the
peculiarities which characterise all recurrent fashions--the appeal to
something which is genuine connected with the suggestion of a great deal
that is not.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Tencin and _Le Comte de Comminge_.]

In the followers of Madame de la Fayette[407] we find that a good many
years have passed by. The jargon appropriated to the subject has grown
still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine
sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well
enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern
reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the
sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have. This
is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame de Tencin than
elsewhere, because d'Alembert's mother was so very much cleverer a
person than the generality of the novel-writers of her day that she
could hardly fail to hide defects more cunningly. But it is evident
enough in the _Comte de Comminge_ and in the _Malheurs de l'Amour_.
Having as questionable morals as any lady of the time (the time of the
Regency), Madame de Tencin of course always had a moral purpose in her
writings, and this again gives her books a certain difference. But, like
the former, this difference only exposes, all the more clearly, the
defects of the style, and the drawbacks from which it was almost
impossible that those who practised it should escape.

Madame de Tencin tried to escape by several gates. Besides her moral
purposes and her _esprit_, she indulged in a good deal of rather
complicated and sometimes extravagant incident. _M. de Comminge_, which
is very short, contains, not to mention other things, the rather
startling detail of a son who, out of chivalrous affection for his
lady-love, burns certain of his father's title-deeds which he has been
charged to recover, and the still more startling incident of the heroine
living for some years in disguise as a monk. The following epistle,
however, from the heroine to the hero, will show better than anything
else the topsy-turvy condition which sensibility had already reached.
All that need be said in explanation of it is that the father (who is
furious with his son, and not unreasonably so) has shut him up in a
dungeon, in order to force him to give up his beloved Adelaide.[408]

Your father's fury has told me all I owe you: I know what
your generosity had concealed from me. I know, too, t