talent of the author of _Mlle. de la
Seigliere_, are mostly conspicuous by their absence in _Rose et
Blanche_, or _La Comedienne et la Religieuse_, an imitative attempt, and
not a happy one, in the style of fiction then in vogue.

Madame Dudevant had stepped into the literary world at the moment of the
most ardent activity of the Romantic movement. The new school was on the
point of achieving its earliest signal triumphs. Victor Hugo's first
poems had just been followed by the dramas _Hernani_ and _Marion
Delorme_. Dumas' _Antony_ was drawing crowded and enthusiastic houses. A
few months before the publication of _Rose et Blanche_ appeared _Notre
Dame de Paris_. The passion for innovation which had seized on all the
younger school of writers was leading many astray. The strange freaks of
Hugo's genius had, to quote Madame Dudevant's own expression, excited a
"ferocious appetite" for whatever was most outrageous, and set taste,
precedent, and probability most flatly at defiance. From those
aberrations into which the great master's imitators had been betrayed
Madame Dudevant's fine art-instincts were calculated to preserve her;
but she had not yet learned to trust to them implicitly.

_Rose et Blanche_, though containing many clever passages--waifs and
strays of shrewd observation, description and character analysis,--is in
the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal. The two authors
have sacrificed their individualities in a mistaken effort to follow the
fashion's lead, resulting in a most ineffective compound of tameness and
sensationalism. Amazing adventures are undergone by each heroine before
she is one-and-twenty. Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have
their existences crushed out by the heartless conduct of man, Blanche
expiring of dismay almost as soon as she is led from the altar, Rose
burying herself and her despair in a convent. The then favorite heroes
of romance were of the French Byronic type--young men of fortune who
have exhausted life before they are five-and-twenty, whose minds are
darkened by haunting memories of some terrific crime, but who are none
the less capable of all the virtues and great elevation of sentiment on
occasion. None of these requisitions are left unfulfilled by the
unamiable hero of _Rose et Blanche_, a work which did little to advance
the fortunes of its authors, and whose intrinsic merits offer little
warrant for dragging it out of the oblivion into which it has been