ravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble
passion. Even the "Mysteries of Paris" and Gaboriau's "Crime d'Orcival"
are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and
forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be
accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible
civilization, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis
of such figures as the Vicomte d'Orcival, the Stabber,[40] the Skeleton,
and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole cretinous school
is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the
execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength
passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general
market, of novels like "Poor Miss Finch," in which the heroine is blind,
the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his
hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[41]

15. This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not
only the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of
the Hotel-Dieu, the Hopital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the
dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile de
Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the "Cite de Paris"--is, when
understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion of the
Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental ruin are
the corruption of love. I have therefore called it "Fiction mecroyante,"
with literal accuracy and precision: according to the explanation of the
word, which the reader may find in any good French dictionary,[42] and
round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather into one Caina of
gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination,
amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with
aberration of the mind.

16. Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal
evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp
or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least
permits, our thoughts; not so the stages of agony in the fury-driven
hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labor of the
modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,
find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur
surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to
obtain