d rule that your
villain should always be allowed a certain run for his money--a
temporary exercise of his villainy. Alvimar, though he does not feel the
marquis's rapier till nearly the end of the first half, as it were, of
the book, is "marked down" from the start, and never kills anything
within those limits except a poor little tame wolf-cub which is going
(very sensibly) to fly at him. He is altogether too much in appearance
and too little in effectuality of the stage Spaniard--black garments,
black upturned moustache, hook-nose, _navaja_, and all the rest of it.
But he does not spoil the thing, though he hardly does it much good; and
if he is badly treated he has his revenge on the author.

For the book becomes very dull after his supposed death (he _does_ die,
but not at once), and only revives when, some way into the second
volume, an elaborate attempt to revenge him is made by his servant,
Sanche, _ame damnee_ and also _damnante_ (if one may coin this variant),
who is, as it turns out, his irregular father. This again rather stagy
character organises a formidable body of wandering _reitres_, gipsies,
and miscellaneous ruffians to attack and sack the marquis's house--a
plan which, though ultimately foiled, brings about a very refreshing
series of hurly-burlys and hullabaloos for some hundred and fifty pages.
The narrative is full of improbable impossibilities, and contrasts
singularly with the fashion in which Dumas, throughout all his great
books (and not a few of his not so great ones), manages to _escamoter_
the difficulty. The boy Mario,[193] orphan of the murdered brother, left
unknown for many years, recognised by his uncle, avenger of his father
on Sanche, as Bois-Dore himself had been on Alvimar, is altogether too
clever and effective for his age; and the conduct of Bellinde,
Bois-Dore's cashiered _gouvernante_, is almost preposterous throughout.
But it is what a schoolboy of the old days would have called a "jolly
good scrimmage," and restores the interest of the book for most of the
second volume. The end--scarcely, one would think, very interesting to
any one--is quite spoilt for some by another example of George Sand's
inveterate passion for "maternal" love-making and matches where the lady
is nearly double the age of her husband. Others--or the same--may not be
propitiated for this by the "horrors"[194] which the author has
liberally thrown in. But the larger part of the book, like the larger
part o