, and the _pieuvre_ operations of
Marneffe and his wife,--all of which fit in and work together with
each other as exactly as the cogs and gear of a harmonious piece of
machinery do. Even such much simpler and shorter books as _Le Pere
Goriot_ by no means possess this seamless unity of construction, this
even march, shoulder to shoulder, of all the personages of the story.

In the second place, this story itself strikes hold on the reader with
a force not less irresistible than that of the older and simpler
stories just referred to. As compared even with its companion, this
force of grasp is remarkable. It is not absolutely criminal or
contemptible to feel that _Le Cousin Pons_ sometimes languishes and
loses itself; this can never be said of the history of the evil
destiny partly personified in Elizabeth Fischer, which hovers over the
house of Hulot.

Some, I believe, have felt inclined to question the propriety of the
title of the book, and to assign the true heroineship to Valerie
Marneffe, whom also the same and other persons are fond of comparing
with her contemporary Becky Sharp, not to the advantage of the latter.
This is no place for a detailed examination of the comparison, as to
which I shall only say that I do not think Thackeray has anything to
fear from it. Valerie herself is, beyond all doubt, a powerful study
of the "strange woman," enforcing the Biblical view of that personage
with singular force and effectiveness. But her methods are coarser and
more commonplace than Becky's; she never could have long sustained
such an ordeal as the tenure of the house in Curzon Street without
losing even an equivocal position in decent English society; and it
must always be remembered that she was under the orders, so to speak,
of Lisbeth, and inspired by her.

Lisbeth herself, on the other hand, is not one of a class; she stands
alone as much as Becky herself does. It is, no doubt, an arduous and,
some milky-veined critics would say, a doubtfully healthy or
praiseworthy task to depict almost pure wickedness; it is excessively
hard to render it human; and if the difficulty is not increased, it is
certainly not much lessened by the artist's determination to represent
the malefactress as undiscovered and even unsuspected throughout.
Balzac, however, has surmounted these difficulties with almost
complete success. The only advantage--it is no doubt a considerable
one--which he has taken over Shakespeare, when Shakespeare