l recognise as old acquaintances
after the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted and
attractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys,
Henri de Lerne, Madame de Tecle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de
Fremeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de
Vaudricourt.

"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madame
de Sevigne and some other of her literary favourites in the days of the
Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they took in high
things! How much more worthy they were than the people who live
now!"--What good company! That is precisely what the admirer of M.
Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf,
to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to tell his last
story, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his most
recent effort at characterisation.

It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens,
September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte de
Vaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at La
Saviniere, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and Brittany.
This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but honest in
purpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his heir
Bernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of the
quietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more serious
company. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in the
Parisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence cultivated
by wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay at La
Saviniere of writing a history of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth,
the library of a neighbouring chateau being rich in memoirs of that
period. Finally, he prefers to write his own story, a story so much
more interesting to himself; to write it at a peculiar crisis in his
life, the moment when his uncle, unmarried, but anxious to perpetuate
his race, is bent on providing him with a wife, and indeed has one in
view.

The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own
confession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religious
beliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over
him, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space
there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from
him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from