int-Preux; but then _cela s'est vu_ from the time of the
Lady of the Strachy downwards, if not from that of Princess Michal. But
Claire is faithful and true as steel, and she is lively without being,
as Charlotte Grandison certainly is, vulgar. She is very much more a
really "reasonable woman," even putting passion aside, than the somewhat
sermonising and syllogising Julie; and it would have been both agreeable
and tormenting to be M. d'Orbe. (Tormenting because she only half-loved
him, and agreeable because she did love him a little, and, whether it
was little or much, allowed herself to be his.) He himself, slight and
rather "put upon" as he is, is also much the most agreeable of the
"second" male characters. Of Bomston and Wolmar we shall speak
presently; and there is so little of the Baron d'Etange that one really
does not know whether he was or was not something more than the
tyrannical husband and father, and the ill-mannered specimen of the
lesser nobility, that it pleased Saint-Preux or Rousseau to represent
him as being. He had provocation enough, even in the case of his
otherwise hardly pardonable insolence to Bomston.[368]

[Sidenote: The delinquencies of Saint-Preux.]

But Saint-Preux himself? How early was the obvious jest made that he is
about as little of a _preux_ as he is of a saint? I have heard, or
dreamt, of a schoolboy who, being accidentally somewhat precocious in
French, and having read the book, ejaculated, "_What_ a sweep he is!"
and I remember no time of my life at which I should not have heartily
agreed with that youth. I do not suppose that either of us--though
perhaps we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not doing so--founded
our condemnation on Saint-Preux's "forgetfulness of all but love." That
is a "forfeit," in French and English sense alike, which has itself
registered and settled in various tariffs and codes, none of which
concerns the present history. It is not even that he is a most
unreasonable creature now and then; that can be pardoned, being
understood, though he really does strain the benefit of _amare et
sapere_ etc. It is that, except when he is in the altitudes of passion,
and not always then, he never "knows how to behave," as the simple and
sufficient old phrase had it. If M. d'Etange had had the wits, and had
deigned to do it, he might even, without knowing his deepest cause of
quarrel with the treacherous tutor, have pointed out that Saint-Preux's
claim to be one of G