A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

The blackguard boyThat runs his link full in your face.

The story of it is, briefly, as follows. Marguerite Gautier, its heroine, is one of the most beautiful and popular demi-mondaines of Paris, also a poitrinaire,354 and as this, if not as the other, the pet and protégée, in a quasi-honourable fashion, of an old duke, whose daughter, closely resembling Marguerite, has actually died of consumption. But she does not give up her profession; and the duke in a manner, though not willingly, winks at it. One evening at the theatre a young man, Armand Duval, who, though by no means innocent, is shy and gauche, is introduced to her, and she laughs at him. But he falls frantically in love with her, and after some interval meets her again. The passion becomes mutual, and for some time she gives herself up wholly to him. But the duke cannot stand this open affiche, and withdraws his allowances. Duval is on the point of ruining himself (he is a man of small means, partly derived from his father) for her, while she intends to sell all she has, pay her debts, and, as we may say, plunge into mutual ruin with him. Then appears the father, who at last makes a direct and effective appeal to her. She returns to business, enraging her lover, who departs abroad. Before he comes back, her health, and with it her professional capacity, breaks down, and she dies in agony, leaving pathetic explanations of what has driven him away from her. A few points in this bare summary may be enlarged on presently. Even from it a certain resemblance, partly of a topsy-turvy kind, may be perceived by a reader of not less than ordinary acuteness to Manon Lescaut. The suggestion, such as it is, is quite frankly admitted, and an actual copy of Prévost's masterpiece figures not unimportantly in the tale.355 Of the difference between the two, again presently.

The later editions of La Dame aux Camélias open with an "Introduction" by Jules Janin, dealing with a certain Marie Duplessis – the recently living original, as we are told, of Marguerite Gautier. A good deal has been said, not by any means always approvingly, of this system of "introductions," especially to novels. In the present instance I should say that the proceeding was dangerous but effective – perhaps not entirely in the way in which it was intended to be so. "Honest Janin,"356 as Thackeray (who had deservedly rapped his knuckles earlier for a certain mixture of ignorance and impudence) called him later, was in his degree almost as "clever" a man as young Dumas; but his kind was different, and it did involve the derogatory connotation of cleverness. It is enough to say of the present subject that it displays, in almost the highest strength, the insincerity and superficiality of matter and thought which accompanied Janin's bright and almost brilliant facility of expression and style. His Marie Duplessis is one of those remarkable young persons who, to alter Dr. Johnson very slightly, unite "the manners of a duchess with the morals of" the other object of the doctor's comparison unaltered; superadding to both the amiability of an angel, the beauty of Helen, and the taste in art of all the great collectors rolled into one. The thing is pleasantly written bosh; and, except to those readers who are concerned to know that they are going to read about "a real person," can be no commendation, and might even cause a little disgust, not at all from the moral but from the purely critical side.

A lover of paradox might almost suggest that "honest Janin" had been playing the ingenious but dangerous finesse of intentionally setting up a foil to his text. He has certainly, to some tastes, done this. There is hardly any false prettiness, any sham Dresden china (a thing, by the way, that has become almost a proverbial phrase in French for demi-monde splendour), about La Dame aux Camélias itself. Nor, on the other hand, is there to be found in it – even in such anticipated "naturalisms" as the exhumation of Marguerite's two-months'-old corpse,357 and one or two other somewhat more veiled but equally or more audacious touches of realism – anything resembling the exaggerated horrors of such efforts of 1830 itself as Janin's own Âne Mort and part of Borel's Champavert. In her splendour as in her misery, in her frivolity as in her devotion and self-sacrifice, repulsive as this contrast may conventionally be, Marguerite is never impossible or unnatural. Her chief companion of her own sex, Prudence Duvernoy, though, as might be expected, a good deal of a proxénète, and by no means disinterested in other ways, is also very well drawn, and assists the general effect more than may at first be seen.

