the child cries-the father seizes it by one leg, and whirling it round his head fractures its little skull against the trunk of a tree -the mother compresses her grief-the escape is effected. When they have reached a place of safety, the bandit abandons himself to sleep while his mistress is to watch: she does watch-but only an opportunity to murder the murderer of her child-she cuts off his head, and carries it in her apron to the French Commandant of the district, who pays her three thousand ducats.

'Four years after, a nun of the convent of the Holy Cross in Rome died after an exemplary life in the odour of sanctity. Nothing was known of her, but that she was a Calabrese, and had paid an admission fee to the convent of 3000 ducats.'

It is not, we fear, without design that M. Dumas gives these two bloody villains the appellations of Celestino and Cherubino, and the murderess-turned saint-the name of Maria *.

The second story is nearer home; and in all its minor details the author takes pains to convince you that he is relating incidents of ordinary Parisian life. A certain M. Eugène is passing the Pont Neuf one night in a hackney cabriolet-he hears a splash in the water-darts to the spot, and rescues, after imminent danger, a young lady who had endeavoured to commit suicide. She had some excuse-she was with child, and her lover, Alfred, a friend of Eugène's, had abandoned her. Eugène carries her home to her lodgings, and sends for her father, an old captain of Napoleon's, with whom nothing has gone well since 1813.' Next morning Alfred calls to pay his friend Eugène a morning visit. To his great amazement, Eugène leads him into the room where his victim is lying, but half revived, and still in danger;-her father also arrives-finds Alfred at his daughter's bed-side-seizes and is about to strangle him. This Eugène is too well-bred to permit but by his judicious interference a duel in form is arranged for the same evening in the Bois de Boulogne, between the father and the seducer-in which the father is, of course, shot dead on the spot: Eugène offers to take up the conqueror, and-the obliging offer being accepted-runs Alfred through the body; and then completes his gallant generosity by marrying, out of hand, the fair destitute, and avowing himself, before legal witnesses, the father of the unborn child.

These must be our specimens of M. Dumas' five tales-two others are less shocking;-and one is so much more so, that we cannot even approach it; and what gives these otherwise contemptible fictions a peculiar importance is, that M. Dumas takes

* M. Dumas lately visited Rome and was honoured, as the French papers tell us, with an audience from the Pope. We trust his Holiness knows little of modern French literature.

great

great pains to divest them of all the characters of mere fiction-he relates them in his own proper person, and labours to give them an air of reality, by the introduction of many incidents of his own private life, and many anecdotes of his real society-so that at least he cannot believe that his friends will consider these narratives as extravagantly out of nature, or even beyond the bounds of decent probability.

We next arrive at the cleverest, the most prolific, and the most popular of all these novelists, M. DE BALSAC. If we were considering the literary merit of these works, we should have much to say in praise and at least as much in censure of M. de Balsac. He has considerable powers of local description, but he considerably abuses them by idle and wearisome minutiæ. He occasionally excites great interest, but quite as often destroys all interest by the improbability and incongruity of his incidents. He is often eloquent, and sometimes pathetic; but, in his efforts after these qualities, frequently deviates into whining and bombast. But it is only as evidence of the state of moral feeling and social life in France that we have at present to deal with M. de Balsac; and in this view his evidence is indeed most important, not only on account of his acknowledged talents, but because he claims and because the public voice has assented to his claim— to be, par excellence, the most accurate painter of private life and existing society. The titles of his principal works-Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Provincial Lifesufficiently attest this pretension. In the preface to the Scenes of Private Life, he sets out with a declaration which reveals an honest and noble ambition;

'That his works are of such a tendency, that he hopes that welleducated mothers, who unite in their own persons feminine graces to manly good sense, will not hesitate to place his works in the hands of their daughters."

And he has found a panegyrist-in the writer of a rather elaborate essay, originally, it seems, published in some French review, but now affixed to the fourth volume of the Scenes of Parisian Lifewho not only extols him as one of the greatest literary geniuses that ever lived, but as the most faithful painter of manners, and, above all, as one of the purest moralists of the age. This critic goes so far, indeed, as to endeavour, by a formal classification and commentary, to prove that these "splendid works," instead of being, as they may appear to the common reader, a series of unconnected tales of the vulgarest and most licentious character, are, in fact, a profound and well-digested course of moral philosophy, written with one great design, and deserving to be distinguished by the loftier title of Etudes sur les Maurs!

Let

Let us see, then, this great moralist's view of the society in which he lives, and which he depicts with such a superiority of accuracy and talent.

M. de Balsac, as his panegyrist tells us, has consigned to oblivion all his works published prior to 1830. Our readers must be informed that this is great modesty, for he had published, we understand, prior to 1830, not less than fourteen different novels, in twenty-five or thirty volumes. We were, at first sight, at a loss to account for this unconditional surrender of so much fame-for we really thought such of those repudiated works as we have looked at to be as good as, and some of them better than, his later productions; but we, on consideration, suspect that, prior to the July revolution, he felt his abilities cramped by the restrictions on the press, and that he desires to be judged by works in which the wings of his genius have been free. Indeed we find that one of his early works, the Vicaire des Ardennes, published in 1822, under the fictitious name of St. Aubin, was suppressed by the former government; and it is therefore necessary, to an understanding of the whole case, to say a word or two on that subject.

