nobility which contrasts happily enough with Lousteau's unworthiness.
Bianchon is as good as usual; Balzac always gives Bianchon a favorable
part. Madame Piedefer is one of the numerous instances in which the
unfortunate class of mothers-in-law atones for what are supposed to
be its crimes against the human race; and old La Baudraye, not so
hopelessly repulsive in a French as he would be in an English novel, is
a shrewd old rascal enough.

But I cannot think the scene of the Parisians _blaguing_ the Sancerrois
is a very happy one. That it is in exceedingly bad taste might not
matter so very much; Balzac would reply, and justly, that he had not
intended to represent it as anything else. That the fun is not very
funny may be a matter of definition and appreciation. But what scarcely
admits of denial or discussion is that it is tyrannously too long. The
citations of _Olympia_ are pushed beyond measure, beyond what is comic,
almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments, which remind one
rather of the heavy jesting on critics in _Un Prince de la Boheme_ and
the short-lived _Revue Parisienne_, are labored to the last degree. The
part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate exactly, and altogether
the book does not seem to me a _reussite_.

The history of _L'Illustre Gaudissart_ is, for a story of Balzac's,
almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance
in the first edition of _Scenes de la Vie de Province_ in 1833, and
entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the
_Comedie_, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared with
_La Muse du Departement_, of _Les Parisiens en Province_ was given to
it.

_La Muse du Departement_ has a rather more complicated record than its
companion piece in _Les Parisiens en Province_, _L'Illustre Gaudissart_.
It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the title of _Dinah
Piedefer_, in _Le Messager_ during March and April 1843, and was almost
immediately published as a book, with works of other writers, under the
general title of _Les Mysteres de Province_, and accompanied by some
other work of its own author's. It had four parts and fifty-two chapters
in _Le Messager_, an arrangement which was but slightly altered in the
volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives some curious indications of mosaic
work in it, and some fragments which do not now appear in the text.

George Saintsbury

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART

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