e
may like, to complete reality. One is less certain about the unhappy
Adrienne Lebreton or Pommeret, but discussion of her would be rather "an
intricate impeach." And one may have a question about the end. We are
told that Francis and Denise keep together (the luckless wife living on
in spite of her madness) because of the child, though they absolutely
hate each other. Would it not be more natural that, if they do not part,
they should vary the hatred with spasms of passion and repulsion?

[Sidenote: _Le Fils Maugars._]

_Le Fils Maugars_ is not only a longer book, but its space is less
exclusively filled with a single situation, and the necessary prelude to
it. In fact, the whole thing is expanded, varied, and peopled. Auberive,
near Langres, the place of _Sauvageonne_, is hardly more than a large
village; Saint-Clementin, on the Charente, though not a large town, is
the seat of a judicial Presidency, of a _sous-prefecture_, etc. "Le
_pere_ Maugars" is a banker who, from having been a working stone-mason,
has enriched himself by sharp practice in money-lending. His son is a
lawyer by the profession chosen for him, and a painter by preference.
The heroine, Therese Desroches, is the daughter of a Republican doctor,
whose wife has been unfaithful, and who suspects Therese of not being
his own child. The scene shifts from Saint-Clementin itself to the
country districts where Poitou and Touraine meet, as well as to Paris.
The time begins on the eve of the Coup d'Etat, and allows itself a gap
of five years between the first and second halves of the book. Besides
the love-scenes and the country descriptions and the country feasts
there is a little general society; much business; some politics,
including the attempted and at last accomplished arrest of the doctor
for treason to the new _regime_; a well-told account of a contest for
the Prix de Rome; a trial of the elder Maugars for conspiracy (with a
subordinate usurer) to defraud, etc. The whole begins with more than a
little aversion on everybody's part for the innocent Etienne Maugars,
who, having been away from home for years, knows neither the fact nor
the cause of his father's unpopularity; and it ends with condign
poetical justice, on the extortioner in the form of punishment, and for
the lovers in another way. It is thus, though a less poignant book than
_Sauvageonne_, a fuller and wider one, and it displays, better than that
book, the competence and adequacy which m