a moralite de cette comedie_ (to quote, probably not for the first
time, or I hope the last, words of Musset which I particularly like)
would appear to be--first, that to secure lasting happiness in matrimony
it is desirable, if not necessary, to have lived for eighteen months
antenuptially with a charming _grisette_--amiability, _nez retrousse_,
garret, and millinery all complete--_or_ to have yourself been this
grisette; while, on the other hand, it is an extremely dangerous thing
to recover a man of his consumption. Which last result the folklorists
would doubtless assimilate to the well-known superstition of the shore
as to the rescue of the drowning.

[Sidenote: _La Vie a Vingt Ans._]

Two other early books of this author promise the Pauline influence in
their titles and do not belie it in their contents, though in varying
way and degree. Indeed, the first story of _La Vie a Vingt Ans_--that of
a schoolboy who breaks his bounds and "sells his dictionaries" to go to
the Bal de l'Opera; receives, half in joy, half in terror, an
assignation from a masked _debardeur_, and discovers her to be an aged
married woman with a drunken husband (the pair knowing from his card
that his uncle is a Deputy, and having determined to get a _debit de
tabac_ out of him)--made me laugh as heartily as the great Paul himself
can ever have made Major Pendennis. The rest--they are all stories of
the various amatory experiences of a certain Emmanuel de Trois Etoiles,
and have a virtuous epilogue extolling pure affection and honest
matrimony--are inferior, the least so being that of the caprice-love of
a certain Augustine, Emmanuel's neighbour on his staircase, who admits
only one other lover and finally marries _him_, but conceives a frantic
though passing affection for her _voisin_. Unluckily there is in this
book a sort of duplicate but, I think, earlier sketch of the atrocious
conduct of Duval to the Dame aux Camelias; and there are some of the
author's curious "holes where you can put your hand" (as a Jacobean poet
says of the prosodic licences in nomenclature and construction of his
fellows).

[Sidenote: _Aventures de Quatre Femmes._]

The other, much longer, and much more ambitious and elaborate book,
_Aventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet_, seems to me on the whole
worse than any just mentioned, though it at least attempts to fly higher
than _Antonine_. It begins by one of those _goguenardises_ which 1830
itself had loved,