een tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not
ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a _parvenu_ rich, but brave and
extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into
fearful scrapes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other
people's affairs to do them good. The situations--as where the marquis,
having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under
arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a
comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room,
and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady
with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining
apartment--are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but
Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the
most of them.

_La Famille Luceval_--something of an expanded and considerably
Pigaultified story _a la_ Marmontel--is duller than any of these, and
the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a classical mania on
the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent
from it.

[Sidenote: Further examples.]

Of the rest, _M. Botte_, which seems to have been a favourite, is a
rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally
generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but
penniless daughter of an _emigre_; a noble rustic, who manages to keep
some of his exiled landlord's property together, etc. _M. de Roberval_,
though in its original issue not so long as _Adelaide de Meran_, becomes
longer by a _suite_ of another full volume, and is a rather tedious
chronicle of ups and downs. There may be silence about the remainder.

[Sidenote: Last words on him.]

The stock and, as it may be called, "semi-official" ticket for
Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him,
appears to be _verve_: and the recognised dictionary-sense of _verve_ is
"heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition." In
the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could
never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of "go," which
is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label.
These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin
races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long
as we go on calling Chaucer "the father of English poetry" and Wyclif
"the father of