onal merit. It forms the first of a
"Library of Choice Fiction" projected by Messrs. Scribner, Armstrong &
Co., of which it forms a very encouraging standard of interest.

Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore. By Sainte-Beuve. With a Selection
from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts
Brothers.

Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died,
and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood
portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and
contemporaries. This is no study of a heroine long dead, and draped in
the obsolete and winning costume of the Empire or the Revolution, but of
an anxious woman concerned with the hardship and grime of our own day,
"amid the dust and defilement of the city, on the highway, always in
quest of lodgings, climbing to the fifth story, wounded on every angle."
Only sympathy and a poetic touchstone could bring out the essence and
sweetness of a nature so unhappily disguised; but Sainte-Beuve,
discarding with a single gesture her penitential mask and hood, finds
Madame Desbordes-Valmore "polished, gracious, and even hospitable,
investing everything with a certain attractive and artistic air, hiding
her griefs under a natural grace, lighted even by gleams of merriment."
The poor details of her life he contrives to lose under a purposed
artlessness of narrative and a caressing superfluity of loyal eulogy. We
learn, however, that Mademoiselle Desbordes was born at Douai in 1786,
and died in Paris in 1859. Daughter of a heraldic painter, the
necessities of her family obliged her to make a voyage, as a child, to
Guadeloupe, in the hope of receiving aid from a rich relative, and a
little later to go upon the stage. In the provinces, and occasionally at
Paris, she played in the role of _ingenue_ with an exquisite address,
succeeding because such a part was really a natural expression of
herself: she thus won the abiding friendship of the great Mars, who
turned to the young comedienne a little-suspected and tender side of her
own character. Mademoiselle Desbordes' artistic charm was infinite, and
she controlled with innocent ease the fountain of tears, whitening the
whole parterre with pocket-handkerchiefs when she appeared as the
Eveline, Claudine and Eulalie of French sentimental drama. But she felt
keenly the social ostracism which was still strong toward the stage of
1800, and bewailed in her poetry the "hono