them. Nothing but the
interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the
difficulty of the form of treatment,--nothing in the way of mere money,
I mean,--could else repay the time and trouble of the incessant
condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque
story_, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but
whom the story should express more than they should express themselves
by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident
might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under
that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating
their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at
once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway."[267] Another of his
letters supplies the last illustration I need to give of the design and
meanings in regard to this tale expressed by himself. It was a reply to
some objections of which the principal were, a doubt if the feudal
cruelties came sufficiently within the date of the action to justify his
use of them, and some question as to the manner of disposing of the
chief revolutionary agent in the plot. "I had of course full knowledge
of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been
bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the
Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long before the
Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was
surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a
nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going
out as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything
certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant
generally at that day was intolerable. No later enquiries or provings by
figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living
at the time. There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to
make out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal
dictionary-like minuteness; scattered up and down the pages of which is
full authority for my marquis. This is Mercier's _Tableau de Paris_.
Rousseau is the authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when
he had a bit of meat. The tax-tables are the authority for the wretched
creature's impoverishment. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been
clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition
of acciden