happening, it turns out to be something else. Persons who wear, as to
the manner born, the jackets of lackeys turn out to be bishops; and
bishops prove to be coiners. An important _jeune premier_ or
_quasi-premier_, having just got off what seems to be imminent danger,
is stabbed in the throat, is left for dead, and then carries out a
series of risky operations and conversations for several hours. A
castle, more than Udolphian in site, size, incidents, and opportunities,
is burnt at a moment's notice, as if it were a wigwam. Everybody's sons
and daughters are somebody else's daughters and sons--a state of things
not a little facilitated by the other fact that everybody's wife is
somebody else's mistress. Everybody knows something mysterious and
exceedingly damaging about everybody else; and the whole company would
be cleared off the stage in the first few chapters if something did not
always happen to make them drop the daggers in a continual stalemate.
Dukes who are governors of provinces and peers of France are also heads
(or think they are) of secret societies--the orthodox members of which
chiefly do the coining, but are quite ignorant that a large number of
other members are Huguenots (it is not long after the "Revocation") and
are, in the same castle, storing arms for an insurrection. Spanish
counts who are supposed to have been murdered fifteen years ago turn up
quite uninjured, and ready for the story to go on sixteen years longer.
When you have got an ivory casket supposed to be full of all sorts of
compromising documents, somebody produces another, exactly like it, but
containing documents more compromising still. There is a counsellor of
the Parliament of Toulouse--supposed to be not merely a severe
magistrate, but a man of spotless virtue, and one who actually submits
fearlessly to great danger in doing his duty, but who turns out to be an
atrocious criminal. And in the centre of all the turmoil there is a
wondrous figure, a sorcerer-shepherd, who is really an Italian prince,
who pulls all the strings, makes all cups slip at all lips, sets up and
upsets all the puppets, and is finally poniarded by the wicked
counsellor, both of them having been caught at last, and the counsellor
going mad after commission of his final crime.

Now, if anybody wants more than this--there is, in fact, a great deal
more in the compass of two volumes,[279] containing between them less
than six hundred pages--all I can say is that