Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847

The position of French novels and novelists in the appreciation of the English public, has undergone, within the last few years, a notable change. We need revert to no distant period to recall the day when the word "Paris" on the title-page of a book of fiction, was, to the work so inscribed, virtual sentence of exclusion from respectable library and decent drawing-room this side the Channel. It was the foul-bill of health, the signal of a moral quarantine, interminable and hopeless of pratique. French novels came to England and were read; but the arrivals were comparatively rare, the readers scarce more numerous; whilst by the masses they were condemned as contraband and dangerous merchandise, and eschewed as religiously as Lyons silks by the humane, when Spitalfields are starving. The wilful and wicked minority who took pleasure in their pungent pages, did so clandestinely, and with precaution. In carefully-locked desk, or on topmost shelf of bookcase, lurking behind an honourable front-rank of history and essay, the disreputable literature was bestowed. Nor was its reception more openly hospitable when arrayed in English garb. Translators there were, who strove to render into the manly, wholesome Anglo-Saxon tongue, the produce—witty, frivolous, prurient, and amusing—of Gallic imagination. But either the translations shared the interdict incurred by the objectionable originals, or the plan adopted to obtain their partial acceptance, destroyed pith and point. Letters from plague-ridden shores are fitted for the perusal of the uninfected by fumigation and other mysterious processes. They reach us reeking with aromatics and defaced by perforations, intended doubtless to favour the escape of the demon of pestilence bodily imprisoned within their folds. But their written contents are uninjured by the salutary operation; the words of affection, the combinations of commerce, the politician's plans, are still to be read upon their stained and punctured surface. Not so with the French novels that underwent fumigation and curtailment at the hands of decorous translators. The knife that extirpated the gangrene, unavoidably trenched upon the healthy flesh: in rooting up the abundant tares, the scanty grain was shaken out, and chaff and straw alone remained.

We speak of times past, although still recent; glance we at the present, and, Heaven help us! what a change is here! Tempora mutantur et libri—or it were perhaps more proper to say, et lectores. With headlong velocity, one extreme has been abandoned for its opposite. The denounced of yesterday is the favoured of to-day; the scouted is now the cherished; the rejected stone has a lofty place in the literary edifice. French novels, translated, if not original, are as commonly seen in the "best regulated families" as comfits at the confectioner's or poison on potter-carriers' shelves. The ban is removed, the anathema revoked; either the Upas has been discovered to be less baneful than was imagined, or the disease lurking at the core has been forgotten in the bright colours and pleasant flavour of the appetible fruit. We take up the newspaper. What heads the column? Half a score advertisements of the "Mysteries of Paris"—a new edition of the "Wandering Jew," "illustrated by the first artists"—"Memoirs of a Physician," in twopenny numbers and shilling volumes; French novels, in short, at all prices and in every form. We step into the club; the produce of Paris and Brussels presses strews the table, and an elderly gentleman, with a solemn face and quakerish coat, searches amongst them for the nine-and-twentieth volume of "Monte Christo," or of some other French romance of longitude equally sea-serpentine. We call upon our friend Tom Sterling, a worthy fellow, much respected on 'Change. Miss Sterling is deep in a natty duodecimo, whose Flemish aspect speaks volumes in favour of international copyright. Our natural clearsightedness enables us to read, even from the door, "Société Belge de Librairie" upon its buff paper cover. Is the book hastily smuggled under sofa-cushions, or stealthily dropped into the neglected work-basket? By no means. The fair student deliberately marks her place, and engages us in a controversy as to the merits, faults, and beauties of a score of French romancists, in whose lucubrations she assuredly is far better read than ourselves. In short, English aversion for French modern literature has disappeared, and been replaced by partiality—not to say affection. Dumas is a staple commodity; Sue is voted delightful; English authors of talent and standing translate or "edite"—to use the genteel word now adopted—the works of French ones; even George Sand finds lady-translators, and, we fear, lady readers; French books are reprinted in London, and the Palais Royal is transported to the arcade of Burlington. We shall not take upon ourselves to blame or applaud this change in public taste, to decide how far such large importation and extensive patronage of foreign wares are advantageous or deplorable—to tax with laxity those who write, or with levity those who read, the lively and palatable productions of the present French school. Without encouraging, we will venture to direct, the prevailing appetite, by pointing the attention of Maga's readers—whose name is Legion—to the writings of an author not the best known, but certainly one of the most accomplished, of his class. In France, his reputation stands very high; and if in England it is not yet equally well-established, it must be attributed to his having written little, and to the absence of that charlatanry and egotism which has brought other cultivators of the Belles Lettres into such universal notice here and on the Continent. M. Dumas, for instance, even had his writings, and those of the numerous staff of literary aid-de-camps to whose bairns he stands godfather, been less diverting, would still have commanded readers in every country where French is understood, and which the post from Paris reaches. The man is his own advertisement; his eccentricities are worth, at a moderate estimate, a dozen advertising vans, a daily paragraph in a score of newspapers, and a cartload of posters. He is a practical puff, an incarnate stimulant to popular curiosity. Let the public appetite for his weekly volumes flag ever so little, and forthwith he puts in practice, for the renewal of his vogue, devices so ingenious, that proceeding from any but the privileged monarch of romance-writers, they would be looked upon as the tricks of a lunatic. One day in a court of assizes, the next at that of a king, on the morrow before a civil tribunal, the illustrious inheritor of the marquisate of La Pailleterie parades his graces, jogs the world's memory as to the fact of his existence, and bids it read his books and bow before his footstool. To-day he is on the Corso, to-morrow on the sunny banks of Rhine; the next day he peeps into Etna's crater, or gasps beneath the brazen sky of shadeless Syria. Now we hear of him in Spanish palaces, figuring at royal weddings, and adding one more to the countless ribbon-ends that already grace his button-hole; and scarcely has our admiration subsided, when a Mediterranean breeze murmurs sweet tidings of his presence on African shores, taking his coffee with Beys, commanding war-steamers, riving the captive's fetters, and rivetting his claims on his country's gratitude. Wherever he goes, he stands, a modern Gulliver, pre-eminent in moral giantship, amidst surrounding pigmies, who

"Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find themselves dishonourable graves."

And the seeming ubiquity of the famous quadroon8 is not more marvellous than the multiplicity of characters he assumes. "Dumas at Home and Abroad" offers an inexhaustible theme and a boundless field for pen and pencil caricaturists. Alternately dramatist, novelist, tourist, ambassador, the companion of princes, the manager of theatres, an authority in courts of justice, a challenger of deputies, and shining with equal lustre in these and fifty other capacities equally diverse, what wonder that the slightest work flowing from the pen of so remarkable a genius, though it be but a forgotten "trifle of twelve thousand lines," is received with intense gratitude, and caught at like manna by a famished multitude? Eugène Sue is another writer who has taken the world by storm, but in quite a different fashion. The ex-lieutenant of marine does not obtrude his personality upon public notice, and relies more upon the powerful calibre of his guns than upon their number. Two books, lengthy ones certainly, established his reputation. He had been many years a cultivator of literature, and had produced sundry romances of little more than average merit, when he suddenly burst upon the public, in the widely spread feuilleton of the Débats, with a work which, however objectionable in some respects, is unquestionably of extraordinary power and interest. Like the Pickwick Papers, the "Mystères de Paris" at once established their author in popular estimation, not only in the land in whose language they were written, but in all the reading countries of Europe. It was the opening of a new vein in the literary mine, and though the metal might have been purer, it had all the glitter that captivates the multitude. The "Juif Errant," inferior to its predecessor, was scarcely less successful. Its bitter attacks on the Jesuits, and the consequent anathemas fulminated against it, with more zeal than wisdom, by certain of the French clergy, doubtless contributed to its vogue. After Sue and Dumas, Balzac is (with the exception, perhaps, of Madame Dudevant,) the best known, and most read, out of France, of all the living French novelists. We hold him much over-rated, but his great fertility, and the real excellence of a few of his books, have made him a widely-spread reputation. His early efforts were less successful than those of Sue; and his first thirty volumes scarcely attained mediocrity. At last he made a start, and took his place on the first line of his class, in virtue of a few masterpieces, scanty diamonds glittering in a cinder-heap. Over-production, the crying vice of the literature of the day, and an over-weening conceit, prevented Honoré de Balzac from maintaining the position he might and ought to have occupied. Such gems as the "Père Goriot" and "Eugenie Grandet" were buried and lost sight of under mountains of rubbish. True that he now denied a number of books published under supposititious names, and which had been universally attributed to him; but enough remained, which he could not deny, to tarnish, if not to cancel his fame. To these he has since, with the reckless and inconsiderate greed that cares not for the public, so long as it finds a publisher, considerably added. His self-sufficiency is unparalleled; and in the preface to an edition of his works published under the comprehensive and presumptuous title of "La Comédie Humaine," he puts himself on a level with the first of poets and philosophers, proposing himself the modest aim of portraying human nature in every variety of its moral physiognomy.

