no relief or variety while it lasts, cannot in the nature of things last long. In the second place, and this is a consequence shared in a qualified degree by all great cities where the rich and idle congregate, the number of these idle men who have to kill time in seeking pleasure goes far to explain the laxity of morals and frailty of reputations believed to prevail among the femmes du monde in France. It is a social country; people live much in public, and much in company. A far larger portion of the time both of men and women is passed in making and receiving visits than with us. The number of people available for this occupation is unusually great. So many men have nothing to do but to pay court to women, and no scruples to prevent them from paying it in any mode and under any circumstances, that, in certain classes of society, women may be said to pass a considerable portion of their lives in a state of siege; they are perpetually surrounded by courtiers and "pretenders;" and as, alas! they are nearly as unoccupied as their adulators, and often quite as ennuyées, what wonder that so many fall under the combined influence of temptation, tedium, and bad example!

Again nothing makes a stronger or more painful impression on the reader than the unfeeling brutality with which the lovers in these tales habitually treat their mistresses, even when these mistresses are ladies of high position, superior education, and unblemished reputation. If any one is disposed to think lightly and leniently of those habits of license and intrigue which seem so general in France, and which are far from unknown here, he will do well to ponder this peculiar phase of character, as depicted in the literature in question by those who know it well and share it so thoroughly that they have almost ceased to excuse it or to be conscious of it. In the novels of George Sand, of Dumas, fils, of Ernest Feydeau, and of Alfred de Musset, the heroines are ladies endowed with every amiable and attractive quality, except that rigid principle which is scarcely to be looked for in such society; fascinating, affectionate, full of heart and soul; capable not only of earnest and disinterested but of devoted and self-sacrificing attachment, and lavishing all the priceless treasures of a rich and noble nature on their unworthy suitors; risking if not actually losing for them peace, fame, a calm conscience, and a happy home; giving themselves up with a completeness and confidingness of surrender which would be lovely and almost sublime, if only the cause were lawful and the object worthy; trusting, soothing, aiding, enduring, worshiping, with a truth and fervour in which woman so rarely fails, and which man so rarely merits. But the men of the story-the objects and inheritors of all this

affection-are represented-almost invariably, and as if it were the rule of life from which truth and notoriety permit the artist no departure-as becoming at once, not indeed insensible to, but utterly ungrateful for the wealth of love lavished upon them; repaying devotion with insult, and abandonment with exigeance; answering every fresh proof of fidelity and self-surrender with groundless jealousies and mean suspicions; meeting every concession with some new outrage or some new demand; treating the most faithful, tender, and noble-minded mistresses, the moment they have them in their power, as no gentleman could treat even the poorest fille perdue who still retained a woman's decency and a woman's form;-in a word, displaying in every word and action a heartless egotism, a harsh and cruel tyranny, and a total want of respect and consideration for the most. natural as for the most sacred feelings, which would seem incredible on any less authority than their own. For it is remarkable that the novels which most detail all these cruel and selfish inflictions-which specify the worst brutalities inflicted by these lovers upon fond and tender women-are all in the autobiographical form;-it is the barbarian who describes his own barbarities-the executioner who records all the slow elaborate tortures he has practised on his victim,-sometimes, indeed, with a sort of conventional self-condemnation, though scarcely ever with self-loathing or self-surprise-never with any indication of that burning shame which would make the record of such things impossible, even were the commission of them not so.

It will be obvious that the worst exemplifications of this hideous feature cannot stain our pages. It is not easy even to adduce any. They are so numberless and so perpetually recurring, that to quote them would be often to give the whole narration. La Dame aux Camélias is full of them,-consists of them, some of a character and enormity which are scarcely. conceivable, yet all narrated by the offender himself. The same may be said of Fanny. The same may be said of Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle. The same may be said of Elle et Lui. In fact, they are all stories of a lover torturing his devoted and sensitive mistress to death by a series of ingenious insults, outrageous suspicions, cruel and exacting caprices, refined brutality, and a sort of cold superlative selfishness for which a fitting epithet really is not to be found. After describing a number of these brutalities, some of them almost incredible, the Enfant du Siècle sums up thus:-"Lecteur, cela dura six mois: pendant six mois entiers, Brigitte, calomniée, exposée aux insultes du monde, eut à essuyer de ma part tous les dédains et toutes

les injurés qu'un libertin colère et cruel peut prodiguer à la fille qu'il paye."*...

