id not speak their thoughts, very much as some of us have looked,
if we have not spoken, when foreigners take certain popular scribes and
playwrights of our own time and country seriously.[40]

Let us see what his work is really like to the eyes of impartial and
comparative, if not cosmopolitan, criticism.

[Sidenote: _L'Enfant de ma Femme._]

Paul de Kock, whose father, a banker, was a victim, but must have been a
late one, of the Terror, was born in 1794, and took very early to
letters. If the date of his first book, _L'Enfant de ma Femme_, is
correctly given as 1812, he must apparently have written it before he
was eighteen. There is certainly nothing either in the quantity or the
quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not
fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very
closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is
not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between
the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he
goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and
adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent
character (the hero, Henri de Framberg, is very "small doings"), the
hussar-soldier-servant, and most oddly selected "governor" of this hero
as a boy, Mullern, is obviously studied off those semi-savage "old
moustaches" of whom we spoke in the last volume, though he is much
softened, if not in morals, in manners. In fact this softening process
is quite obvious throughout. There is plenty of "impropriety" but no
mere nastiness, and the impropriety itself is, so to speak, rather
indicated than described. As nearly the last sentence announces, "Hymen
hides the faults of love" wherever it is possible, though it would
require a most complicated system of polygamy and cross-unions to enable
that amiable divinity to cover them all. There is a villain, but he is a
villain of straw, and outside of him there is no ill-nature. There seems
to be going to be a touch of "out-of-boundness" when Henri, just about
to marry his beloved Pauline, is informed that she is his sister, and
when the pair, separating in horror, meet again and, let us say, forget
to separate. But the information turns out to be false, and Hymen duly
uses the not uncomfortable extinguisher which, as noted above, is
supplied to him as well as the more usual torch.

To call the book good would be ridiculous,