ne of the objects, as it
was part of the original cause, of the mistaken _Histoire_ system, which
made you, when or soon after you introduced a personage, "tell us all
about it," as the children say, in a separate inset tale. You did not
now do this, but you made, as in the capital instance of Victor Ducange,
huge diversions, retrospects, episodes, in the body of the story itself.
This method, being much less skippable than the inset by those who did
not want it, was not likely to continue, and so applied the cure to its
own ill. And yet further, as novels multiplied, the supposed necessity
of very great length tended to disappear. The seven or eight volumes of
the eighteenth century, which had replaced the twelves and twenties of
the seventeenth, shrank to six (_Ludovica_), five (_L'Artiste et Le
Soldat_ and _l'Ouvreuse de Loges_), four (_Le Petit Carillonneur_), and
then three or two, though later the historical kind swelled again, and
the almost invariable single volume did not establish itself till the
middle of the century. As a consequence again of this, the enormous
delay over single situations tended, though very slowly, to disappear.
It is one of the merits of Pigault-Lebrun that he is not a great sinner
in verbosity and prolixity: his contemporary minors of this volume are
far more peccant in this kind.

[Sidenote: The Vicomte d'Arlincourt--_Le Solitaire_.]

_Le Solitaire_ is a book which I have been "going to read" for some
fifty years, but by some accident did not till the present occasion. I
knew it generally as one of the vedettes of Romanticism, and as
extremely popular in its own day: also as having been, with its author's
other work in poem and play and prose fiction, the subject of some
ridicule. But till I read it, and some things about it, I never knew how
well it deserved that ridicule and yet how very popular it was, and how
really important is its position in the history of the Romantic
movement, and so of the French novel and French literature generally. It
was published at the end of January 1821, and at the end of November a
seventh edition appeared, with an elaborate _Io Triumphe!_ from the
publisher. Not only had there been those seven editions (which, it must
be remembered in fairness, represent at least seventy at the other end
of the century[77]), but it had been translated into four foreign
languages; _fourteen_ dramas had been based on it, some half of which
had been at least conditiona