ok--that Sentiment must be kept under the control of Reason--he
was pleased to transmogrify Chatterton's compassionate Holborn landlady
into a certain Kitty Bell--a pastry-shop keeper close to the Houses of
Parliament, who is very beautiful except that she has the inevitable
"large feet" (let us hope that M. le Comte de Vigny, who was a
gentleman, took only the first _signalement_ from Madame la Comtesse),
extraordinarily sentimental, and desperately though (let us hope again,
for she has a husband and two children) quite virtuously in love with
the boy from Bristol. He entirely transforms Lord Mayor Beckford's part
in the matter;[256] changes, for his own purposes, the arsenic into
opium (a point of more importance than it may seem), and in one blunt
word does all he can to spoil the story. It is too common an experience
when foreigners treat such things, and I say this with the fullest
awareness of the danger of _De te fabula_.

[Sidenote: The tragedy of Andre Chenier.]

These two stories, however, fill scarcely more than a third of the book,
and the other two-thirds, subtracting the moral at the end, deal with a
matter which Vigny, once more, understood thoroughly. The fate of Andre
Chenier is "fictionised" in nearly the best manner, though with the
author's usual fault of inability to "round out" character. We do not
sufficiently realise the poet himself. But his brother, Marie-Joseph,
requiring slighter presentment, has it; and so, on a still smaller
scale, has the well-meaning but fatuous father, who, hopelessly
misunderstanding the signs of the times, actually precipitates his elder
son's fate by applying, in spite of remonstrance, to the tiger-pole-cat
Robespierre for mercy. The scene where this happens--and where the
"sea-green incorruptible" himself, Saint-Just (prototype of so many
Republican enthusiasts, ever since and to-day), Marie-Joseph, and the
Black Doctor figure--is singularly good. Hardly less so are the
pictures--often painted by others but seldom better--of the ghastly
though in a way heroic merriment of the lost souls in Saint-Lazare,
between their doom and its execution, and the finale. In this the
doctor's soldier-servant Blaireau ("Badger"), still a gunner on active
service (partly, one fancies, from former touches,[257] by concealed
good intention, partly from mere whim and from disgust at the drunken
hectorings of General Henriot), refuses to turn his guns on the
Thermidorists, and thus save