have promised?" asks Hortense in amazement, in the first scene of all. "They are promised but not given," says Numa, and the explanation which he adds is characteristic. "Don't forget that we are in the South, among fellow countrymen speaking the same language. All these fine fellows know what a promise means, and have no more certainty of receiving their tobaccoshop than I have of being able to give it. But it is something to talk of it amuses them, and keeps their imagination occupied. Why should I deprive them of that pleasure?" This comfortable way of smoothing matters over does not, however, exempt Numa from a great deal of embarrassment when he is in power, and when claimants of these easy promises are raised upon him from every side. The curious group of the Valmajour, the simple and stupid tambourineplayer whose picturesque looks and the romantic interest of his supposed descent from the ancient princes of the name-a fable which Numa throws out in a moment of enthusiasm-attract the youthful heart of poor Hortense, and indirectly cause her death; with his tyrannical little sister, upon whose countenance it is the Midi délirant which reigns, a creature compounded of cunning and fury; and the old father who is jealous of his son's a very striking and powerful, if disagreeable, episode to the tale. They are victims of Numa's lavish offers of service, but not victims who attract any sympathy; and their squalid settlement into the back slums of Paris is only another addition to the thronged ranks of that overwhelming Midi which fills up every corner from the palace to the garret.

skill-adds

And we will not attempt to unfold to the reader the dismal intrigue which finally revolts Rosalie, and brings her endurance to an end. The little actress with whom on her first appearance the newly appointed minister forgets himself so far as to sing a duet while his rooms are full of important visitors, all waiting for him—a bishop in one chamber, a deputation in another-who is si enfant, yet quite old enough to take care of her own interests, and compromise in the most serious way her rash, middle-aged lover,is a singularly unattractive figure. The extraordinary commotion caused throughout the family and connections by Rosalie's indignant determination to have nothing further to do with her perfidious husband when she discovers this intrigue-a resolution which by every means her relatives are determined to make impossible-culminates in the following scene. The outraged wife has stood firm against all her father's arguments and her mother's entreaties.

but took his wife aside, and there "The president insisted no more, ensued a whispering conference, almost a dispute, surprising indeed between that authoritative master and his humble and self-effacing wife. 'You must tell her,' he said. 'Yes, yes; I desire that you should tell herWithout adding a word, M. le Quesnoy went out, and with his ordinary step, sonorous and regular, passed away through the empty distance in the solemnity of the great room.

"Come here,' said the mother, with a tender gesture nearer, still nearer.' She dared not speak loud-even so close together, heart against heart, she hesitated still. 'Listen; it is he who will have it-it is he who insists that

I should tell you that thy fate is that of all women, and that even thy mother has not escaped.'

VOL. CXXX.-NO. DCCXCIV.

2 7

"Rosalie was terror-stricken by this confidence which she divined from the first words, while the dear aged voice,

broken with tears, could scarcely articulate the miserable story, in all points like her own, the infidelity of her husband from the very earliest days of her marriage.

"Oh mother, enough, enough! you do me harm

"Her father whom she admired so

much, whom she placed above all men the upright and firm magistrate! What then were men? North and south all the same, traitors and perjurers. She who had not wept for the treason of her husband, wept a flood of hot tears for that humiliation of her father. And it was supposed that this would make her yield! No,

a hundred times no! If this was mar

riage, shame upon it! What mattered the fear of scandal and the opinion of the world since the question was only which would brave it the best? Her mother had taken her in her arms and held her against her heart in an endeavour to soothe the struggles of that young conscience wounded in all its beliefs, in its dearest superstitions, and gently caressing her as one rocks a child. Yes, thou wilt pardon; thou wilt do as I have done. It is our lot. Ah! I too felt a great anguish, a despair to leap out of the window. But I thought of my child, my poor little André, just born, who since then has grown up, and who is dead, loving, respecting all that belonged to him. Thou too wilt pardon, that thy child may have the happy peacefulness which I purchased for you, that he may not be one of those half-orphans whom the parents share between them, whom they bring up in the hate and scorn each of the other. And then thou wilt remember that thy father and mother have greatly suffered already, and that other anguish threatens them.' She stopped oppressed: then with a solemn accent,

My child, all troubles quiet down, all wounds heal. There is only one misfortune irreparable-it is the death

of those whom we love.'

"In the sorrowful exhaustion which followed these words, Rosalie saw the

There can be no doubt that this scene is singularly touching, but we are glad that it is not yet a likely expedient in English fiction, to curb an injured wife's indignation by the narrative of all that her mother has suffered. Rosalie yields to the last argument, so affectingly, and with so much simplicity and tenderness, put before her-and her clemency is rewarded by the advent of the baby so hoped for and despaired of. The book closes with a triumphant baptismal ceremony, which is made into a popular fete by the warm-hearted enthusiasm of the crowd. While Rosalie, half terrified, shuts herself up with her child, safe from the raptures of the "Oh, ce population, murmuring, Midi, ce Midi !" her husband harangues them in all the excitement of a public triumph.

