imself from the dangers incident
to his plan in this book after a rather miraculous fashion. The Goguelat
myth may seem disconnected, and he did as a matter of fact once publish
it separately; yet it sets off (in the same sort of felicitous manner of
which Shakespeare's clown-scenes and others are the capital examples
in literature) both the slightly matter-of-fact details of the
beatification of the valley and the various minute sketches of places
and folk, and the almost superhuman goodness of Benassis, and his
intensely and piteously human suffering and remorse. It is like the red
cloak in a group; it lights, warms, inspirits the whole picture.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way in which Balzac
in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion (for if
Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he avows his
orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in practice), has almost
entirely escaped the sentimentality _plus_ unorthodoxy of similar work
in the eighteenth century, and the sentimentality _plus_ orthodoxy of
similar work in the nineteenth. Benassis no doubt plays Providence in
a manner and with a success which it is rarely given to mortal man to
achieve; but we do not feel either the approach to sham, or the more
than approach to gush, with which similar handling on the part of
Dickens too often affects some of us. The sin and the punishment of the
Doctor, the thoroughly human figures of Genestas and the rest, save the
situation from this and other drawbacks. We are not in the Cockaigne of
perfectibility, where Marmontel and Godwin disport themselves; we are in
a very practical place, where time-bargains in barley are made, and
you pay the respectable, if not lavish board of ten francs per day for
entertainment to man and beast.

And yet, explain as we will, there will always remain something
inexplicable in the appeal of such a book as the _Medecin de Campagne_.
This helps, and that, and the other; we can see what change might have
damaged the effect, and what have endangered it altogether. We must, of
course, acknowledge that as it is there are _longueurs_, intrusion of
Saint Simonian jargon, passages of _galimatias_, and of preaching.
But of what in strictness produces the good effect we can only say one
thing, and that is, it was the genius of Balzac working as it listed and
as it knew how to work.

The book was originally published by Mme. Delaunay i