o his mistress, which she forgives; but he has at least the
grace to repent of this almost immediately. His conduct, however, when
he returns to Paris, after staying in the country with his family, and
finds that she has returned to her old ways, is the real crime. A
violent scene might, again, be excusable, for he does not know what his
father has done. But for weeks this young gentleman of France devotes
all his ingenuity and energies to tormenting and insulting the object of
his former adoration. He ostentatiously "keeps" a beautiful but
worthless friend of hers in her own class, and takes every opportunity
of flaunting the connection in Marguerite's face. He permits himself and
this creature to insult her in every way, apparently descending once
more to anonymous letters. And when her inexhaustible forgiveness has
induced a temporary but passionate reconciliation, he takes fresh
umbrage, and sends money to her for her complaisance with another letter
of more abominable insult than ever. Now it is bad to insult any one of
whom you have been fond; worse to insult any woman; but to insult a
prostitute, faugh![359]

However, I may be reading too much English taste into French ways
here,[360] and it is impossible to deny that a man, whether French or
English, _might_ behave in this ineffable manner. In other words, the
irresistible _humanum est_ clears this as it clears Marguerite's own
good behaviour, so conventionally inconsistent with her bad. The book,
of course, cannot possibly be put on a level with its pattern and
inspiration, _Manon Lescaut_: it is on a much lower level of literature,
life, thought, passion--everything. But it has literature; it has life
and thought and passion; and so it shall have no black mark here.

[Sidenote: _Tristan le Roux._]

Few things could be more different from each other than _Tristan le
Roux_--another early book of Dumas _fils_--is from _La Dame aux
Camelias_. Indeed it is a good, if not an absolutely certain, sign that
so young a man should have tried styles in novel-writing so far apart
from each other. _Tristan_ is a fifteenth-century story of the later
part of the Hundred Years' War, and of Gilles de Retz, and of Joan of
Arc, and of _diablerie_, and so forth. I first heard approval of it from
a person whose name may be unexpected by some readers--the late
Professor Robertson Smith. But the sometime editor of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_ was exceptionally well qualified for