ut presenting a
single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give
evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author
has been credited. _Adelaide_ is very strongly reminiscent of
Richardson, and more than reminiscent of "Sensibility"; it is written in
letters--though all by and to the same persons, except a few
extracts--and there is no individuality of character. Pigault, it has
been said, never has any, though he has some of type. But by exercising
the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape
(though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or
three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper"
details--conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and
self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad
and rickety one; the indefinable _naturaleza_ is present in it after a
strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named
_Tableaux de Societe_--the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de
Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by
being in the most frantic state of mutual passion with her husband,
though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time
virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and
by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on
the husband's. With his usual unskilfulness in managing character,
Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine's
almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while
he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a
faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy
and "unconvincing" fashion. As for his throwing in, at the end, another
fatal passion on part of their daughter for her mother's lover, it is,
though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness,
entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of
Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl's
death. If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing,
the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt
at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost
inviolably constant to happy endings.[432] _L'Officieux_, if he had only
had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux
might have b