particular is very striking, and shows that peculiar _victoriousness_ in
accomplishing what he attempted which is so characteristic of Flaubert.
It is the history-no-history of a Norman peasant woman, large if simple
of heart, simple and not large of brain, a born drudge and prey to
unscrupulous people who come in contact with her, and almost in her
single person uniting the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I
admire it now, without even the touch of rather youthful impatience
which used, when I read it first, to temper my admiration. It is not a
_berquinade_, because a _berquinade_ is never quite real. _Un Coeur
Simple_ shares Flaubert's Realism as marvellously as any equal number of
pages of either of the books to which I have compared it. But there
_is_, perhaps, something provocative--something almost placidly
insolent--about the way in which the author says, "Now, I will give you
nothing of the ordinary baits for admiration, and yet, were you the
Devil himself, you shall admire me." And one does--in youth rather
reluctantly--not so in age.

_Herodias_ groups itself in the same general fashion, but even more
definitely in particulars, with _Salammbo_--of which, indeed, it is a
sort of miniature replica cunningly differentiated. Anybody can see how
easily the story of the human witchcraft of Salome, and the decollation
of the Saint, and the mixture of terror and gorgeousness in the desert
fortress, parallel the Carthaginian story. But I do not know whether it
was deliberate or unconscious repetition that made Flaubert give us
something like a duplicate of the suffete Hanno in Vitellius. There is
no lack of the old power, and the shortness of the story is at least
partly an advantage. But perhaps the Devil's Advocate, borrowing from,
but reversing, Hugo on Baudelaire, might say, "Ce frisson _n'est pas_
nouveau."

The third story, _Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, has always seemed to me
as near perfection in its own kind as anything I know in literature, and
one of the best examples, if not the very best example, of that
adaptableness of the _Acta Sanctorum_ to modern rehandling of the right
kind, which was noticed at the beginning of this _History_.[400] The
excessive devotion of the not yet sainted Julian to sport; the crime and
the dooms that follow it; the double parricide which he commits under
the false impression that his wife has been unfaithful to him; his
self-imposed penance of ferrying, somewhat like S