o is drawn much more (one regrets to say) as history
paints her than as the agreeable creature of Marmontel's subsequent
fancy. The book is a mere cockboat beside the mighty argosy of the
_Cyrus_, running only to four volumes and some two thousand pages. But
though smaller, it is much "stodgier." The _Histoires_ break out at once
with the story of a certain Alibech--much more proper for the young
person than that connected with the same name by Boccaccio,--and those
who have acquired some knowledge of Mlle. Madeleine's ways will know
what it means when, adopting the improper but defensible practice of
"looking at the end," they find that not merely "Justinian" and
Isabelle, but a Horace and a Hypolite, a Doria and a Sophronie, an
Alphonse and a Leonide are all married on the same day, while a "French
Marquis" and an Emilie vow inviolable but celibate constancy to each
other; they will know, that is to say, that in the course of the book
all these will have been duly "historiated." To encourage them, a single
hint that Leonide sometimes plays a little of the parts of Martesie and
Doralise in the _Cyrus_ may be thrown in.

There is, however, one sentence in the second volume of _Ibrahim_ which
is worth quotation and brief comment, because it is a text for the whole
management and system of these novels, and accounts for much in their
successors almost to the present day. Emilie is telling the _Histoire_
of Isabelle, and excuses herself for not beginning at the beginning:
"Puisque je sais que vous n'ignorez pas l'amour du Prince de Masseran,
les violences et les artifices de Julie, la trahison de Feliciane, le
genereux ressentiment de Doria [this is another Doria], la mort de cet
amant infortune, et ensuite celle de Julie." In other words, all these
things have been the subject of previous histories or of the main text.
And so it is always. Diderot admired, or at least excused, that
procedure of Richardson's which involved the telling of the conversation
of an average dinner-party in something like a small volume. But the
"Heroic" method would have made it necessary to tell the previous
experiences of the lady you took down to dinner, and the man that you
talked to afterwards, while, if extended from aristocratic to democratic
ideas, it would have justified a few remarks on the cabmen who brought
both, and the butcher and fishmonger who supplied the feast. The
inconvenience of this earlier practice made itself felt, and by