f-Calvarised lady promptly
discovers that she wants him again; and as he, acknowledging her claim,
does not disguise his actual state of feeling, she, though going off in
a huff, tells him that she had never meant him either to leave her at
first or to accept her command not to return. All this, no doubt, is not
unfeminine in the abstract; but the concrete telling of it required more
interesting personages. _Le Prix de Pigeons_ is a good-humoured
absurdity about an English scientific society, which offers a prize of
L2000 to anybody who can eat a pigeon every day for a month; _Le Pendu
de la Piroche_, a fifteenth-century anecdote, which may be a sort of
_brouillon_ for _Tristan_; _Cesarine_, a fortune-telling tale. But _La
Boite d'Argent_, the story of a man who got rid of his heart and found
himself none the better for getting it back again (the circumstances in
each case being quite different from those of _Das kalte Herz_), and _Ce
que l'on voit tous les jours_, a sketch of "scenes" between keeper and
mistress, but of much wider application, go far above the rest of the
book. The first (which is of considerable length and very cleverly
managed in the change from ordinary to extraordinary) only wants "that"
to be first-rate. The second shows in the novelist the command of
dialogue-situation and of dialogue itself which was afterwards to stand
the playwright in such good stead.

[Sidenote: _Ilka._]

Some forty years afterwards--indeed I think posthumously--another
collection appeared, with, for main title, that of its first story,
_Ilka_. Subject to the caution, several times already given, of the
inadequacy of a foreigner's judgment, I should say that it shows a great
improvement in mere style, but somewhat of a falling off in originality
and _verve_. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is an anecdote of the
author's youth, when, having in the midst of a revolution extracted the
mighty sum of two hundred francs in one bank-note from a publisher for a
bad novel (he does not tell us which), he gives it to a porter to
change, and the messenger being delayed, entertains the direst
suspicions (which turn out to be quite unjust) of the poor fellow's
honesty. The sketch of mood is capitally done, and is set off by a most
pleasant introduction of Dumas _pere_. More ambitious but less
successful, except as mere descriptive _ecphrases_,[378] are the
title-story of a beautiful model posing, and _Le Songe d'une Nuit
d'Ete_, wi