their wit. But Mariette, the _servante-maitresse_, though
much less moral, is much more attractive than Pamela; the whole of the
story is hit off with a pleasant mixture of humour, narrative faculty,
bright phrase,[209] and good nature, of which the first is simply absent
in Crebillon and the last rather dubiously present.

We may return very shortly to the later, longer, and, I suppose, more
accomplished stories before relinquishing Gautier.

[Sidenote: Return to _Fortunio_.]

I have known very good people who liked _Fortunio_; I care for it less
than for any other of its author's tales. The fabulously rich and
entirely heartless hero has not merely the extravagance but (which is
very rare with Gautier) the vulgarity of Byronism; the opening orgie,
by an oversight so strange that it may almost seem to be no oversight at
all, reminds one only too forcibly of the ironic treatment accorded to
that institution in _Les Jeune-France_, and suffers from the
reminder; the blending of East and West and the _Arabian Night_ harems
in Paris, "unbeknown" to everybody,[210] almost attain that
_plusquam_-Aristotelian state of reprobation, the impossible which is
also improbable; and the courtesan heroines--at least two of them,
Musidora and Arabelle--are even more faulty in this respect. No doubt

[Greek: pollai morphai ton ouranion],

and the forms of the Pandemic as well as of the Uranian Aphrodite are
numerous likewise. But among them one finds no probability or
possibility of Gautier's Musidora of eighteen, who might be a young
duchess gone to the bad. Neither is the end of the girl, suicide, in
consequence of the disappearance of her lover, though quite possible and
even probable, at all suitable to Gautier's own fashion of thinking and
writing. Merimee could have done it perfectly well. Of almost no others
of the delectable contents of the two volumes of _Nouvelles_ and of
_Romans et Contes_ has one to speak in this fashion, while some of them
come very nearly up to their companion _La Morte Amoureuse_ itself.

How Gautier managed to keep all this comparatively serious, if not quite
so, in treatment, is perhaps less difficult to make out than why he took
the trouble to do so. But it is the entire absences of irony on the one
side and on the other of the dream-quality--the pure imagination which
makes the impossibilities of _La Morte_ and of _Arria Marcella_, and
even of the trifle _Omphale_, so delightful--that deprives