The "problem" of the book, at least to English readers, lies in the person whom it is impossible to call the hero – Armand Duval. It would be very sanguine to say that he is unnatural; but the things that he does are rather appalling. That he listens at doors, opens letters not addressed to him, and so on, is sufficiently fatal; but a very generous extension of lovers' privileges may perhaps just be stretched over these things.358 No such licence will run to other actions of his. In his early days of chequered possession he writes, anonymously, an insulting letter to his mistress, which she forgives; but he has at least the grace to repent of this almost immediately. His conduct, however, when he returns to Paris, after staying in the country with his family, and finds that she has returned to her old ways, is the real crime. A violent scene might, again, be excusable, for he does not know what his father has done. But for weeks this young gentleman of France devotes all his ingenuity and energies to tormenting and insulting the object of his former adoration. He ostentatiously "keeps" a beautiful but worthless friend of hers in her own class, and takes every opportunity of flaunting the connection in Marguerite's face. He permits himself and this creature to insult her in every way, apparently descending once more to anonymous letters. And when her inexhaustible forgiveness has induced a temporary but passionate reconciliation, he takes fresh umbrage, and sends money to her for her complaisance with another letter of more abominable insult than ever. Now it is bad to insult any one of whom you have been fond; worse to insult any woman; but to insult a prostitute, faugh!359

However, I may be reading too much English taste into French ways here,360 and it is impossible to deny that a man, whether French or English, might behave in this ineffable manner. In other words, the irresistible humanum est clears this as it clears Marguerite's own good behaviour, so conventionally inconsistent with her bad. The book, of course, cannot possibly be put on a level with its pattern and inspiration, Manon Lescaut: it is on a much lower level of literature, life, thought, passion – everything. But it has literature; it has life and thought and passion; and so it shall have no black mark here.

Tristan le Roux.

Few things could be more different from each other than Tristan le Roux– another early book of Dumas fils– is from La Dame aux Camélias. Indeed it is a good, if not an absolutely certain, sign that so young a man should have tried styles in novel-writing so far apart from each other. Tristan is a fifteenth-century story of the later part of the Hundred Years' War, and of Gilles de Retz, and of Joan of Arc, and of diablerie, and so forth. I first heard approval of it from a person whose name may be unexpected by some readers – the late Professor Robertson Smith. But the sometime editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica was exceptionally well qualified for the literary side of his office, and could talk about French quite as knowledgeably as he could about Arabic and Hebrew.361 He was rather enthusiastic about the book, an enthusiasm which, when I myself came to read it, for a considerable time puzzled me a little. It opens pretty well, but already with a good deal of the "possible-improbable" about it; for when some twenty wolves have once pulled a horse down and a man off it, his chance of escaping (especially without revolvers) seems small, even though two rescuers come up, one of whom has a knack of shooting these creatures362 and the other of throttling them. It is on these rescuers that the central interest of the story turns. Olivier de Karnak and Tristan le Roux are, though they do not at the time know it, brothers by the same mother, the guiltless Countess of Karnak having been drugged, violated, and made a mother by Gilles de Retz's father. They are also rivals for the love of their cousin Alix, and as she prefers Olivier, this sends Tristan literally "to the Devil." The compact is effected by means of a Breton sorceress, who has been concerned in the earlier crime, and is an accomplice of Gilles himself. That eminent patriot performs,363 for Tristan's benefit or ruin, one of his black masses, with a murdered child's blood for wine. Further diablerie opens a great tomb near Poitiers, where, seven hundred years earlier, in Charles Martel's victory, an ancestor of the Karnaks has been buried alive, with the Saracen Emir he had just slain, by the latter's followers; and where the two have beguiled the time by continuous ghostly fighting. The Saracen, when the tomb is opened, evades, seen by no one but Tristan, and becomes the apostate's by no means guardian devil. Then we have the introduction of the Maid (whom Tristan is specially set by his master to catch), the siege of Orleans and the rest of it, to the tragedy of Rouen.

