--_Une Loge a Camille_.]

That standard edition of _Diane de Lys_ which has enabled us to pick up
such a pleasant _coquille d'imprimerie_ contains three shorter stories
(_Diane_ itself is not very long). Two or them are not worth much: _Ce
qu'on ne sait pas_ is a pathetic _grisetterie_, something of the class
of Musset's _Frederic et Bernerette_; _Grangette_ deals with the very
true but very common admonition that in being "on with" two loves at
once there is always danger, particularly when, as M. le Baron Francis
de Maucroix does here, you write them letters (to save time) in exactly
the same phraseology. Neither love, Adeline the countess or the
Gris-Grang-ette, is disagreeable; indeed Francis himself is a not
detestable idiot, and there is a comfortable conversation as he sits at
Adeline's feet in proper morning-call costume, with his hat and stick
on a chair. (Even kneeling would surely be less dangerous, from the
point of view of recovering a more usual attitude when another caller
comes.) But the whole thing is slight. The third and last, however, _Une
Loge a Camille_, is the only thing in the whole volume that is
thoroughly recommendable. It begins with an obviously "felt" and "lived"
complaint of the woes which dramatic authors perhaps most of all, but
others more or less, experience from that extraordinary
inconsecutiveness (to put it mildly) of their acquaintances which makes
people--who, to do them justice, would hardly ask for five, ten, or
fifty shillings except as a loan, with at least pretence of
repayment--demand almost, or quite, as a right, a box at the theatre or
a copy of a book. This finished, an example is given in which the
hapless playwright, having rashly obliged a friend, becomes (very much
in the same way in which Mr. Nicodemus Easy killed several persons on
the coast of Sicily) responsible for the breach, not merely of a
left-handed yet comparatively harmless _liaison_, but of a formal
marriage, the knitting of a costly and disreputable amour, a duel, an
imprisonment for debt, and--for himself--the abiding reputation of
having corrupted, half ruined, and driven into enlistment for Africa a
guileless scientific student. It is good and clean fun throughout.[374]

[Sidenote: _Le Docteur Servans._]

[Sidenote: _Le Roman d'une Femme_.]

Some others must have shorter shrift. One volume of the standard edition
contains two stories, _Le Docteur Servans_ and _Un Cas de Rupture_. The
latter is sho