, children, state
documents, cabinet, councils, Chamber of Deputies, everything in fact.
He will break away from his young wife who has grown up under his eyes
in the same town with him, among all the sweet domestic graces, moulded
amid all the fresh and sapid delicacies of the provinces, but pshaw! too
provincial for a noble of his importance, and he will go in pursuit of
some flower, no matter what, be it only redolent of Parisian patchouli.
He will break the heart of the one, while for the other, he will bring
before the councils of administration suspected schemes, blackmailings,
concessions, treachery and ruin. Monsieur Claretie had shown us the
Vaudrey of his romance involved in all these degradations, although he
has checked him as to some, and in his novel, at least, with due
submission to the exalted truth of art, he has not shrunk from punishing
this false, great man and pretended tribune of the people, by the very
vices he espoused._

_"I do not stop to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's
'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some
features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play
an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter?
It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his
Excellency's entourage are fully grasped and clearly described. Granet,
the low _intriguer_ of the lobbies; Molina, the stock-company cut-throat
and Bourse ruffian; Ramel, the melancholy and redoubtable publicist, who
has made emperors without himself desiring to become one, who will die
in the neighborhood of Montmartre and the Batignolles, forgotten but
proud, poor, and unsullied by money, true to his ideals, among the
ingrates enriched by his journal and who have reached the summit only by
the influence of his authority with the public; Denis Garnier, the
Parisian workman who has had an experience of the hulks as the result of
imbibing too freely of sentimental prose and of lending too ready an ear
to the golden speech of some tavern demagogue, who has now had enough of
politics and who scarcely troubles to think what former retailer of
treasonable language, what Gracchus of the sidewalk may be minister,
Vaudrey or Pichereau, or even Granet: all these types are separately
analyzed and vigorously generalized. Monsieur Claretie designated no one
in particular but we elbow the characters in his book every day of our
lives. He has, moreover,