nteresting if (to speak with
only apparent flippancy) it were made so. He is commonplace in his
adoration of his mother and his neglect (though his historian calls it
"respect") of his father; he is constantly a prig, as when he is shocked
at people for paying more attention to him when they hear that his
parents are going to be indemnified to a large extent for the thefts of
their property at the Revolution; he is such a sneak and such a snob
that he is always eavesdropping to hear what people say about him; such
a bounder that he disturbs his neighbours by talking loud at the play;
such a brute that he deliberately kills a rather harmless coxcomb of a
marquis who rebukes him for making this _tapage_; and such a still
greater brute (for in the duel he had himself been wounded) that he
throws out of the window an unfortunate lackey who gets in his way at a
party where Octave has, as usual, lost his temper. Finally, he is a
combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool when (having picked up
and read a forged letter which is not addressed to him, though it has
been put by enemies in his way) he believes, without any enquiry, that
his unlucky cousin Armance, to whom he is at last engaged, is deceiving
him, but marries her all the same, lives with her (she loves him
frantically) for a few days, and then, pretending to go to the succour
of the Greeks, poisons himself on board ship--rather more, as far as one
can make out, in order to annoy her than for any other reason. That
there are the elements, and something more than the elements, of a
powerful story in this is of course evident; there nearly always are
such elements in Beyle, and that is why he has his place here. But, as
has been said, the story is almost as dull as it is disagreeable.
Unluckily, too, it is, like most of his other books, pervaded by an
unpleasant suggestion that the disagreeableness is intimately connected
with the author's own nature. As with Julien Sorel (_v. inf._) so with
Octave de Malivert, one feels that, though Beyle would never have
behaved exactly like his book-child, that book-child has a great deal
too much of the uncanny and semi-diabolical doubles of some occult
stories in it--is, in fact, an incarnation of the bad Beyle, the seamy
side of Beyle, the creature that Beyle might have been but for the grace
of that God in whom he did not believe. Which things, however one may
have schooled oneself not to let book and author interfere with e