d in this particular case, if the very
greatest novelists are not of the company, there are those whose
greatness in other ways, and whose more than mediocrity in this, should
appease the admirers of their companions. We shall deal here with the
novel work of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of France; of Eugene
Sue, whose mere popularity exceeded that of any other writer discussed
in this half of the volume except Dumas; of men like Sandeau, Charles de
Bernard, and Murger, whose actual work in prose fiction is not much less
than consummate in its own particular key and subdivisions; of one of
the best political satirists in French fiction, Louis Reybaud; and of
others still, like Soulie, Mery, Achard, Feval, Ourliac, Roger de
Beauvoir, Alphonse Karr, Emile Souvestre, who, to no small extent
individually and to a very great extent when taken in battalion, helped
to conquer that supreme reputation for amusingness, for pastime, which
the French novel has so long enjoyed throughout Europe. And these will
supply not a little material for the survey of the general
accomplishment of that novel in the first half of the century, which
will form the subject of a "halt" or Interchapter, when Dumas
himself--the one "major" left, and left purposely--has been discussed.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.--_Volupte._]

When Sainte-Beuve, thirty years after the book first appeared, subjoined
a most curious Appendix to his only novel, _Volupte_, he included a
letter of his own, in which he confesses that it is "not in the precise
sense a novel at all." It is certainly in some respects an outlier, even
of the outlying group to which it belongs--the group of _Rene_ and
_Adolphe_ and their followers.

[Sidenote: Its "puff-book."]

I do not remember anything, even in a wide sense, quite like this
Appendix--at least in the work of an author _majorum gentium_. It
consists of a series of extracts, connected by remarks of Sainte-Beuve's
own, from the "puff"-letters which distinguished people had sent him, in
recompense for the copies of the book which he had sent _them_. Most
people who write have had such letters, and "every fellow likes a hand."
The persons who enjoy being biographied expect them, I suppose, to be
published after their deaths; and I have known, I think, some writers of
"Reminiscences" who did it themselves in their lifetimes. But it
certainly is funny to find the acknowledged "first critic" in the Europe
or the world of his day