ooks just mentioned,
and one, I think, of the first to be dramatised, so announcing the
author's change of "kind," acquired a certain fame by being made (in
which form I am not certain, but probably as a play) the subject of one
of those odd "condemnations" by which the Second Empire occasionally
endeavoured to show itself the defender of morality and the prop of
family and social life. I do not think that Flaubert and Baudelaire had
much reason to pride themselves on their predecessor in this particular
pillory. Alexander the younger is not here even a coppersmith; his metal
is, to me, not attractive at all. The Marquise de Lys is one of those
beauties, half Greek, half Madonnish, and wholly regular-scholastic, to
whom it has been the habit of modern novelists and poets to assign what
our Elizabethan ancestors would have called "cold hearts and hot
livers." Dumas _fils'_ theory--for he must, Heaven help him! always have
one[372]--is that it all depends on ennui. I know not. At any rate,
Diane is not a heroine that I should recommend, for personal
acquaintance, to myself or my friends. With one of those rather silly
excuses which chequer his cleverness equally, whether they are made
honestly or with tongue in cheek, our author says: "On va sans doute
nous dire que nous presentons un caractere impossible, que nous faisons
de l'immoralite" (which the compositors of the stereotyped edition
pleasantly misprint "immor_t_alite"), etc. Far be it from me to say that
any woman is impossible. I would only observe that when Diane, neglected
by and neglecting her husband for some two years, determines to take a
lover, being vexed at the idea of reaching the age of thirty without
having one; when she takes him without any particular preference, as one
might call a cab from a longish rank, and then has a fancy to make a
scientific comparison of forgotten joys with her husband, deciding
finally that there is nothing like alternation--when, I say, she does
this, I think she is not quite nice.[373] Nor does her school-friend
Marceline Delaunay--who, being herself a married woman irreproachably
faithful to her own husband, makes herself a go-between, at least of
letters, for Diane--seem very nice either. It is fair to say that Mme.
Delaunay gets punished in the latter part of the story, which any one
may read who likes. It is, if not white, a sort of--what shall we
say?--French grey, compared with the opening.

[Sidenote: Shorter stories