waking, sees at the foot of the bed, flowing sluggishly from
the crack under the Englishman's door, a dark brownish-red fluid. It is
blood, certainly blood! and what on earth is to be done? Apparently the
Englishman (they have heard a heavy bump in the night) has either
committed suicide or been murdered, perhaps by the nephew; the matter
will be enquired into; in the circumstances they themselves cannot
escape examination, and the escapade will come out (blue spectacles and
black veils being alike useless against Commissaries of Police and
Judges of Instruction). The only hope is an early Paris train, if they
can get their bill, obtain some sort of breakfast, and catch it. But,
just as they have determined to do so, the facts next door are
discovered. The Englishman, who has ordered two bottles of _porto_, has
fallen asleep over the second, knocked it down while still half-full,
followed it himself to the floor, and reclined there peacefully, while
the fluid from the broken bottle trickled over the boards,[231] under
the door, and into the agapemone beyond. Once more (but for one
horrible[232] piece of libel), the thing could hardly be better.

[Sidenote: The _Chronique de Charles IX._]

Merimee's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction--the
_Chronique de Charles IX_--has been rather variously judged. That the
present writer once translated the whole of it may, from different
points of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualification
for judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there are
unfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be one
or the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored by
his occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of an
expert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many books
to an even keel between _engouement_ and disgust, it certainly should
not be a _dis_qualification. I do not think that the _Chronique_, as a
romance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas so
fortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely a
success. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in his
two Dalilahs--the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen,
and the great lady--and in his fear-neither-God-nor-Devil brother; good
scenes in the massacre and in other passages also. But as a whole--as a
modernised _roman d'adventures_--it does not exactly _run_: the reader
does not de