ary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage.
There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order
of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting
something and finding that he cannot bring it off.

At the close of one of his most extravagant, most indecent, and
stupidest novels, _La Folie Espagnole_--a supposed tale of chivalry,
which of course shows utter ignorance of time, place, and circumstance,
and is, in fact, only a sort of travestied _Gil Blas_, with a rank
infusion of further vulgarised Voltairianism[430]--the author has a
rather curious note to the reader, whom he imagines (with considerable
probability) to be throwing the book away with a suggested cry of
"Quelles miseres! quel fatras!" He had, he says, previously offered
_Angelique et Jeanneton_, a little work of a very different kind, and
the public would neither buy nor read it. His publisher complained, and
he must try to please. As for _La Folie_, everybody, including his cook,
can understand _this_. One remembers similar expostulations from more
respectable authors; but it is quite certain that Pigault-Lebrun--a
Lebrun so different from his contemporary "Pindare" of that
name--thoroughly meant what he said. He was drawing a bow, always at a
venture, with no higher aim than to hit his public, and he did hit it
oftener than he missed. So much the worse, perhaps, both for him and for
his public; but the fact is a fact, and it is in the observation and
correlation of facts that history consists.

[Sidenote: _Angelique et Jeanneton._]

_Angelique et Jeanneton_ itself, as might be expected from the above
reference, is, among its author's works, something like _Le Reve_ among
Zola's; it is his endeavour to be strictly proper. But, as it is also
one of his most Sternian exercises, the propriety is chequered. It
begins in sufficiently startling fashion; a single gentleman of easy
fortune and amiable disposition, putting his latchkey in the door of his
chambers one night, is touched and accosted by an interesting young
person with an "argentine" voice. This may look _louche_; but the
silvery accents appeal only for relief of needs, which, as it shortly
appears, are those most properly to be supplied by a maternity hospital.
It is to be understood that the suppliant is an entire stranger to the
hero. He behaves in the most amiable and, indeed, noble fashion, instals
her in his rooms, turns himself