or very opposite
reasons, MM. Ohnet and Rod, may at least require notice of some length.

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Fabre: _L'Abbe Tigrane_.]

_L'Abbe Tigrane_, by Ferdinand Fabre, may be described as one of not the
least remarkable, and as certainly one of the most remarked, novels of
the later nineteenth century. It never, I think, had a very large sale;
for though at the time of its author's death, over thirty years and more
after its appearance, it had reached its sixteenth thousand, that is not
much for a _popular_ French novel. Books of such different appeal as
Zola's and Feuillet's (not to mention for the present a capital example
to be noted below) boasted ten times the number. But it dared an
extremely non-popular subject, and treated that subject with an
audacious disregard of anything like claptrap. There is no love in it
and hardly a woman; there is no--at least no military--fighting; no
adventure of any ordinary sort. It is neither a _berquinade_, nor a
crime-story, nor (except in a very peculiar way) a novel of analysis. It
relies on no preciousness of style, and has not very much description,
though its author was a great hand at this when and where he chose. It
is simply the history of an ambitious, strong-willed, strong-minded, and
violent-tempered priest in an out-of-the-way diocese, who strives for
and attains the episcopate, and after it the archiepiscopate, and is
left aspiring to the Papacy--which, considering the characters of the
actual successors of Pius IX., the Abbe Capdepont[520] cannot have
reached, in the fifty years (or nearly so) since the book was published.

Now, in the first place, it is generations since a clerical novel was
likely to please the French novel-reading public. In this very book
there is an amusing scene where the _abbe_, then a private tutor,
induces his employer, a deputy, to invite clerics of distinction to a
party, whereat the other guests melt away in disgust. And this was a
long time before a certain French minister boasted that his countrymen
"had taken God out of Heaven." Moreover, while there are two obvious
ways of reconciling extremists to the subject, M. Fabre rejected both.
His book is neither a panegyric on clericalism nor a libel on it. His
hero is as far as possible from being a saint, but he is perfectly free
from all the vulgar vices. The rest of the characters--all, with
insignificant exceptions, clerics--are quite human, and in no case--not
even in that o