s France from at least the lowest depths of
the Revolutionary Inferno.[258] Perhaps there is here, as with Vigny's
fiction throughout, a certain amateurishness, and a very distinct
inability to keep apart things that had better not be mixed. But there
is also evidence of power throughout, and there is actually some
performance.

[Sidenote: _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires._]

His third and last work, of anything like the kind, _Servitude et
Grandeur Militaires_, is no more of a regular novel than _Stello_; but,
though perhaps in an inferior degree, it shares the superiority of
_Stello_ itself over _Cinq-Mars_ in power of telling a story. Like
_Stello_, too, it is a frame of short tales, not a continuous narrative;
and like that, and even to a greater degree, it exhibits the intense
melancholy (almost unique in its particular shade, though I suppose it
comes nearer to Leopardi's than to that of any other great man of
letters) which characterises Alfred de Vigny. His own experience of
soldiering had not been fortunate. He had begun, as a mere boy, by
accompanying Louis XVIII. in his flight before the Hundred Days; he had
seen, for another fourteen or fifteen years during the Restoration,

No wars where triumphs on the victors wait,

but only the dreary garrison life (see on Beyle, _sup._ p. 149) of
French peace time, and, in the way of active service, only what all
soldiers hate, the thankless and inglorious police-work which comes on
them through civil disturbance. Whether he was exactly the kind of man
to have enjoyed the livelier side of martialism may be the subject of
considerable doubt. But at any rate he had no chance of it, and his
framework here is little more than a tissue of transcendental
"grousing."

[Sidenote: The first story.]

The first story illustrating "Servitude" is sufficiently horrible, and
has a certain element of paradox in it. The author, actually on his very
disagreeable introduction to a military career by flight, meets with an
old officer who tells him his history. He has been at one time a
merchant sailor; and then in the service of the Directory, by whom he
was commissioned to carry convicts to Cayenne. The most noteworthy of
these, a young man of letters, who had libelled one of the tyrants, and
his still younger wife, are very charming people; and the captain, who
makes them his guests, becomes so fond of them that he even proposes to
give up his profession and farm with them in