Vicaire going off to be a missionary, and recover his lost honour by a martyr's death, according to all the rules in such cases provided-when she has to stir up all her powers to escape from the coarse arms of the notary, who has from the beginning marked her for his own. At last the reader is as glad as she is when this conquering beauty has the smallpox, and comes out of it so disfigured that her lovers all turn from her in disgust, and even her steadfast female friends cannot recognise her seamed and altered countenance. This is not a cheerful dénouement for the complications of a story, and the lesson to be drawn from it is but a poor one. If it requires nothing less than a bad attack of smallpox to make a girl capable of earning her bread in France, the situation is somewhat appalling for women. Is this the last subtle means found by cunning conspirators to undervalue the Republic? If so, it may be permissible in politics, but it is suicidal in art. Hélène, we must add, is a most practical person, persevering and stout-hearted. It is not every girl who would regard gratefully a smallpox which deprived her of all personal attractions. But she appears throughout the book as a philosopher and a Stoic; and perhaps to such high virtue there is nothing wonderful in her contented acceptance of the conditions under which only, as it seems, she can be allowed to do her work in peace.

This, however, is the poorest art imaginable, and these novels make it painfully evident that French light literature is (with all its special drawbacks) in no better circumstances than our own. One or two men of genius keep up the old prestige of the name; but the mass of novels, like our own, are tedious and long-winded, not brilliant and sparkling as we so fondly continue

to believe. M. Daudet stands far above the little competitors who draw their material from the same crowded world of contemporary drama. It is not the adventures of his creations which attract our interest, but themselves. They fall into the mud like their neighbours, and that mud is often black enough: but it is no accidental conspiracy of the outside world that betrays them, it is their own character, the flow of the individual current on which each is launched. So long as this is the case, fiction can never be entirely depraved: it may meddle with matters banished from our manuals, it may take a different view of what is and is not permissible as subjects of general discussion, but it cannot be degraded to the rank of a historian of vice. Unfortunately there have been several instances lately in English fiction of an inclination towards the easy and vulgar effects of this depraved art. Mr. Henry James, with all his power of refined and delicate workmanship, not only makes every man who meets his heroine go down before her like so many ninepins, but he permits the fair and passionless creature whom he has embodied, to feel almost for the first time a sensation of relief and repose among her troubles, when one of her many lovers passionately proposes to carry her off into Elysium, away from the husband who makes her unhappy. She does not consent, it is true, but neither does she resent the suggestion; and the bold Puritan who makes the proposal is bidden, at the end of the tale, to wait. Let us hope that this is but a slip, and that English writers (even when they are American) will never care to abandon the delicate task of disentangling the threads of human motive and action, for the coarser expedient of cutting them with the sharp edge of vice.

PERSONAL modesty is perhaps the most remarkable quality of the modern war correspondent. Exclusively attached to the interests of the journal by which he is employed, and anxious only faithfully to chronicle the splendid achievements of the general and officers upon whom he depends largely for his comfort, he feels instinctively that to narrate his own deeds of daring, his hair-breadth escapes and thrilling adventures, would be altogether out of place, while they would have no interest for the public. Excepting in the rare cases when his personal popularity is so great as to warrant the familiarity of a nickname in the highest circles, or when the extraordinary toughness of his epidermis, and overwhelming devotion to the interests of his journal, induce him to undertake rides of fabulous length and incredible hazard, his very name is unknown; and the thoughtless public, reading a graphic description of hot encounters and fierce cavalry charges, are only too apt to consider the narrator a mere writing-machine, impervious to bullets, and devoid of a stomach. After the lapse of more than ten years, I will venture to break through the reserve which the extreme delicacy of my feelings imposed upon me at the time, and recount a few personal experiences of a campaign during the late Franco-German war, which may illustrate the vicissitudes of a war correspondent's life, and show the public what they lose through the restraints imposed by the etiquette of journalism.

In November 1870, I was one of a numerous fraternity of war correspondents at Versailles. It is needless to allude to the organ of public

opinion which I represented, or to the source from which I derived the information, that if I started for Orleans without an hour's delay, I might be in time for a battle. At the moment I was not equipped for campaigning. I had just arrived from another part of Europe, and was fitting myself out leisurely. I had picked up a servant at Frankfort, and was negotiating for the purchase of horses, when this disturbing piece of intelligence reached me. It is under these circumstances that the war correspondent comes out strong. To rush to the nearest fiacre stand, and hire one on the spot, was the work of a few moments. When the driver asked me where he was to drive to, and I mildly replied Orleans, he naturally objected. Even under the severe rule of the Prussians, he thought he was entitled to resist a course of seventy-two miles in length; so I told him to drive me to his own stables. There I conversed with him in the language of common-sense, which all the world over means the language of hard cash. In half an hour he had engaged to become my coachman by the month, and to buy me a carriage and a pair of horses; and an hour later I was driving triumphantly out of Versailles with my servant on the box, and my scanty luggage inside, on the road to Orleans. Notwithstanding the promptitude of my movements, I was too late for the battle of Coulmiers, which was the more annoying as no English correspondent witnessed it, and it proved one of the most interesting episodes of the war, as being the only defeat which the Germans sustained, and which, if it had been promptly followed up

