edition, which are
unusually numerous and elaborate, are also rather unusually effective.
"Peggy's face" is too often as "wretched" as Thackeray confessed his own
attempts were; but the compositions are not, as such, despicable--even
in the case of the immortal and immortalising kiss-scene itself. The
"delicious event," to quote the same author in another passage, is not
actually coming off--but it is very near. But it was perhaps a pity that
either Gombauld or Keats ever _waked_ Endymion.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Villedieu.]

The most recent book[215] but one about Mme. de Villedieu contains (and,
oddly enough, confesses itself to contain) very little about her novels,
which the plain man might have thought the only reason for writing about
her at all. It tells (partly after Tallemant) the little that is known
about her (adding a great deal more about other people, things, and
places, and a vast amount of conjecture), and not only takes the very
dubious "letters" published by herself for gospel, but attributes to
her, on the slightest evidence, if any, the anonymous _Memoires sur la
Vie de Henriette Sylvie de Moliere_, and, what is more, accepts them as
autobiographic; quotes a good deal of her very valueless verse and that
of others, and relates the whole in a most marvellous style, the
smallest and most modest effervescences of which are things like this:
"La religion arrose son ame d'une eau parfumee, et les fleurs noirs du
repentir eclosent" or "Soixante ans pesaient sur son crane ennuage d'une
perruque."[216] A good bibliography of the actual work, and not a little
useful information about books and MS. relating to the period, may
reconcile one class of readers to it, and a great deal of scandal
another; but as far as the subject of this history goes no one will be
much wiser when he closes the volume than he was when he opened it.

The novelist-heroine's actual name was Marie Catherine Hortense des
Jardins, and she never was really Mme. de Villedieu at all, though there
was a real M. de Villedieu whom she loved, went through a marriage
ceremony and lived with, left, according to some, or was left by,
according to others. But he was already married, and this marriage was
never dissolved. Very late in life she seems actually to have married a
Marquis de Chaste, who died soon. But most of the time was spent in
rather scandalous adventures, wherein Fouquet's friend Gourville, the
minister Lyonne, and others figure. In f