was born in
1833 at Marly-le-Roi, near Paris, but educated in a little town in
Lorraine, where his mother's family lived, and whither he still returns
two or three times a year, as he said to me, "to run in the woods." He
early entered the civil service, and was long stationed at Auberive, a
place situated in the forest-region on the edge of Burgundy, and about
which is laid the scene of his novels _Gerard_ and _Raymonde_. For the
last eight years his official duties have caused him to live at Paris,
and it is during this period that his works of fiction have been
produced. Theuriet is a poet as well as a novelist, and his poetry is
said by competent critics to be very good; but the public looks with a
more kindly eye upon his novels, and as their author cannot afford to
disdain contemporary profit and reputation, he has been obliged rather
to show the cold shoulder to the Muse. Theuriet's appearance in letters
and his popularity are, I think, to be taken as a sign that a healthy
change is going on in the taste of French readers. His books,
consciously or unconsciously, are a protest against the system in which
young girls are brought up in France, and which most intelligent
Frenchmen deplore. It is less from an innate tendency to that sort of
thing than because young girls of their own rank must not only always be
under the eye of a chaperone, but also are intentionally afflicted with
a deadly ignorance, incapacity to talk or to make themselves agreeable,
that the young men leave them for the society of _cocottes_. Now,
Theuriet has been a good deal in the society of English people, and
while he stoutly maintains that his girl-characters are thoroughly
French, he yet admits that the idea of describing a kind of young girl
that in France is always assumed to be hoydenish and ill-brought-up,
came to him from observing the family-life of his neighbors from across
the Channel. Theuriet is not a great writer: he has none of that power
of analyzing physical and mental emotions in which Balzac and Stendhal
are the great adepts, though their descriptions, while unquestionably
implying great knowledge of the human heart, produce upon the
Anglo-Saxon reader a feeling of pain, of offence, and often of disgust.
I once asked him if he thought France, under the present bourgeois
regime, likely to return to a healthier taste in literature, and
received as answer the assurance that since coarse and sordid realism
_could_ go no further