e side of a
Pyrenean gorge or canon, Richelieu's villainous tool, the magistrate
Laubardemont; his mad niece, the former Ursuline Abbess, who has helped
to ruin Urbain Grandier; his outcast son Jacques, who has turned Spanish
officer and general bravo; and a smuggler who has also figured in the
Grandier business, forgather; where the mad Abbess dies in terror, and
Jacques de Laubardemont by falling through the flimsy hut-boards into
the gorge, his father taking from him, by a false pretence before his
death, the treaty between the Cinq-Mars conspirators and Spain. All this
is sufficiently "horrid," as the girls in _Northanger Abbey_ would say,
and divers French contemporaries of Vigny's from Hugo to Soulie would
have made good horrors of it. In his hands it seems (to me) to miss
fire. So, again, he has a well-conceived interview, in which Richelieu,
for almost the last time, shows "the power of a strong mind over a weak
one," and brings the King to abject submission and the surrender of
Cinq-Mars, by the simple process of leaving his Majesty to settle by
himself the problems that drop in from France, England, and where or
whence not, during the time of the Cardinal's absence. It is less of a
failure than the other, being more in Vigny's own line; but it is
impossible not to remember several scenes--not one only--in _Quentin
Durward_, and think how much better Scott would have done it; several in
the Musketeer-trilogy, if not also in the Margot-Chicot series, and make
a parallel reflection. And as a final parry by anticipation to the
objection that such comparison is "rascally," let it be said that
nothing of the kind ever created any prejudice against the book in my
case. I failed to get on with it long before I took the least trouble to
discover critical reasons that might excuse that failure.

[Sidenote: _Stello_ less of a novel, but containing better novel-stuff.]

But if any one be of taste sufficiently like mine to find disappointment
of the unpleasant kind in _Cinq-Mars_, I think I can promise him an
agreeable, if somewhat chequered, surprise when, remembering _Cinq-Mars_
and basing his expectations upon it, he turns to _Stello_. It is true
that the book is, as a whole, even less "precisely a novel" than
Sainte-Beuve's _Volupte_. But for that very reason it escapes the
display of the disabilities which _Cinq-Mars_, being, or incurring
obligation to be, precisely a novel, suffers. It is true also that it
exhibits