by General d'Aurelles de Paladines, would have forced them to raise the siege of Paris. I can certify to the fact that the road was perfectly open, as from the moment I left the investing army, to the moment of my joining General von der Tann at Toury, I had not passed a German soldier. The Bavarian force, who had fought more than four times their number at Coulmiers, were so exhausted with the battle and the subsequent retreat, that had D'Aurelles de Paladines fallen upon them at the hour of my arrival, as General von der Tann momentarily expected him to do, they would have been quite unable to offer any resistance, and there would have been nothing to prevent the French army of seventy thousand men taking them all prisoners, and four days later attacking the besieging Germans at Paris. Those who were at Versailles at this juncture will remember the preparations which took place for raising the siege. However, I alluded to all this at the time in the columns of my "organ." What I did not mention was, that I hardly found myself within the German lines when my servant was arrested as a spy, and, to my horror, compromising documents were found upon him, which not only rendered all attempts to release him hopeless, but indiscreet, as likely to involve me in the same suspicious category. Indeed, for some days afterwards, in spite of my own papers being in order, I felt myself under a cloud. I had left Versailles in such a hurry that I had come unprovided with letters of introduction, and I now found myself not merely without acquaintances, but with no one except a French "cabby," who regarded every soul he met with mingled feelings of fear and aversion, and who, of course, could not speak a word of German, to act as

a servant. In one respect this was fortunate, for nearly all the provisions in the village had been exhausted; and had it not been for my coachman's influence as a compatriot, neither he nor his horses nor I should have had anything to eat. Not being attached formally to this particular corps d'armée, I had neither lodging nor rations provided for me, but had to scramble for both. Under these circumstances, I was not sorry to stumble upon a German colleague in like distress; and after giving him some of my dinners, I offered him a share in a room I had secured in the house of a peasant, and a seat in my carriage for the rest of the campaign.

This commenced three days afterwards, on the arrival of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg with 30,000 men. I found myself the only English correspondent with this army, and we made a most enjoyable three weeks' march, through some of the loveliest scenery in France, in pursuit of an enemy who always vanished as we advanced, and whom, if he existed in force, we never overtook. Here, again, D'Aurelles de Paladines lost his chance, for during the whole of these three weeks there was nothing

to

oppose his march to Paris. We had only two trifling skirmishes, -one at Dreux, and the other at Bretoncelles; but the march was by no means devoid of personal incident. The course of procedure which was forced upon me in the earlier part of the campaign by my undefined position with the army, possessed this merit, that it led me into adventures, and procured me experiences which I should have missed, had I been regularly attached to the Headquarter staff. Having to look out for board and lodging for myself, I found that the only chance of obtaining either

one or the other, was to go in advance of the army, and hover upon that neutral ground which constantly exposed me to the chance of being taken prisoner. To start with the rest of the army, to follow in its wake with the baggage, and to arrive after it at the end of the day's march, to find every corner occupied, was to encounter an amount of fatigue, discomfort, and starvation for which nothing could compensate. Whereas to penetrate the mystery overnight of the direction of our march next day, and by the aid of a good map to take circuitous roads, unhampered by troops,-to arrive as soon or sooner than the quarter" makers," as the advanced guard is called, who go ahead to billet the troops for the night-to push on half-a-mile or so beyond them, and select my own quarters, combined a certain amount of risk with a considerable degree of comfort. By these means I succeeded in sleeping between clean sheets every night during the campaign. My horses never wanted for forage, and my dinners were sometimes quite artistic in their excellence. There was a constant excitement in the uncertainty attending this hunt for night quarters, and my most varied and amusing experiences arose from this source. My German companion did not quite approve of this method of procedure, as he was constantly haunted by the fear of being taken prisoner, and as a German he would probably have fared worse than I should. On the other hand, his nationality often proved of the greatest service to me, on occasions when our night quarters were beaten up by Uhlans, and we were regarded as suspicious characters, in consequence of our being so isolated from the rest of the army. He was also great friends with the

postal officials connected with the force, and used to take my letters to the rear with his own, when it was inconvenient to me to leave the front. On the other hand, as the enterprising journal he represented had not provided him with means sufficient to keep a horse, he was only too glad to be driven along the line of march in my carriage. So we were mutually useful to each other; and he was obliged to agree to the somewhat hazardous method of campaigning which I had adopted. Our first alarm took place two days after leaving Toury. There was a heavy fog, and we had been driving ever since the start on a road of our own choosing, quite unhampered by troops, and were congratulating ourselves on the rapidity of our progress, when, suddenly, we were startled by a horrible fanfare of French trumpets, issuing from a village scarcely a hundred yards distant on the left. At the same moment the fog lifted, and right in front of us were a body of French cavalry, some forty or fifty in number, watering their horses at a pond by the road-side. Fortunately there was a haystack on the edge of a field to our right, and our coachman, who was more alarmed at the sight of his countrymen than we were, for he felt they would have no mercy upon him for hiring himself to his enemies, with great presence of mind rushed the carriage across the ditch and behind the stack before we were observed. Here we remained for some moments in a state of the utmost trepidation; the detestable trumpets seemed to be growing louder as they approached nearer, and we dreaded lest the fog should clear off altogether,-for the prospect of a game of hide-and-seek with a carriage and a pair of horses round a haystack was by no means reassuring. Fortunately a fresh