Up to this point – that is to say, for some seven-eighths of the book – I confess that I did not, and do not, think much of it. I am very fond of fighting in novels; and of diablerie even "more than reason"; and of the Middle Ages; and of many other things connected with the work. But it does not seem to me well managed or well told. One never can make out whether the "Sarrazin" is, as he is actually sometimes called, Satan himself, or not. If he is not, why call him so? If he is, why was there so little evidence of his being constantly employed in fighting with M. de Karnak between the Battle of Poitiers (not ours, but the other) and the Siege of Orleans? I love my Dark and Middle Ages; but I should say that there was considerable diabolic activity in them, outside tombs. Or was the Princedom of the Air "in commission" all that time? Minor improbabilities constantly jar, and there are numerous small blunders of fact364 of the unintentional kind, which irritate more than intentional ones of some importance.

But at the end the book improves quite astonishingly. Tristan, as has been said, has been specially commissioned by the fiend to effect the ruin of Joan. He has induced his half-brother, Gilles de Retz – not, indeed, to take the English side, for patriotism, as is well known, was the one redeeming point of that extremely loathsome person, but – to join the seigneurs who were malcontent with her, and if possible drug her and violate her, a process, as we have seen, quite congenial, hereditarily as well as otherwise, to M. de Laval. He is foiled, of course, and pardoned. But Tristan himself openly takes the English side, inflicts great damage on his countrymen, and after our defeat at the bastilles or bastides round Orleans, resumes his machinations against Joan, helps to effect her capture, and does his utmost to torment and insult her, and if possible resume Gilles's attempt, in her imprisonment; while, on the contrary, his brother Olivier (they are both disguised as monks) works on her side, nearly saves her,365 and attends her on the scaffold. It is somewhat earlier than this that the author, as has been said, "wakes up" and wakes us up. When Tristan, admitted to Joan's cell, designs the same outrage to which he had counselled his brother, it is the Maid's assumption of her armour to protect herself from him that (in this point for once historically) seals her fate. But at the very last his hatred is changed, not at all impossibly or improbably, to violent love as she smiles on him from the fire; and he sees the legendary dove mount to heaven, after he himself has flung to her, at her dying cry, an improvised crucifix, or at least cross. And then a choice miracle happens, told with almost all the vigour of the "Vin de Porto" itself. Tristan seeks absolution, but is, though not harshly, refused, before penitence and penance. He begs his brother Olivier's pardon, and is again refused – this time with vituperation – but bears it calmly. He takes, meekly, more insult from the very executioner. At last he makes the sign of the compact and summons the "Saracen" fiend. And then, after a very good conversation, in which the Devil uses all his powers of sarcasm to show his victim that, as usual, he has sold his soul for naught, Tristan draws his sword, calls on the Trinity, Our Lady, and Joan, and one of the strangest though not of the worst fights in fiction begins.

The Red Bastard is himself almost a giant; but the Saracen is a fiend, and though it seems that in this case the Devil can be dead, he can, it seems also, only be killed at Poitiers in his original tomb. So for two whole years, the Demon constantly giving ground and misleading his enemy as much as he can. But Tristan, in the strength of repentance and with Joan's unseen help, lives, fights, and forces the fiend back over half France and half the world. By a good touch, after long combat, the Devil tries to tempt his adversary on the side of chivalry, asking to be allowed to drink at a stream on a burning day, to warm himself at a fire they pass in a snow-storm, to rest a moment. But Tristan has the single word "Non!" for any further pact with or concession to the Evil One; the two years' battle wears away his sin; and at last he finds himself pressing his fainting foe towards the very tomb in the fields of Poitou. It opens, and the combatants entering, find themselves by the actual graves. They drop their swords and now literally wrestle. Tristan wins, throws the Saracen into his own tomb, and runs him through the body, once more inflicting on him such death as he may undergo.366

They wrestle up, they wrestle down,They wrestle still and sore,

There is a grandiose extravagance about it which is really Oriental;367 and perhaps it was this which conciliated Robertson Smith, as it certainly reconciled me.

Antonine.

