its romantic elements into relief without
dislocating them. His opinion was that history might so be written as
to be a sort of novel, which, perhaps, will account for his answer to
Lamartine, who, in 1847, asked him if he could explain how it was that
the _History of the Girondins_ had obtained a greater success than the
most popular novels of the same date. "Gad!" he replied, "the reason
is that you wrote this fine book as a novelist, not as an historian."
The _Shady Affair_ recreates for us the Napoleonic atmosphere, silent
and heavy, yet electrically charged with grudge, hatred, and ambition,
all ready to burst out at one or another point. Underhand plotting was
the order of the day; there was a language of the eye rather than of
the tongue, since no one was sure that in his own family there might
not be eavesdroppers listening to betray him.

_Ursule Mirouet_ is a very different kind of story. We have here the
old Doctor Minoret, who after making a fortune in Paris, returns to
spend the last few years of his life in Nemours, his native town.
Having lost wife and child by death, he brings back with him a baby
niece, who is an orphan, and to whom he devotes himself with tender
care. In Nemours there are other less estimable branches of the
Minoret stock, cousins of the Doctor's, whose hopes of inheriting his
fortune are damped by the presence of little Ursule. Chief of these
relatives is the burly postmaster, Minoret Levrault, whose son Desire
is destined to the law and is sent by his parents to study in Paris.
Although a disciple of Voltaire, and scouting all religious practice
for himself, the Doctor is friendly with the Cure, and allows his
niece to be brought up to Church. At the time the story opens an
unexpected event astonishes the town. The Doctor has become converted,
and goes to Mass. The cause of the change is a wonderful experience of
clairvoyance he meets with in the capital, whither he has been
summoned by a colleague with whom he had quarrelled years before over
the new-fangled doctrines of Mesmerism. What necessary connection
there is between clairvoyance and Catholicism, or indeed any
particular form of religion, the novelist does not attempt to prove.
It suffices for the sceptical old Doctor to be told by a hypnotized
woman in Paris what Ursule is doing at Nemours, and the conversion is
wrought. Soon after, Doctor Minoret dies, bequeathing his fortune in
just and appropriated shares to his various r