s course rather unexpectedly delayed sometimes, and it is
the fact and the reasons of these delays which must form the subject of
the text.--There is no doubt that Pigault was very largely read abroad
as well as at home. We know that Miss Matilda Crawley read him before
Waterloo. She must have inherited from her father, Sir Walpole, a strong
stomach: and must have been less affected by the change of times than
was the case with her contemporary, Scott's old friend, who having
enjoyed "your bonny Mrs. Behn" in her youth, could not read her in age.
For our poor maligned Afra (in her prose stories at any rate, and most
of her verse, if not in her plays) is an anticipated model of Victorian
prudery and nicety compared with Pigault. I cannot help thinking that
Marryat knew him too. Chapter and verse may not be forthcoming, and the
resemblance may be accounted for by common likeness to Smollett: but
not, to my thinking, quite sufficiently.

[425] He had a younger brother, in a small way also a novelist, and,
apparently, in the Radcliffian style, who extra-named himself rather in
the manner of 1830--Pigault-_Maubaillarck_. I have not yet come across
this junior's work.--For remarks of Hugo himself on Pigault and Restif,
see note at end of chapter.

[426] At least in his early books; it improves a little later. But see
note on p. 453.

[427] For a defence of this word, _v. sup._ p. 280, _note_.

[428] It may be objected, "Did not the Scuderys and others do this?" The
answer is that their public was not, strictly speaking, a "public" at
all--it was a larger or smaller coterie.

[429] It has been said that Pigault spent some time in England, and he
shows more knowledge of English things and books than was common with
Frenchmen before, and for a long time after, his day. Nor does he, even
during the Great War, exhibit any signs of acute Anglophobia.

[430] Pigault's adoration for Voltaire reaches the ludicrous, though we
can seldom laugh _with_ him. It led him once to compose one of the very
dullest books in literature, _Le Citateur_, a string of anti-Christian
gibes and arguments from his idol and others.

[431] Yet sometimes--when, for instance, one thinks of the
rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's _Eric_, or the _spiritus
vulgaritatis fortissimus_ of Mark Twain's _A Yankee at the Court of King
Arthur_--one feels a little ashamed of abusing Pigault.

[432] There was, of course, a milder and perhaps more effective
po