A third "book of the beginning," Antonine, is far inferior to these. It is, in fact, little more than a decentish Paul-de-Kockery, with a would-be philosophical conclusion. Two young men, Gustave Daunont and Edmond de Péreux, saunter after breakfast looking for young ladies' ankles, and Edmond sees a pair so beautiful that he follows the possessor and her unobservant father home. Having then ascertained that the father is a doctor, he adopts the surprisingly brilliant expedient of going to consult him, and so engineering an entry. He thinks there is nothing the matter with him; but the doctor (it was apparently "at temp. of tale" – 1834, while the port was getting ready, – the practice of French physicians, to receive their patients in dressing-gowns) discovers that he is in an advanced stage of Dumas fils' favourite poitrine. He says, however, nothing about it (which seems odd) to his patient, merely prescribing roast-meat and Bordeaux; but (which seems odder) he does mention it to his daughter Antonine, the Lady with the Ankles. For the moment nothing happens. But Gustave the friend has for mistress an adorable grisette– amiability, in the widest sense, nez retroussé, garret, and millinery all complete – whom Madame de Péreux, Edmond's mother – a sainte, but without prejudices – tolerates, and in fact patronises. It is arranged that Nichette shall call on Antonine to ask, as a milliner, for her custom. Quite unexpected explanations follow in a not uningenious manner, and the explosion is completed by Edmond's opening (not at all treacherously) a letter addressed to Gustave and containing the news of his own danger. The rest of the story need not be told at length. A miraculous cure effected by M. Devaux, Antonine's father; marriage of the pair; pensioning off of Nichette, and marriage of Gustave to another adorable girl (ankles not here specified); establishment of Nichette at Tours in partnership with a respectable friend, etc., etc., can easily be supplied by any novel-reader.

But here the young author's nascent seriousness, and his still existing Buskbody superstition, combine to spoil the book, not merely, as in the Tristan case, to top-hamper it. Having given us eight pages of rather cheap sermonising about the poetry of youth not lasting; having requested us to imagine Manon and Des Grieux "decrepit and catarrhous," Paul and Virginie shrivelled and toothless, Werther and Charlotte united but wrinkled,368 he proceeds to tell us how, though Gustave and his Laurence are as happy as they can be, though Nichette has forgotten her woes but kept her income and is married to a book-seller, things are not well with the other pair. Antonine loves her husband frantically, but he has become quite indifferent to her – says, indeed, that he really does not know whether he ever did love her. Later still we take leave of him, his "poetry" having ended in a prefecture, and his passion in a liaison, commonplace to the nth, with a provincial lawyer's wife. La moralité de cette comédie (to quote, probably not for the first time, or I hope the last, words of Musset which I particularly like) would appear to be – first, that to secure lasting happiness in matrimony it is desirable, if not necessary, to have lived for eighteen months antenuptially with a charming grisette– amiability, nez retroussé, garret, and millinery all complete —or to have yourself been this grisette; while, on the other hand, it is an extremely dangerous thing to recover a man of his consumption. Which last result the folklorists would doubtless assimilate to the well-known superstition of the shore as to the rescue of the drowning.

La Vie à Vingt Ans.

Two other early books of this author promise the Pauline influence in their titles and do not belie it in their contents, though in varying way and degree. Indeed, the first story of La Vie à Vingt Ans– that of a schoolboy who breaks his bounds and "sells his dictionaries" to go to the Bal de l'Opéra; receives, half in joy, half in terror, an assignation from a masked débardeur, and discovers her to be an aged married woman with a drunken husband (the pair knowing from his card that his uncle is a Deputy, and having determined to get a débit de tabac out of him) – made me laugh as heartily as the great Paul himself can ever have made Major Pendennis. The rest – they are all stories of the various amatory experiences of a certain Emmanuel de Trois Étoiles, and have a virtuous epilogue extolling pure affection and honest matrimony – are inferior, the least so being that of the caprice-love of a certain Augustine, Emmanuel's neighbour on his staircase, who admits only one other lover and finally marries him, but conceives a frantic though passing affection for her voisin. Unluckily there is in this book a sort of duplicate but, I think, earlier sketch of the atrocious conduct of Duval to the Dame aux Camélias; and there are some of the author's curious "holes where you can put your hand" (as a Jacobean poet says of the prosodic licences in nomenclature and construction of his fellows).

Aventures de Quatre Femmes.

