l _Effets de la Sympathie_, already discussed; the
central in every way, but endlessly dawdled over, _Marianne_, which
never got finished at all (though Mme. Riccoboni continued it in
Marivaux's own lifetime, and with his placid approval, and somebody
afterwards botched a clumsy _Fin_); and _Le Paysan Parvenu_, the latter
part of which is not likely to be genuine, and, even if so, is not a
real conclusion. We may, however, with some, advantage, take it before
_Marianne_, if only because it is not the book generally connected with
its author's name.

[Sidenote: _Le Paysan Parvenu._]

Notwithstanding this comparative oblivion, _Le Paysan Parvenu_ is an
almost astonishingly clever and original book, at least as far as the
five of its eight parts, which are certainly Marivaux's, go. I have read
the three last twice critically, at a long interval of time, and I feel
sure that the positive internal evidence confirms, against their
authenticity, the negative want of external for it. In any case they add
nothing--they do not, as has been said, even really "conclude"--and we
may, therefore, without any more apology, confine ourselves to the part
which is certain. Some readers may possibly know that when that
strangest of strange persons, Restif de la Bretonne (see the last
chapter of this book), took up the title with the slight change or gloss
of _Parvenu_ to _Perverti_, he was at least partly actuated by his own
very peculiar, but distinctly existing, variety of moral indignation.
And though Pierre Carlet (which was Marivaux's real name) and "Monsieur
Nicolas" (which was as near a real name as any that Restif had) were,
the one a quite respectable person on ordinary standards, and the other
an infinitely disreputable creature, still the later novelist was
perhaps ethically justified. Marivaux's successful rustic does not, so
far as we are told, actually do anything that contravenes popular
morality, though he is more than once on the point of doing so. He is
not a bad-blooded person either; and he has nothing of the wild-beast
element in the French peasantry which history shows us from the
Jacquerie to the Revolution, and which some folk try to excuse as the
result of aristocratic tyranny. But he is an elaborate and exceedingly
able portrait of another side of the peasant, and, if we may trust
literature, even with some administration of salt, of the French peasant
more particularly. He is what we may perhaps be allowed to ca