t des Morts itself ceases, not in a suitable way, but because the
Burgomaster shuts it up!!! All the other stories--one of Marie
Antoinette's Trianon dairy; another of an anonymous pamphlet; yet
another of an Italian noble and his use of malaria for vengeance; as
well as the last, told by a Sister of Mercy while watching a
patient--miss fire in one way or another, though all have good subjects
and are all in a way well told. It is curious, and might be made rather
instructive by an intelligent Professor of the Art of Story-telling, who
should analyse the causes of failure. But it is somewhat out of the way
of the mere historian.[304]

[Sidenote: Ourliac--_Contes du Bocage_.]

Edouard Ourliac, one of the minor and also one of the shorter-lived men
of 1830, seems to have been pleasant in his life--at least all the
personal references to him that I remember to have seen, in a long
course of years, were amiable; and he is still pleasant in literature.
He managed, though he only reached the middle of the road, to accumulate
work enough for twelve volumes of collection, while probably more was
uncollected. Of what I have read of his, the _Contes_ and _Nouveaux
Contes du Bocage_--tales of La Vendee, with a brief and almost
brilliant, certainly vivid, sketch of the actual history of that
glorious though ill-fated struggle--deserve most notice. Two of the
_Nouveaux Contes_, _Le Carton D._ (a story of the rescue of her husband
by a courageous woman, with the help of the more amiable weaknesses of
the only amiable Jacobin leader, Danton) and _Le Chemin de Keroulaz_
(one of treachery only half-defeated on the Breton coast), may rank with
all but the very best of their kind. In another, _Belle-Fontaine_,
people who cannot be content with a story unless it instructs their
minds on points of history, morality, cosmogony, organo-therapy, and
everything _quod exit in y_, except jollity and sympathy, may find a
section on the youth of 1830--really interesting to compare with the
much less enthusiastic account by Gerard de Nerval, which is given
above. And those who like to argue about cases of conscience may be glad
to discuss whether Jean Reveillere, in the story which bears his name,
_ought_ to have spared, as he actually did, the accursed
_conventionnel_, who, after receiving shelter and care from women of
Jean's family, had caused them to be massacred by the _bleus_, and then
again fell into the Vendean's hands.

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