bidden me to have any." "I have said nothing to shock
you," replied Nicodeme. "My passion for you is perfectly
honest and pure, and its end is only a lawful suit." "Then,
Sir," answered Javotte, "you want to marry me? You must ask
my papa and mamma for that; for indeed I do not know what
they are going to give me when I marry." "We have not got
quite so far yet," said Nicodeme. "I must be assured
beforehand of your esteem, and know that you have admitted
me to the honour of being your servant." "Sir," said
Javotte, "I am quite satisfied with being my own servant,
and I know how to do everything I want."

Now this, of course, is not extraordinarily brilliant; but it
is an early--a _very_ early--beginning of the right sort of
thing--conversation of a natural kind transferred from the boards to the
book, sketches of character, touches of manners and of life generally,
individual, national, local. The cross-purposes of the almost idiotic
_ingenue_ and the philandering gallant are already very well done; and
if Javotte had been as clever as she was stupid she could hardly have
set forth the inwardness of French marriages more neatly than by the
blunt reference to her _dot_, or have at the same moment more thoroughly
disconcerted Nicodeme's regularly laid-out approaches for a flirtation
in form, with only a possible, but in any case distant, termination in
anything so prosaic as marriage.[268] The thing as a whole is, in
familiar phrase, "all right" in kind and in scheme. It requires some
perfecting in detail; but it is in every reasonable sense perfectible.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Cyrano de Bergerac and his _Voyages_.]

It has been possible to speak of one of the pioneer books mentioned in
this chapter with more allowance than most of the few critics and
historians who have discussed or mentioned it have given it, and to
recommend the others, not uncritically but quite cheerfully. This
satisfactory state of things hardly persists when we reach what seems
perhaps, to those who have never read it, not the least considerable of
the batch--the _Voyage a la Lune_ of Cyrano de Bergerac, as his name is
in literary history, though he never called himself so.[269] Cyrano,
though he does not seem to have had a very fortunate life, and died
young, yet was not all unblest, and has since been rather blessed than
banned. Even in his own day Boileau spoke o