stard one. She whom he called his brother George survived him for
more than twenty years, and continued to the last to add to her
reputation, so that naturally the impetus she lent to the idealistic
movement was long before it was spent, if indeed one may say that the
impetus has altogether been lost. Adepts like Octave Feuillet, with
his _Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, and Victor Cherbuliez, with his
_Comte Kostia_, endeavoured to perpetuate idealism or at least to
recreate it in other forms. And then there were independents, like
Flaubert who, with _Madame Bovary_, passed realism by on his way to
naturalism. Yet it is worth remarking that Flaubert made a sort of
_volte face_ in 1869, and wrote his _Education Sentimentale_, in
which, under the pressure of simple circumstance, the hero descends
gradually from the soaring of youth's hopes and ambitions to the dull,
dun monotony of mature life, with nothing left him save the iron
circle of his environment. Here the disillusionment is that of all
Balzac's chief _dramatis personae_. Moreover, the minor characters of
_Madame Bovary_ may well owe something to the _Comedy_. These doctors,
chemists, cures, prefectoral councillors and country squires would
possibly never have been depicted but for their having already existed
for twenty years in the predecessor's gallery of portraits.

There is no need to call the de Goncourts and Guy de Maupassant
imitators because they bear a strong stamp of Balzac's influence. They
have greater art, a finer style, and, above all, more pathos than the
earlier master was capable of. But they are true disciples, as
likewise Feuillet in his later manner with _Monsieur de Camors_. De
Maupassant's short stories, exemplifying his severely objective
treatment at his best, are Balzac's purified of their lingering
romanticism, and his _Bel Ami_ is a modernized Lucien de Rubempre.
And, if the resemblances are closer between works of the de Goncourts
less known, such as _Charles Demailly_, or _Manette Salomon_ and the
_Lost Illusions_, _Peter Grassou_, the _Muse of the County_, yet the
means employed by the two brothers to endow with life and form _Renee
Mauperin_ and _Germinie Lacerteux_, fixing a background, stamping the
outlines, filling in details, adding particularities, all this was
Balzacian method, insufficient forsooth, in the domain of psychology,
but furnishing idiosyncrasy in plentiful variations.

When we come to Alphonse Daudet, time enou