Another characteristic and, as far as we know, unique feature of these novels is the repeated pictures they present to us, not only of absolutely uncontrolled passions and emotions, and of indulging them without reticence or shame, but of the entire absence apparently of any consciousness that such abandonment of all self-restraint is in any way disgraceful and unmanly. The heroes go into the most outrageous furies; they roll on the ground in agonies of tears; they pass from the wildest excesses of love into the wildest excesses of hatred; they become speechless with rage; they gesticulate like madmen; they give vent to all the unseemly violences of the half-childish, half-savage human animal, without dignity, decency, or drapery. It is not so much that they lose all self-control, as that they give no intimation that selfcontrol is considered needful, or the want of it shameful. Extremes to which no provocation could goad an Englishman seem to be simple every-day occurrences among these spoiled children of license and intrigue. "The first thing I did" (says one), "as soon as I was able to rise after my wound, was to run to my mistress's house. I found her alone, sitting in the corner of her room, her countenance fallen and disturbed. I loaded her with the most violent reproaches; I was drunk with despair. I cried out till the whole house echoed with the clamour; and at the same. time my tears so interrupted my words that I FELL ON THE BED to let them flow freely." He ends by striking his mistress on the back of the neck; and when, in spite of all this treatment, she comes to him the same evening to beg forgiveness and reconciliation, he takes a carving-knife and threatens to kill her. The same man, a year or two later, finds another lady to love him, to whom he behaves much in the same way,-"treating her" (he says) "now as an abandoned woman, and the next instant as a divinity. A quarter of an hour after insulting her, I was

*Fanny is from first to last the history, by himself, of a lover who maltreats and torments his mistress in every mode except actual personal violence,-by sarcasms, by insults, by suspicions, by cruel outrages upon every sentiment of duty, honour, and natural affection which she is endeavouring to retain. Yet most of the outrages are of such a character that we have searched in vain for any passage that it would be possible to extract. We can only convey the most faint and general conception of the narrative by saying, that the lover begins by being furious because his mistress stays by the bedside of her sick child, instead of visiting him as usual; that he then falls so low as to regale her ears with every false and scandalous rumour that he can collect regarding her husband, whom, though she has betrayed him, she still esteems and values; that he abuses her because she defends this husband against his calumnies; and finally that, to punish the unhappy lady for refusing to fly with him, and abandon reputation, kusband, and children at once, he, out of mere horrible perversity and spite, plunges into every sort of low debauchery; and returns to her, day after day, soiled and reeking from the haunts of infamy in which he has been endeavouring, as it were, to revenge himself upon her! And all this he relates himself!

kneeling at her feet; as soon as I ceased to accuse, I began to apologise; when I could no longer rail at her, I wept over her. A monstrous delirium, a rapturous fever, seized upon me; I nearly lost my senses in the violence of my transports; I did not know what to say, or to do, or to imagine, to repair the evil I had wrought. I spoke of blowing out my brains if I ever ill-treated her again. These alternations of passion often lasted whole nights." The following is the reception given to a lady who comes to visit her lover (whom she had wronged, certainly) as he recovers from a severe illness:

"Elle se pencha sur mon lit, et des deux mains souleva son voile.

