--and only later deviated into letters--he was all for
the Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from
the encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen."
Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who
"was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfully
accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautier
says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of
Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret
passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding
places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts
where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate,
fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in
the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in
the floor for him to disappear through."

The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of
inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France was
belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in
England and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo
to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose
works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than
to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or
Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce between
fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none
had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous
product of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for Bishop
Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for
Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Buerger in 1770 to do the same
thing for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossible
before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany,
moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch
with the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry
and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and
the habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers of
the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German
"Maehrchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his
famous fairy ta