.

my

"Upon the balcony the orator poured himself forth in outbursts of eloquence, of which only some sharp accentuations of his southern speech came to her ears. My soul. blood . . . morals-religion-country,' underlined by the huzzahs of that audience made in his image, of which he was the living representative in his virtues and vices, the effervescent animated South, tumultuous as the sea. There was a last vira, then the crowd was heard to disperse slowly, and Roumestan entered her room wiping his forehead, intoxicated with his triumph, warmed by the inexhaustible tenderness of a whole nation, and approaching his wife kissed her with sincere enthusiasm. He felt himself good to her, tender as on their marriage day, without remorse as without rancour.'

Oh! ce Midi, ce Midi! it is the burden of this strange and powerful book. We cannot tell whether it has a distinct political motive; but its appearance at a moment when the Midi has so evidently

ness which her father had lost in her eyes."

cannot but remember looking down from the public gallery in Versailles

upon a black-bearded deputy, not then so absolutely potential as now, the centre of a rustling, gesticulating, continually changing crowd, himself never still for a moment, head and arms in perpetual motion, now bursting through the cloud of waving hands and black beards that surrounded him, to fall like a whirlwind upon some one else, then darting back, big but rapid, he and his Midi all boiling about him. This glimpse, though it was a brief one, gives us a more clear conception of Numa Roumestan.

'Le Petit Chose'* is of the South also, but a very different version of it. The hero and supposed writer of this tender and touching little book is the son of a poor manufacturer, whose fabrique stops in the beginning of the story, and whose family is conveyed sadly to Lyons to strive and starve in a vain attempt to recover their lost ground. The father, anxious and precise about his books which will never come right the delicate and gentle mother--and Jacques who is pleurard, to whom his father's constant address is, "Jacques, tu es un âne," and who responds with a sob,--are all introduced to us in a soft light of discouragement and melancholy-poor people who are worsted in their struggle of life, and fighting sadly a losing battle. Daniel is a delicate and puny boy, very small and insignificant, for whom his master can find no better name than that of Petit Chose, a name which gives him through all his career a half-guilty sense of his own pettiness and smallness, as if it were somehow his fault. When the family falls into absolute bankruptcy, and breaks up, each to seek his fortune by himself, Petit Chose finds that a place has been got for him in

which he can gain his living,that of a maître d'étude in a great college in the Cevennes. Half frightened, half excited, the lad goes away to this unknown place, always panicstricken when his smallness is remarked upon, lest he should be found unfit for his work. The interior of the great provincial lycée affords a curious study of boys and masters. Petit Chose has the humble office of helping to prepare the lessons, and taking charge generally of the class to which he is attached. The sketch of the surveillant général, M. Viot, with his bunch of keys, his table of rules, and his head on one side, is a bit of unquestionable Dickens, as to a great extent is the little Chose himself, one of the gentle, weak, sentimental boys of whom Dickens is so fond. But Dickens would have left him under a fine crop of violets at the end of the tale. M. Daudet is more merciful, and carries his little hero safely, though at much sacrifice, through his troubles. There is the prettiest picture of the little class which is his care at first, les petits, of whom the oldest is but eleven, and to whom the young master tells stories in all their moments of leisure, until found out and suppressed by the terrible M. Viot, with his clinking keys. The vignette of Bamban, the little externe, demi-pensionnaire, who is the horror and shame of the class when they go out on their promenade the dirtiest little urchin, who knows all the naughtiest of the street boys, and is on terms of good-fellowship with every blouse he meets-is just such a sketch as Dickens would have delighted in. Petit Chose, after doing all he can to shake off this little unfortunate, bethinks himself that, after all, he at Lyons was very much like

Paris Carpentier.

Bamban, and his heart melts over the creature whom nobody cares for.

"The day of his arrival at school a sheet of pothooks had been given to him, which he was told to copy. And for a year Bamban made pothooks and such pothooks, ye heavens!— crooked, dirty, lame, staggering, the pothooks of Bamban! Nobody paid any attention to him. He did not belong to any special class; generally he seated himself with the first he saw.

One day he was found making his pothooks in the philosophy class. I watched him sometimes at work, bent double over his paper, perspiring, breathing hard, rolling his tongue, holding his pen in both hands, and leaning all his weight as if he would have gone through the table. At each pothook he took more ink; and at the foot of each line he drew back his tongue into his mouth, and took a rest, rubbing his hands.

"Bamban worked with better heart after we became friends. When he had finished a page he made haste to climb up on hands and knees to my pulpit, and placed his chef-d'œuvre before me without a word. I gave him a little affectionate tap, and said, 'Well done!' They were hideous, but I would not discourage him. In fact, little by little the pothooks began to keep a straight line, the pen scratched less, and the ink flowed less freely. I

felt that at last I should succeed in

teaching him something. Unhappily fate separated us.

