Napoleon) is orphaned
early, brought up at his remote country house by an aunt, privately
tutored for a time, not by an abbe, but by a young schoolmaster and
literary aspirant; then sent for three or four years to the nearest
"college," where he is bored but triumphant: and at last, about his
_vingt ans_, let loose in Paris. But--except once, and with the result,
usual for him, of finding the thing a failure--he does not make the
stock use of liberty at that age and in that place. He has, at school,
made friends with another youth of good family in the same province, who
has an uncle and cousins living in the town where the college is. The
eldest she-cousin of Olivier d'Orsel, Madeleine, is a year older than
Dominique de Bray, and of course he falls in love with her. But though
she, in a way, knows his passion, and, as one finds out afterwards,
shares or might have been made to share it, the love is "never told,"
and she marries another. The destined victims of the _un_smooth course,
however, meet in Paris, where Dominique and Olivier, though they do not
share chambers, live in the same house and flat; and the story of just
overcome temptation is broken off at last in a passionate scene like
that of "Love and Duty"--which noble and strangely undervalued poem
might serve as a long motto or verse-prelude to the book. It is rather
questionable whether it would not be better without the thin frame of
actual proem and conclusion, which does actually enclose the body of the
novel as a sort of _recit_, provoked partly by the suicide, or attempted
suicide, of Olivier after a life of fastidiousness and frivolity. The
proem gives us Dominique as--after his passion-years, and his as yet
unmentioned failure to achieve more than mediocrity in letters--a quiet
if not cheerful married man with a charming wife, pretty children, a
good estate, and some peasants not in the least like those of _La
Terre_; while in the epilogue the tutor Augustin, who has made his way
at last and has also married happily, drives up to the door, and the
book ends abruptly. It is perhaps naughty, but one does not want the
wife, or the children, or the good peasants, or the tutor Augustin,
while the suicide of Olivier appears rather copy-booky. It is especially
annoying thus to have what one does not want to know, and not what one,
however childishly, does want to know--that is to say, the after-history
of Madeleine.

Yet even in the preliminary forty or fift