Sterny was to blame!
He is much upset by this, and, coming to Vallanches to recuperate, is
rewarded later for his good deeds and sufferings,[552] by the hand of a
very attractive young woman with a fortune. This poetic justice,
however, is by no means the point of the book, which, indeed, has no
particular point. It is filled up by details of Swiss hotel-life: of the
wicked conduct of English tourists, who not merely sing hymns on Sunday,
but dance on wet evenings in the week (nearly the oddest combination of
crimes known to the present writer); of a death in climbing of one of
the characters which is not in the least required by the story; of the
scalding of her arm by a _paysanne_ in a sort of "ragging" flirtation,
and the operation on the mortifying member by a cure who knows
something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn
their chalet into a hotel with no capital to work it, and are bought
out, with just enough to cover their outlay and leave them penniless, by
the general _entrepreneur_. It is a curious book, but the very reverse
of a successful one.

[Sidenote: _La Course a la Mort._]

The centre, not by any means in the chronological sense (for they were
among his earliest), but in the logical and psychological, of M. Rod's
novel production, is undoubtedly to be found in the two contrastedly
titled books _Le Sens de la Vie_ and _La Course a la Mort_. The first,
which, as has been said, received Academic distinction, I approached
many years ago without any predisposition against it, and closed with a
distinct feeling of disappointment. The other I read more recently with
a distinct apprehension of disapproval, which was, if not entirely, to a
very large extent removed as I went on. It was strongly attacked as
morbid and mischievous at its first appearance in 1885; and the author,
some years afterwards, prefixed a defence to his fifth edition, which is
not much more effective than such defences usually are. It takes
something like the line which, as was mentioned above, Mr. Traill took
about Maupassant--that Pessimism was a fact like other facts, and one
was entitled to take it as a subject or motive. But it also contained a
slip into that obvious but, somehow or other, seldom avoided trap--the
argument that a book is "dramatic," and does not necessarily express the
author's own attitude. Perhaps not; but the rejoinder that almost all,
if not all, M. Rod's books are "sicklied o'er" in this