st brilliant
facility of expression and style. His Marie Duplessis is one of those
remarkable young persons who, to alter Dr. Johnson very slightly, unite
"the manners of a _duchess_ with the morals of" the other object of the
doctor's comparison unaltered; superadding to both the amiability of an
angel, the beauty of Helen, and the taste in art of all the great
collectors rolled into one. The thing is pleasantly written bosh; and,
except to those readers who are concerned to know that they are going to
read about "a real person," can be no commendation, and might even cause
a little disgust, not at all from the moral but from the purely critical
side.

A lover of paradox might almost suggest that "honest Janin" had been
playing the ingenious but dangerous finesse of intentionally setting up
a foil to his text. He has certainly, to some tastes, done this. There
is hardly any false prettiness, any sham Dresden china (a thing, by the
way, that has become almost a proverbial phrase in French for
_demi-monde_ splendour), about _La Dame aux Camelias_ itself. Nor, on
the other hand, is there to be found in it--even in such anticipated
"naturalisms" as the exhumation of Marguerite's _two_-months'-old
corpse,[357] and one or two other somewhat more veiled but equally or
more audacious touches of realism--anything resembling the exaggerated
horrors of such efforts of 1830 itself as Janin's own _Ane Mort_ and
part of Borel's _Champavert_. In her splendour as in her misery, in her
frivolity as in her devotion and self-sacrifice, repulsive as this
contrast may conventionally be, Marguerite is never impossible or
unnatural. Her chief companion of her own sex, Prudence Duvernoy,
though, as might be expected, a good deal of a _proxenete_, and by no
means disinterested in other ways, is also very well drawn, and assists
the general effect more than may at first be seen.

The "problem" of the book, at least to English readers, lies in the
person whom it is impossible to call the hero--Armand Duval. It would be
very sanguine to say that he is unnatural; but the things that he does
are rather appalling. That he listens at doors, opens letters not
addressed to him, and so on, is sufficiently fatal; but a very generous
extension of lovers' privileges may perhaps just be stretched over these
things.[358] No such licence will run to other actions of his. In his
early days of chequered possession he writes, anonymously, an insulting
letter t