In the Vicaire des Ardennes, a young man and young woman, who believe themselves brother and sister, are desperately in love with each other, while a married lady of high rank is as desperately in love with the young man, who is really her own illegitimate son. Although this odious imbroglio is eventually cleared up by the supposed brother and sister being discovered to be only cousins, and by the mother's recognition of her son, so that the guilty passions are at last merged in legitimate affection, yet our readers will easily conceive that this is but a poor compensation for all the shocking ideas that the preceding pages must excite; and there are, besides, some circumstances interwoven with the story which create additional disgust. Everybody knows that in the Roman Catholic Church the marriage of a priest is not only a nullity, but a most odious sacrilege; and the young man had become a priest expressly to guard himself from his passion for his supposed sister: but no sooner does he find that she is his cousin, than he hastens to unite himself to her, by what he knows to be an illusory marriage, and some suspicion of his being in orders having been expressed, he at the very altar, by the most solemn adjurations, denies the fact. But it is afterwards discovered, and the poor girl, who believes such a marriage to be worse than pollution, dies of horror-he dies of grief, and his mother of remorse; and to complete the scandal, it turns out that he was the illegitimate son of a bishop. Such fictions, offensive even to our eyes, are impious in those of any one who has any respect for the Roman Catholic religion; and being heightened and set off by copious episodes of rape,

robbery,

robbery, and murder, it is not surprising that the government of Charles X. should have suppressed the work. This adventure seems to have alarmed, though it did not reclaim M. de Balsac, who very soon published a continuation of the former story under the title of Annette et le Criminel, in which he carefully eschews incest, adultery, and sacrilege, but makes an innocent young heroine fall desperately in love with a coarse and brutal pirate and murderer, who must have been, by the chronology of the two works, some sixty years of age, and is described with the unlovely attributes of bandy legs, a protuberant paunch, a bottle nose, and a brandy face. This singular union ends in a catastrophe of fire and blood, more suitable to the Black Forest of the sixteenth century, or the Spanish Main of the seventeenth, than to civilized France in the beginning of the nineteenth. We wish we could believe that M. de Balsac's repudiation of these errors of his youth arose from good feeling, or even from good taste, but the sequel will show that these could not have been his motives, and that he only regrets them because they are too tame.

The first separate work of the era by which M. de Balsac wishes to be judged is La Peau de Chagrin, of which—as the groundwork is supernatural, and therefore out of our present scope we shall say little. A young fellow-an etudiant we beheve-having lost his last penny at play, resolves to drown himself; but failing somehow in his resolution, he postpones the catastrophe to the next night, and in the meanwhile goes into one of the curiosity shops which line the Quay Voltaire, and there buys-he had no money, but he pawned his soul-a magical piece of chagrin, or seal skin, which has the agreeable property of giving its possessor the enjoyment of all his wishes, embittered by the very disagreeable accompaniment of diminishing at every wish, and of a warning, that, when it shall be exhausted, the possessor must perish. Allowing for the absurdity of this conception, and for the bad taste which this vulgar youth would be sure to exhibit, the story does not want a certain degree of interest; but it is awkwardly and inconsistently managed, and is only worth mentioning for its evidence-as far as it goes-of the general demoralization of the society it describes ; but such a romance, we are aware, can be no satisfactory evidence, except of the bad taste which admires it. Next comes the great series which M. de Balsac's admirers call the Etudes sur les Mours-the Scènes de la Vie, Privée, Parisienne, et de Province, of which we have before us twelve or fourteen volumes, and must endeavour to give some idea, still repeating our consciousness that English ears would not bear an unreserved repetition of the prurient lessons of M. de Balsac. We shall take the stories in the order in which they are

presented to us, for two reasons: first, because, as nemo repente fuit turpissimus, his earliest tales are the least offensive; and secondly, that by taking them in order, we avoid all possible suspicion of making unfair selections.

The first of the Scènes de la Vie privée is entitled La Vendetta (Revenge). The only daughter of one of Buonaparte's Corsican followers, whom he has raised to rank and wealth, is, nevertheless, a pupil in a common painting school, where she makes acquaintance with a proscribed officer de la vieille armée, whom she persists in marrying, in spite of the advice, entreaties, and command of her affectionate parents-who had the deepest and best founded objections to the match—namely, an old family feud (Vendetta), exasperated by recent bloody injuries. She at first supports herself and her husband by her great talents as a painter -but she goes gradually out of fashion, and poverty comes. Her parents are inexorable; and then perish, of actual starvation -first her baby-for the sources of maternity are dry-and then she and her husband! The old parents repent when too latethe mother dies of remorse, and the father is left alone in the world—soon, also, to die of a broken heart, the punishment of his cruelty. The moral seems to be, that the father and mother were justly punished; which we admit, though the provocation was very strong; but not a censure is breathed against the cruel disobedience of the daughter, nor against a state of society which allows an admired and admirable artist to perish with her husband and child from actual hunger in the capital, as they call it, of the civilization of mankind. The picture may be true enough, but we think a great moralist should not have laid all the blame on the Vendetta of the insulted parents. But let that pass.

The next tale is Les Dangers de l'Inconduite-the dangers of misconduct which are exemplified by a Countess de Restaud, who, by a long course of adultery, has given a right to her husband's name and property to children that are not his. She sells her jewels to pay the debts of her paramour; borrows, for the same purpose, large sums from an usurer, which her husband must pay; and on her death-bed she employs the most malignant artifices on her eldest child, (the only one which her husband believes to be his,) to burn a deed by which she supposes that child would receive a larger share of his father's property, to the injury of the children of the adulterous intercourse. And this story is related to a young lady and her family by a common friend of all the parties, as a means of promoting that young lady's union with the son of those amiable parents. This may be a moral lecture at Paris; but to us it looks like a lesson of corruption.

The third story, the Bal de Sceaux, is comparatively innocent,