* * *

But, with one or two more notices, we must close this chapter.

Although Dumas, by an odd anticipatory reversal of what was to be his
son's way, spent a great deal of time on more or less trashy[305] plays
before he took to his true line of romance, and so gave opportunity to
others to get a start of him in the following of Scott, it was
inevitable that his own immense success should stir emulation in this
kind afresh. In a way, even, Sue and Soulie may be said to belong to the
class of his unequal competitors, and others may be noticed briefly in
this place or that. But there is one author who, for one book at least,
belonging to the successors rather than the _avant-coureurs_, but
decidedly of the pre-Empire kind, must have a more detailed mention.

[Sidenote: Achard.]

Many years ago somebody was passing the small tavern which, dating for
aught I know to the times of Henry Esmond, and still, or very lately,
surviving, sustained the old fashion of a thoroughfare, fallen, but
still fair, and fondly loved of some--Kensington High Street, just
opposite the entrance to the Palace. The passer-by heard one loiterer in
front of it say to his companion in a tone of emotion, and almost of
awe: "There was beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and _everything
you can imagine_." This _pheme_ occurred to me when, after more than
half a century, I read again Amedee Achard's _Belle-Rose_. I had taken
it up with some qualms lest crabbed age should not confirm the judgment
of ardent youth; and for a short space the extreme nobility of its
sentiments did provoke the giggle of degeneracy. But forty of the little
pages of its four original volumes had not been turned when it reassured
me as to the presence of "beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and
everything you can imagine" in its particular style of romance. The
hero, who begins as a falconer's son and ends as a rich enough colonel
in the army and a Viscount by special grace of the Roi Soleil, is a
_sapeur_, but far indeed from being one of those graceless comrades of
his to whom nothing is sacred. At one time he does indeed succumb to the
sorceries of a certain Genevieve de Chateaufort, a duchess _aux narines
fremissantes_. But who could resist this combination? even if there were
a marquise of the most beautiful and virtuous kind, only waiting to be a
widow in order to be lawfully his. Besides, the Lady of the Quivering
Nostrils becomes an abbess, he