cated. M. de Marsan finds
it out and takes an unusual line. He will not make any scandal, and will
not even call the lover out. He will simply separate and leave her whole
fortune to his wife. She throws her marriage contract into the fire (one
does not presume to enquire how far this would be effective), dismisses
Gilbert through the medium of her sister, and--we don't know what
happened afterwards.

Now the absence of _finale_ may bribe critics of the present day; for my
part, as I have ventured to say more than once before, it seems that if
you accept this principle you had much better carry it through, have no
middle or beginning, and even no title, but issue, in as many copies as
you please, a nice quire or ream of blank paper with your name on it.
The purchasers could cut the name out, and use it for original
composition in a hundred forms, from washing bills to tragedies.

But I take what Musset has given me, and, having an intense admiration
for the author of _A Saint Blaise_ and _L'Andalouse_ and the _Chanson de
Fortunio_, a lively gratitude to the author of _Il ne faut jurer de
rien_ and _Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, call _Emmeline_
a very badly told and uninteresting story. The almost over-elaborate
description of the heroine at the beginning does not fit in with her
subsequent conduct; Gilbert is a nonentity; the husband, though noble in
conduct, is pale in character, and the sister had much better have been
left out.[236] So the rest may be silence.

[Sidenote: Gerard de Nerval--his peculiar position.]

I have been accused (quite good-naturedly) of putting Rabelais in this
history because I liked him, though he was not a novelist. My conscience
is easy there; and I think I have refuted the peculiar charge
beforehand. But I might have a little more difficulty (though I should
still lose neither heart nor hope) in the case of the ill-fated but
well-beloved writer whom gods and men call Gerard de Nerval, or simply
Gerard, though librarians and bibliographers sometimes insist on his
legal surname, Labrunie. It certainly would be difficult, from the same
point of view of strict legality, to call anything of his exactly a
novel. He was a poet, a dramatist, a voyage-and-travel writer, a
bibliographer (strange trade, which associates the driest with the most
"necta_w_eous" of men!) even sometimes a tale-teller by name, but even
then hardly a novelist. Yet he managed to throw over the most unlike