ng in one of the most
widely-circulated of the Parisian papers, so grotesquely overdone, that
if it had been meant for a caricature of the worst parts of our own
hulk-and-gallows authors, it would have been very much admired; but
meant to be serious, powerful, harrowing, and all the rest of it, it is
a most curious exhibition of a nation's taste and a writer's audacity.
The _Mysteries of Paris_, by Eugene Sue, has been dragging its slow
length along for a long time, and gives no sign of getting nearer its
denouement than when it began. A sovereign prince is the hero--his own
daughter, whom he has disowned, the heroine; and the tale commences by
his fighting a man on the street, and taking a fancy to his unknown
child, who is the inhabitant of one of the lowest dens in the St Giles'
of Paris! The other _dramatis personae_ are convicts, receivers of stolen
goods, murderers, intriguers of all ranks--the aforesaid prince,
sometimes in the disguise of a workman, sometimes of a pickpocket,
acting the part of a providence among them, rewarding the good and
punishing the guilty. The English personages are the Countess Sarah
McGregor--the lawful wife of the prince--her brother Tom, and Sir Walter
Murph, Esquire. These are all jostled, and crowded, and pushed, and
flurried--first in flash kens, where the language is slang; then in
country farms, and then in halls and palaces--and so intermixed and
confused, that the clearest head gets puzzled with the entanglements of
the story; and confusion gets worse confounded as the farrago proceeds.
How M. Sue will manage ever to come to a close is an enigma to us; and
we shall wait with some impatience to see how he will distribute his
poetic justice, when he can't get his puppets to move another step.
Horror seems the great ingredient in the present literary fare of
France, and in the _Mysteres de Paris_ the most confirmed glutton of
such delicacies may sup full of them. In the midst of such depraved and
revolting exhibitions, it is a sort of satisfaction, though not of the
loftiest kind, to turn to the coarse fun and ludicrous descriptions of
Paul de Kock. And, after all, our friend Paul has not many more sins
than coarseness and buffoonery to answer for. As to his attempting, of
set purpose, to corrupt people's morals, it never entered into his head.
He does not know what morals are; they never form any part of his idea
of manners or character. If a good man comes in his way, he looks at