heroine on a fresh elopement of
an innocent kind, and we get back to reality. The better side of George
Sand's Bohemianism revives in Bohemia itself; and she takes Consuelo to
the road, where she adopts male dress (a fancy with her creatress
likewise), and falls in with no less a person than the composer Haydn in
his youth. They meet some Prussian crimps, and escape them by help of a
coxcombical but not wholly objectionable Austrian Count Hoditz and the
better (Prussian) Trenck. They get to Vienna (meeting La Corilla in an
odd but not badly managed maternity-scene half-way) and rejoin old
Porpora there. There are interviews with Kaunitz and Maria Theresa:[183]
and a recrudescence of the Venetian musical jealousies. Consuelo
endeavours to reopen communications with the Rudolstadts, but
Porpora--chiefly out of his desire to retain her on the stage, but
partly also from an honest and not wholly unsound belief that a union
between a gipsy girl and a German noble would itself be madness--plays
false with the letters. She accepts a professional invitation from
Hoditz to his castle in Moravia, meets there no less a person than
Frederic the Second _incognito_, and by his order (after she has saved
his life from the vengeance of the re-crimped deserter rescued with her
by Hoditz and Trenck) is invited to sing at Berlin. The carrying out of
the invitation, which has its Fredericianities[184] (as one may perhaps
be allowed to call them), is, however, interrupted. The mysterious
Albert, who has mysteriously turned up in time to prevent an attempt of
the other and worse (Austrian) Trenck on Consuelo, is taken with an
apparently mortal illness at home, and Consuelo is implored to return
there. She does so, and a marriage _in articulo mortis_ follows, the
supposed dead Zdenko (whom we did not at all want) turning up alive
after his master's death. Consuelo, fully if not cheerfully adopted by
the family, is offered all the heirloom jewels and promised succession
to the estates. She refuses, and the book ends--with fair warning that
it is no ending.

[Sidenote: _La Com