The other, much longer, and much more ambitious and elaborate book, Aventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet, seems to me on the whole worse than any just mentioned, though it at least attempts to fly higher than Antonine. It begins by one of those goguenardises which 1830 itself had loved, but it is not a good specimen. Two men who have determined on suicide – one by shooting, one by hanging – meet at the same tree in the Bois de Boulogne and wrangle about possession of the spot, till the aspirant to suspension per coll. recounts his history from the branch on which he is perched. After which an unlucky thirdsman, interfering, gets shot, and buried as one of the others – "which is witty, let us 'ope," as the poetical historian of the quarrel between Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Buchanan observes of something else.369 As the book begins with two attempted and disappointed suicides, so it ends with two accomplished ones. A great part, and not the least readable, is occupied by a certain English Countess of Lindsay (for Dumas the younger, like Crébillon the younger, commits these scandala magnatum with actual titles). The hero is rather a fool, and not much less of a knave than he should be. His somewhat better wife is an innocent bigamist, thinking him dead; and one of the end-suicides is that of her second husband, who, finding himself de trop, benevolently makes way. As for the parrot, he nearly spoils the story at the beginning by "singing" (which I never heard a parrot do), and atones at the end by getting poisoned without deserving it. I am afraid I must call it a rather silly book.

It does not, however, lack the cleverness with which silliness, especially in the young and the old, is often associated, and so does not break the assignment of that quality to its author. All these five books were produced (with others) in a very few years, by a man who was scarcely over twenty when he began and was not thirty when he wrote the last of them. Now people sometimes write wonderful poetry when they are very young, because, after all, a poet is not much more than a mouthpiece of the Divine, whose spirit bloweth where it listeth. But it is not often that they write thoroughly good novels till, like other personages who have to wait for their "overseership" up to thirty, they have had time and opportunity roughly to scan and sample life. There is, in this work of Alexander the younger, plenty of imitation, of convention, of that would-be knowingness which is the most amusing form of ignorance, etc., etc. But there is a good deal more: and especially there is plenty of the famous diable au corps, of verve, of "go," of refusal to be content with one rut and one model. And all this came once, even at this period, in La Dame aux Camélias, to something which I shall not call a masterpiece, but which certainly is a powerful thesis for the attainment of the master's degree.

Trois Hommes Forts.

Perhaps there is no better example of the curious mixture of verve, variety, and vigorous hitting-off which characterised the youth of Dumas fils than Trois Hommes Forts– a book of the exact middle of the century, which begins with an idyll, passing into a tragedy; continues with a lively ship-and-yellow-fever scene; plunges into a villainous conspiracy against virtue and innocence diversified with a bull-throwing; and winds up with another killing, which, this time, is no murder; a trial, after which and an acquittal the accused and the Crown Prosecutor embrace before (and amidst the chalorous applause of) the whole Court; not forgetting a final panache of happy marriage between innocence, a very little damaged, and the bull-thrower-avenger-ouvrier, Robert. It is of course pure melodrama —Minnigrey and the Porte-Saint-Martin pleasantly accommodated. But it is not too long; it never drags; and it knocks about in the cheerfullest "pit-box-and-gallery" fashion from first to last. When the wicked "Joseph le Mendiant," alias M. Valéry, alias Frédéric Comte de La Marche370– who has stabbed a priest with one hand and throttled an old woman with the other; then made a fortune in Madagascar; then nearly died of yellow-fever on board ship, but recovered (something after the fashion of one of Marryat's heroes) by drinking a bottle of Madeira; then gone home and bought an estate and given himself the above title; then seduced the innocent sister of the person who heard his confession; then tried to marry a high-born maiden;371 then threatened to betray the sister's shame if her brother "tells" – when this villain has his skull broken by Robert, all right-minded persons will clap their hands sore. But remembrance of one passage at the beginning may "leave a savour of sorrow." Could you, even in Meridional France, to-day procure a breakfast consisting of truffled pigs' feet, truffled thrush, tomato omelette (I should bar the tomatoes), and strawberries in summer, or "quatre-mendiants" (figs, nuts, and almonds and raisins) in winter, with a bottle of sound Roussillon or something like it, for three francs? Alas! one fears not.