treatment might, in the
abstract, be pronounced to be by the grave and precise.

[Sidenote: _Mon Voisin Raymond._]

Yet somebody may say, "This is all very well, but what was it that made
Major Pendennis laugh?" Probably a good many things in a good many
books; but I do not know any one more likely to have received that crown
than the exception above mentioned, _Mon Voisin Raymond_, which also
bears (to me) the recommendation of a very competent friend of mine. My
experience is that you certainly do begin laughing at the very
beginning, and that the laughter is kept up, if not without cessation,
with very few intervals, through a remarkable series of comic scenes.
The book, in fact, is Paul de Kock's _Gilbert Gurney_, and I cannot sink
the critic in the patriot to such an extent as to enable me to put
Theodore, even in what is, I suppose, his best long story, above, or
even on a level with, Paul here.

The central point, as one sees almost at once, is that this Raymond (I
think we are never told his other name), a not entirely ill-meaning
person, but a _facheux_ of almost ultra-Molieresque strength, is
perpetually spoiling his unlucky neighbour's, the autobiographic Eugene
Dorsan's, sport, and, though sometimes paid out in kind, bringing
calamities upon him, while at last he actually capots his friend and
enemy by making him one of the _derniers_ already mentioned! This is
very bold of Paul, and I do not know any exact parallel to it. On the
other hand, Eugene is consoled, not only by Raymond's death in the Alps
(Paul de Kock is curiously fond of Switzerland as a place of punishment
for his bad characters), but by the final possession of a certain
Nicette, the very pearl of the grisette kind. We meet her in the first
scene of the story, where Dorsan, having given the girl a guiltless
sojourn of rescue in his own rooms, is detected and exposed to the
malice of a cast mistress by Raymond. I am afraid that Paul rather
forgot that final sentence of his own first book; for though Pelagie,
Dorsan's erring and unpleasant wife, dies in the last chapter, I do not
observe that an actual Hymen with Nicette "covers the fault" which,
after long innocence, she has at last committed or permitted. But
perhaps it would have been indecent to contract a second marriage so
soon, and it is only postponed to the unwritten first chapter of the
missing fifth volume.[51]

The interval between overture and finale is, as has been said or hint