Bamban

said not a word, but at the moment of my departure he came up to me, very sad, and thrust into my hand with solemnity a copy-book full of pothooks which he had written specially for me. Poor Bamban!"

The cause of this sad separation was that the master of the moyens -the middle-sized, the terrible, neither old enough to understand nor young enough to love the gentle little master-left the college; and, French directors of schools being no wiser than their neighbours, though at this disthis distance we are fain to think they

are

-the school authorities handed over the little class to un rhétoricien à barbe, and gave to poor Petit Chose, all trembling, and knowing his fate, the charge of the moyens. "Ah, the cruel children, how they made me suffer!" he cries. The narrative is cruel indeed, and the persecutions of the little demons almost madden the delicate, sensitive boy, not very much older than themselves, and without any support in the little world of the college, where he has excepting a certain pair of black eyes which he sees equally sad, equally oppressed as himself, bending over eternal needle

work in a window-no friend but one, a vigorous and learned abbé, who finally delivers him and sends him to Paris, where Jacques, the sobbing one, the âne of the family, the good, tender, devoted brother, has found a place, and opens a refuge for him. Once more the life of the two lads in a garret close to the tower of St. Germains-des-Près recalls Dickens to us. Just so would he have expanded over the cold little traveller, hungry and perishing; over the awkward, kind, good brother, with "his long stooping figure, and long arms like a telegraph," and son divin sourire résigné. Jacques is the good angel of the piece. When Petit Chose falls into the hands of la dame du premier, and forgets his honest. love and honest work, and everything that is good, under the smile of that enchantress-nay, under her vile, squalid influence, when he is disenchanted and falls with her into the lowest depths-it is Jacques who delivers him. And naturally Daniel repays his brother by stealing from him the girl he loves, who turns out to be the very black eyes whom he had made acquaintance with at his college, in the fatality of things. All this takes a considerable time to unfold,

and there are many episodes full of truth and nature: all the more interesting from the fact that Daniel's experiences are supposed to embody those of the writer himself in the hard beginnings of his career. The pathetic picture of the mother, compelled, when the home is broken up, to leave her family and seek refuge in a brother's house, where every morsel of bread is grudged to her, who weeps her poor eyes blind, yet never says a word of complaint, eternally knitting in her humble corner,-is profoundly touching - even more so than the more highly strained tragedy of Jacques, whose death-scene has been so much quoted, and whose self-sacrifice and resignation are of an order more evident than that of the faint figure in the background, which is little more than a suggestion of a patience and suffering still longer and more profound. The establishment of the remains of the ruined family over the porcelain-shop of the faithful Pierrotte, and the grand effect of the final scene- the new sign which the clumsy honest shopkeeper draws ont in triumph after Daniel's betrothal to his daughter-the "black eyes" of the Sarlande college, placing in honest magnanimity the name of his future son-in-law before his own,-again powerfully recall Dickens to us. Pierrotte, indeed, has never been made repulsive to the reader, yet we feel something a little resembling the shock with which so many years ago we witnessed Mr. Dombey touching glasses with Captain Cuttle, when we perceive to what advancement the young visionary and poet, the poor little persecuted tutor, is to come. Mr. Dombey, however, in the profoundly unreasonable sentimentality of the English novelist, has so entirely conquered himself, that touching

"At

glasses with Captain Cuttle becomes a pleasure to him; but the young Frenchman does not find himself transformed into a Paris shopkeeper without a pang. the bottom of his heart Petit Chose gave a last tear to his Papillons bleus; then taking the placard in both hands-come! be a man, Petit Chose!-read aloud in a firm voice this shop-sign in which his future was written in letters of a foot long."

Thus we leave him, not without a sigh for the Papillons bleus, the hopes that were never to come to anything, yet with his "black eyes" by his side, and his poor mother rescued from her long vigil. In everything but the adventure of la dame du premier the book is irreproachable. That is pure French, and belongs to the other conception of art. An Englishman would think a long time before he would cut off from himself the best part of his public by such an expedient; and if he was a man of genius like M. Daudet, he would search deeper into existence, and most likely find some other cause of misery and needful complications, which would be at once better and more original. But it is possible that M. Daudet's readers would find him insipid without this prick of vice. Dickens would not have touched such pitch, knowing well that to be defiled by it would be suicide to him; but he would have delighted in the uncouth negro woman with the horrible gibberish, who is as fantastic as his heart could have desired.

There can be no better proof of M. Daudet's superiority than the sensation of coming down with a run which we experience, sinking down into abysses of commonplace and nastiness, when we turn from his volumes to the other popular novels of the time. Monsieur le