not final wild oats in Italy and
Germany, in Poland and in England. But the English meesses are too
_sentimentales_ (note the change from _sensibles_); he does not like the
courses of horses, the combats of cocks, the bets and the punches and
the plum-puddings. He is angry because people look at him when he pours
his tea into the saucer. But what annoys him most of all is the custom
of the ladies leaving the table after dinner, and that of preferring
cemeteries for the purpose of taking the air and refreshing oneself
after business. It may perhaps diminish surprise, but should increase
interest, when one remembers that, after Frenchmen had got tired of
Locke, and before they took to Shakespeare, their idea of our literature
was largely derived from "Les Nuits de Young" and Hervey's _Meditations
among the Tombs_.

Another bit of copy-book (to revert to the Pauline moralities) is at the
end of the same very unedifying novel, when the benevolent and
long-suffering colonel, joining the hands of Gustave and Suzon, remarks
to the latter that she has proved to him that "virtues, gentleness,
wits, and beauty can serve as substitutes for birth and fortune." It
would be unkind to ask which of the "virtues" presided over Suzon's
original acquaintance with her future husband, or whether the same or
another undertook the charge of that wonderful six weeks' abscondence of
hers with him in this very uncle's house.

[Sidenote: _Edmond et sa Cousine._]

But no doubt this capacity for "dropping into" morality stood Paul in
good stead when he undertook (as it was almost incumbent on such a
universal provider of popular fiction to do) what the French, among
other nicknames for them, call _berquinades_--stories for children and
the young person, more or less in the style of the _Ami des Enfants_. He
diversified his _gauloiseries_ with these not very seldom. An example is
bound up with _Gustave_ itself in some editions, and they make a very
choice assortment of brimstone and treacle. The hero and heroine of
_Edmond et sa Cousine_ are two young people who have been betrothed from
their youth up, and neither of whom objects to the situation, while
Constance, the "She-cosen" (as Pepys puts it) is deeply in love with
Edmond. He also is really fond of her, but he is a bumptious and
superficial snob, who, not content with the comfortable[47] income which
he has, and which will be doubled at his marriage, wants to make fame
and fortune in some