, magnanimously and to the financier's
great wrath, declines to profit by another's misfortune. Whether the
fact that the lady is very pretty has anything to do with the matter
need not be discussed. His--let us call it at least--good nature,
however, indirectly makes his fortune. Going to visit the husband and
wife whom he has obliged, he sees a young man attacked by three enemies
and ill-bested. Jacob (who is no coward, and, thanks to his wife
insisting on his being a gentleman and "M. de la Vallee," has a sword)
draws and uses it on the weaker side, with no skill whatever, but in the
downright, swash-and-stab, short- and tall-sailor fashion, which (in
novels at least) is almost always effective. The assailants decamp, and
the wounded but rescued person, who is of very high rank, conceives a
strong friendship for his rescuer, and, as was said above, makes his
fortune. The last and doubtful three-eighths of the book kill off poor
Mlle. Habert (who, although Jacob would never have been unkind to her,
was already beginning to be very jealous and by no means happy), and
marry him again to a younger lady of rank, beauty, fashion, and fortune,
in the imparted possession of all of which we leave him. But, except to
the insatiables of "what happened next," these parts are as questionably
important as they are decidedly doubtful.

The really important points of the book are, in the first place, the
ease and narrative skill with which the story is told in the difficult
form of autobiography, and, secondly, the vivacity of the characters.
Jacob himself is, as will have been seen already, a piebald sort of
personage, entirely devoid of scruple in some ways, but not ill-natured,
and with his own points of honour. He is perfectly natural, and so are
all the others (not half of whom have been mentioned) as far as they go.
The cross sister and the "kind" one; the false prude and false _devote_
Mme. de Ferval, and the jolly, reckless, rather coarse Mme. de Fecour;
the tyrannical, corrupt, and licentious financier, with others more
slightly drawn, are seldom, if ever, out of drawing. The contemporary
wash of colour passes, as it should, into something "fast"; you are in
the Paris of the Regency, but you are at the same time in general human
time and place, if not in eternity and infinity.

[Sidenote: _Marianne_--outline of the story.]

The general selection, however, of _Marianne_ as Marivaux's masterpiece
is undoubtedly right, thoug