gneur_ marrying an apostate nun,
and strong language is used. So Delphine dies, not actually by her own
hand, and Leonce gets shot, more honourably than he deserves, on the
patriot-royalist side.

Among the minor characters not yet referred to are an old-maid
sister-in-law of Delphine's, who, though tolerably sensible in the
better sense, plays the part of confidante to her brother's _mijauree_
of a widow much too indulgently; a M. Barton, Leonce's mentor, who,
despite his English-looking name, is not (one is glad to find) English,
but is, to one's sorrow, one of the detestable "parsons-in-tie-wigs"
whom French Anglomania at this time foisted on us as characteristic of
England; a sort of double of his, M. de Lerensei, a Protestant
free-thinker, who, with his _divorcee_ wife, puts up grass altars in
their garden with inscriptions recording the happiness of their queer
union; an ill-natured Mme. du Marset and her old cicisbeo, M. de
Fierville, who suggest, in the dismallest way, the weakest wine of
Marmontel gone stale and filtered through the dullest, though not the
dirtiest, part of Laclos.

Yet the thing, "dismal trash" as Sydney almost justly called it, is
perhaps worth reading once (nothing but the sternest voice of duty
could have made me read it twice) because of the existence of _Corinne_,
and because also of the undoubted fact that, here as there, though much
more surprisingly, a woman of unusual ability was drawing a picture of
what she would have liked to be--if not of what she actually thought
herself.[11] The borrowed beauty goes for nothing--it were indeed hard
if one did not, in the case of a woman of letters, "let her make her
dream All that she would," like Tennyson's Prince, but in this other
respect. The generosity, less actually exaggerated, might also pass.
That Delphine makes a frantic fool of herself for a lover whose
attractions can only make male readers shrug their shoulders--for though
we are _told_ that Leonce is clever, brave, charming, and what not, we
see nothing of it in speech or action--may be matter of taste; but that
her heroine's part should seem to any woman one worth playing is indeed
wonderful. Delphine behaves throughout like a child, and by no means
always like a very well-brought-up child; she never seems to have the
very slightest idea that "things are as they are and that their
consequences will be what they will be"; and though, once more, we are
_told_ of passion carrying a