to the end of the book, hides her trouble in the
bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the
aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the
historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of
Pigault as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing
with them are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of
general novel-development and admitting English examples, we may assign
to its author a place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the _Family Herald_:
confining ourselves to French only, he has again, like Pigault,
something of the credit of making a new start. He may appeal to the
taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the same sort of thing as "a
vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable of providing
general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.

[Sidenote: V. Ducange.]

[Sidenote: _L'Artiste et le Soldat._]

"The other Ducange," whose patronymic appears to have been Brahain, and
who perhaps took the name of the great scholar[69] for the sake of
contrast, was even more famous for his melodramas[70] than for his
fiction, one piece especially, "Trente Ans, ou La Vie d'un Joueur,"
having been among the triumphs of the Porte-Saint-Martin and of
Frederick Lemaitre. As a novelist he did not write for children like
Ducray-Duminil, and one of his novels contains a boastful preface
scoffing at and glorying in the accusations of impropriety brought
against him. I have found nothing very shocking in those books of his
which I have read, and I certainly have not thought it necessary to
extend my acquaintance in search of it. He seems to have been a
quarrelsome sort of person, for he got into trouble not only with the
moralists, not only with the Restoration government, but with the
Academy, which he attacked; and he is rather fond of "scratchy"
references such as "On peut meriter encore quelque interet sans etre un
Amadis, un Vic-van-Vor [poor Fergus!], un Han, ou un Vampire." But his
intrinsic merit as a novelist did not at first seem to me great. A book
worse _charpente_ than that just quoted from, _L'Artiste et le Soldat_,
I have seldom read. The first of its five volumes is entirely occupied
with the story (not badly, though much too voluminously told) of a
captain who has lost his leg at Waterloo, and though tended by a pretty
and charming daughter, is in great straits till helped by a mysterious
Black Nun, who love