cruel, de
perdre tout a coup la femme qu'on aime par son inconstance, ou par sa
mort," he says one of the final things finally. But it would be as final
and as impressive if it were an isolated _pensee_. The whole story is
not well told; Frederic, though not at all a bad fellow, and an only too
natural one, is a thing of shreds and patches, not gathered together and
grasped as they should be in the hand of the tale-teller; the narrative
"backs and fills" instead of sweeping straight onwards.

[Sidenote: _Les Deux Maitresses, Le Fils du Titien_, etc.]

So, again, the first story,[235] _Les Deux Maitresses_, with its
inspiring challenge-overture, "Croyez-vous, madame, qu'il soit possible
d'etre amoureux de deux personnes a la fois?" is in parts interesting.
But one reader at least cannot help being haunted as he reads by the
notion how much better Merimee would have told it. _Le Fils du
Titien_--the story of the great master's lazy son, on whom even love and
entire self-sacrifice--lifelong too--on the part of a great lady, cannot
prevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture of
herself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth--is
the best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have done
it even better. _Margot_, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the same
degree, suggests the country tales of Musset's own faithless love.

[Sidenote: _Emmeline._]

But the most crucial example of the "something wrong" which pursues
Musset in pure prose narrative is _Emmeline_. It is quite free from
those unlucky, and possibly unfair, comparisons with contemporaries
which have been affixed to its companions. A maniac of parallels might
indeed call it something of a modernised _Princesse de Cleves_; but this
would be quite idle. The resemblance is simply in situation; that is to
say, in the _publica materies_ which every artist has a right to make
his own by private treatment. Emmeline Duval is a girl of great wealth
and rather eccentric character, who chooses to marry (he has saved her
life, or at any rate saved her from possible death and certain damage) a
person of rank but no means, M. de Marsan. There is real love between
the two, and it continues on his side altogether unimpaired, on hers
untroubled, for years. A conventional lady-killer tries her virtue, but
is sent about his business. But then there turns up one Gilbert, to whom
she yields--exactly how far is not clearly indi