delightful girl[422] may fall in love with a nincompoop who
is also notoriously a light-of-love, is quite possible: and, no doubt,
is fortunate for the nincompoops, and, after a fashion, good for the
continuation of the human race. But, in a novel, you must make the
process interesting, and that is not, _me judice_, done here. The
nincompoop, too, is such an utter nincompoop (he is not a villain, nor
even a rascal) that, no comic use being made of his nincompoopery, he is
of no use at all. And though an old and haughty Italian family like the
Feraldis _might_ no doubt in real life--there is nothing that may not
happen in real life--consent to clandestine engagements of the kind
described, it certainly is one of the possible-improbables which are
fatal, or nearly so, to art. Two or three subordinate characters--the
good-natured and good-witted Marquis Filippo Trasimeni, the faithful
peasant Menico, Tolla's foster-brother, and even the bad chambermaid
Amarella--have some merit. But twenty of them could not save the book,
which, after dawdling till close upon its end, huddles itself up in a
few pages, chiefly of _recit_, in a singularly inartistic fashion.

[Sidenote: _Germaine._]

_Germaine_, which has been (speaking under correction) a much less
popular book than either _Le Roi des Montagnes_ or _Tolla_, is perhaps
better than either. Except for a very few pages, it does not attempt the
somewhat cackling irony of the Greek book; and though it ends with one
failure of a murder, one accomplished ditto, and two more deaths of no
ordinary kind, it does not even attempt, as the Italian one does, real
tragedy. But it has a fairly well-knit plot, some attempt at character,
sufficient change of incident and scene, and hardly any _longueurs_.
Even the hinge of the whole, though it presents certain improbabilities,
is not of the brittle and creaking kind reprobated in that of _Tolla_.

A Neapolitan-Spanish Count of Villanera, whose second title is "Marquis
of the Mounts of Iron," possessed also not only of the bluest of
blood, but of mountains of gold, has fallen in love, after an
honour-in-dishonour fashion, with the grass-widow of a French naval
captain, Honorine Chermidy, and has had a child by her. She is really a
worse Becky Sharp, or a rather cleverer Valerie Marneffe (who perhaps
was her model[423]), and she forms a cunning plan by which the child may
be legitimated and she herself, apparently renouncing, will really
sec