Fanny' m'écriai-je tout-à-coup, en levant les deux bras. Elle s'affaissa en sanglotant sur ma poitrine. Mais la mémoire m'était revenue avec la connaissance, et la frappant au front de mes poings fer més, je la détachai de moi en m'écriant comme un furieux: 'Va-t'en d'ici! Elle crut que j'étais fou encore, et se détourna en pleurant; mais retrouvant un reste de force dans ma colère, je la frappais encore à l'épaule, et m'élançant de mon lit, je m'abattais sur elle, et roulai à terre à ses pieds."+

One quotation more, and we have done. This novel ends with another scene, similar, but yet more atrocious. After heaping every sort of verbal outrage and abuse on the unhappy woman who had given herself to him, for six or seven pages of fluent insult, the narrator of his own shame proceeds:

"Elle se leva enfin désespérée, et voulut partir. Mais je la retins, la poussai au fond de la chambre, et m'adossant contre la porte, les bras croisés: Tu entendras tout!' m'écriai-je. Et alors je me mis à haleter; et ne trouvant plus rien à lui dire, je la menaçai des poings, en trépignant et en criant; et elle me regardait de côté avec un indicible terreur. Enfin les paroles, une fois de plus, jaillirent de ma bouche: Jamais je n'ai cru en toi. Je sentais si bien que tu me trompais, qu'à mon tour-malheureux que je suis !—j'ai voulu souiller notre amour. Apprends-le donc, si tu ne t'en es pas doutée; moi qui t'adorais, je t'ai trompée avec les plus viles des femmes.'"

Conceive an English gentleman in such a passion with the faithless lady whom he loved that his fury cannot find utterance, setting his back against the door, panting with rage, stamping and shaking his fists at her like a dumb idiot; and at last, when words come to his relief, using his recovered

* Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle. These are not, as might be imagined, specimens taken from the poor productions of some hack caterer for the lowest class of readers. They are extracts from a work of unusual power, of profound melancholy, and sadly and almost soundly moral in the lesson it inculcates. It contains the truest, most painful, and most warning pictures we have ever met with of the certainty and the terrible degree in which a career of profligacy, however brief and uncongenial, poisons all legitimate enjoyment and all purer and serener love.

† Fanny, par Ernest Feydeau.

FF

speech to overwhelm her with noirceurs which could never enter the thoughts or pass the lips of any but the shameless and the abandoned! And conceive further, his describing all this himself, without the slightest indication of reticence or humiliation!

It might seem impossible to go beyond or below this; yet if there be a lower depth still, that depth has been reached in two of the last novels that have issued from the press, written by two of the most noted writers of the day. Elle et Lui and Lui et Elle bear the names respectively of George Sand and Paul de Musset. They are said to be, and we believe they are, the personal scandalous adventures of the writers, with some colouring, but with little deviation from historic fact, wrought into fiction. Elle et Lui describes the connection of Madame Dudevant (under her nom de plume of George Sand) with Alfred de Musset, from the lady's point of view, and paints scenes and characters as she would wish them to be believed by the world. Even on her own showing, the story is shocking and revolting enough; but she paints herself as the loving, clinging, much-enduring, if yielding and guilty, woman; and her lover as cruel, exacting, capricious, and incurably licentious. This lover, so delineated, -whom every one recognised as Alfred de Musset, a poet and novelist of great merit-is dead; and Paul de Musset, not choosing that such a false picture of his brother should go forth uncontradicted, and having materials and documents at his command, thought fit to give, also in the form of fiction, Alfred's version of the liaison. Here, as might be expected, the colours are reversed: the gentleman is described as all that is amiable, attractive, faithful, and devoted; while the lady acts throughout as a thoroughly heartless and abandoned creature, though full of fascination, and not incapable for a time of experiencing an absorbing passion. Which of the parties speaks the truth and which lies, or in what proportion the indisputable falsehood is to be divided between them, it is needless to inquire. But assuredly nothing can be more disgraceful than the things revealed-except the revelation of them.

From the popularity, the general agreement, the consentaneous tone, both as to character and plot, of the works we have been considering, as well as from the absence of all exposing and protesting criticism, and from much corroborative information that has reached us, we are driven irresistibly to the following painful conclusions. That illicit liaisons, especially with married women, are, in the upper and the idler classes of France, the rule rather than the exception, and that the excep