e him: keen, biting, sarcastic--egotistic as
a beauty, and cold-hearted as Mephistopheles--the Frenchman walks among
his figures in a gilded drawing room; probes their spirits, breaks their
hearts, ruins their reputation, and seems to have a profound contempt
for any reader who is so carried away by his power as to waste a touch
of sympathy on the unsubstantial pageants he has clothed for a brief
period in flesh and blood. We confess the sober _super_-naturalism of
the German has less attractions with us, than the grinning
_infra_-naturalism of the Frenchman. There is more sameness in it, and,
besides, it is to be hoped we have at all tines less sympathy for the
very best of devils than for the very worst of men. Luckily for the
Frenchman, he has no need to go to the lower regions to procure monsters
to make us shudder. His own tremendous Revolution furnishes him with
names before which Lucifer must hide his diminished head; and from this
vast repertory of all that is horrid and grotesque--more horrid on
account of its grotesqueness--the _feuilletonists_, or short
story-tellers, are not indisposed to draw. We back Danton any day
against Old Nick. And how infinitely better the effect of introducing a
true villain in plain clothes, relying for his power only on the known
and undeniable atrocity of his character, than all the pale-faced,
hollow-eyed denizens of the lower pit, concealing their cloven feet in
polished-leather Wellington boots, and their tails in a fashionable
surtout. We shall translate a short story of Balzac, which will
illustrate these remarks, only begging the reader to fancy to himself
how different the _denouement_ would have been in the hands of a German;
how demons, instead of surgeons and attorneys, would have disclosed
themselves at the end of the story, how blue the candles would have
burned; and what an awful smell of brimstone would have been perceptible
when they disappeared. It is called the _Two Dreams_, and, we think, is
a sketch of great power.

* * * * *

Bodard de St James, treasurer of the navy in 1786, was the best known, and
most talked of, of all the financiers in Paris. He had built his
celebrated Folly at Neuilly, and his wife had bought an ornament of
feathers for the canopy of her bed, the enormous price of which had put it
beyond the power of the Queen. Bodard possessed the magnificent hotel in
the Place Vendome which the collector of taxes, Dange,