Less prolific, more unassuming, and far less universally known than the three authors at whose character and writings we have thus briefly glanced, Charles de Bernard need fear comparison with none of them. That he is faultless we do not assert; that he in great measure eschews the errors of his contemporaries, will be patent to all who peruse his pages. The objections that English readers will make to his books are to be traced to no aberrations of his, but to those of the society whose follies he so ably and wittily depicts. He faithfully sketches, and more often amusingly caricatures, the vices, foibles, and failings of French men and women. If those are to be delineated at all—and, with a view to their amendment, surely they may—the task could hardly be executed with a chaster and less offensive pencil. De Bernard paints immorality—it would be unjust to say that he encourages it. He neither deals in highly-coloured and meretricious scenes à la Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in—or disgraced by the irreligion, and contempt of things holy, found in the writings of scores of French authors whom we could name, were they worth the naming. It is undeniable that the ingenious plots of his very entertaining books turn, for the most part, on matters difficult to touch upon with propriety, and which English writers usually avoid; frequently, for instance, on illicit passion and conjugal infidelity. And therefore many Englishmen, with whatever interest and amusement they themselves might read his volumes, would hesitate to recommend them to their sisters and daughters. Some few of his tales, especially of the shorter ones, are in all respects unexceptionable. We instance "La Peau du Lion," translated as "The Cossack's Grave;" and "L'Anneau d'Argent," which has also appeared in English. Gerfaut, one of this author's earliest works, and unquestionably his masterpiece, has little that can justly offend, although its translation met, we believe, a cold reception. The plot turns on an attachment between a married woman and the hero of the story. But if M. de Bernard falls readily enough into the easy, matter-of-course tone in which his countrymen habitually discuss amatory peccadilloes—and he could hardly have attained his present popularity in France had he assumed the prude—he does not disdain or neglect to point a moral after his own fashion. In administering a remedy, a wise physician has regard to the idiosyncrasy of the patient as well as to the nature of the disease. A nation whose morality is unhealthy, must not be treated like a sick horse, whose groom crams a ball down his throat, and holds his jaws together, and his head back, to prevent its rejection. The dose must be artfully disguised, wrapped in a sweetmeat, and the invalid will take it kindly, and sooner or later feel the benefit. We would fain discern, in some of M. de Bernard's books, under a perfumed envelope of palatable trifle, a tendency worthy of applause; a design to combat, by quiet and implied ridicule, the moral maladies of his country. It is not his wont, as with many of his competitors, to make the vicious interesting and the virtuous fools. His husbands are not invariably good-natured, helpless noodles, with whom, even in their direst calamities, the most right-thinking have difficulty to sympathise: the Lovelaces who pursue married women with their insidious and dangerous attentions, are not by him for ever exalted into heroes, redeeming their pleasant vices by a host of high and chivalrous qualities. On the contrary, the apparently easy-going husband often proves a smart fellow, and thorough Tartar—the brilliant lover an emancipated bagman, or contemptible chevalier d'industrie. Of this we have an example in "Le Gendre," in some respects one of the most objectionable of De Bernard's novels, certainly not well suited for a birth-day present to misses in their teens. A seemingly tame, insipid clown of a husband counteracts the base manœuvres of a dashing Paris roué; and finally, after refusing to fight the would-be seducer, whom he has ascertained to be an arrant swindler, takes truncheon in hand, and belabours him in presence of his intended victim and of a roomful of company. But setting aside any moral tendency which goodwill towards such a vastly pleasant author as De Bernard may induce us, by the aid of our most complaisant spectacles, to discover in his writings, his gentlemanly tone is undeniable, his pictures of French life, especially in Paris, are beyond praise. In the most natural and graphic style imaginable, he dashes off a portrait typifying a class, and in a page gives the value of a volume of the much-vaunted "Physiologies." And this he does, like all he does, in a sparkling, well-bred, impertinent style, peculiar to himself, and peculiarly attractive.

We have already remarked, that M. de Bernard has written little. The assertion was comparative; we meant that he has produced, since the commencement of his literary career—not yet very remote—an average of only three or four volumes per year. This rate, in days when French scribes carry on five romances at a time, in the daily feuilletons of five newspapers, and when certain English authors, emulous of Gallic fecundity, annually conceive and elaborate their dozen or two of octavos—says little for his industry, or much for his judicious forbearance. Latterly, however, we regret to observe in him a disposition to increase the length of his books, and abandon the pleasant one, two, and three volume tales with which he began. In this he is wrong; books of so very light a description as his will not bear great prolongation. Things agreeable enough in small quantities, pall and cloy if the ration be overmuch augmented. However fragrant and well-spiced, syllabub is not to be drunk by the bucketful; neither would it be satisfactory to dine off a soufflé au marasquin, though compounded by the philanthropical Regenerator himself. In England, custom has decided that three volumes are the proper length for a novel, and they have become, as a maximum, a rule rarely departed from. We are content that it should be so, and, indeed, heartily rejoice at it, when we see works of fiction spun out by indefatigable French manufacturers into interminable series, through which, at twelve hours a-day, the most insatiable devourer of the romantic needs a month to toil. Following the fashion of the times, and encouraged by the example of his successfully diffuse brethren, M. de Bernard, weary of launching trim corvettes and dashing frigates, has taken to build line-of-battle ships. He had better have kept to the small craft, which he found to float so well. Two of his recent works, "Le Beaupère," and "Le Gentilhomme Campagnard," have lost in merit what they have gained in length. The subject of the former is most unpleasant: its catastrophe unnecessarily painful. And the "Gentilhomme Campagnard," just now concluded, although containing, as do all his books, much spirited dialogue, many well-drawn characters, and well-contrived incidents, is weakened by being spun out, and at times, by its tediousness of detail, reminds us of De Balzac. And here we will remark, that there is a certain general resemblance between the styles of De Bernard and De Balzac; so much so, that when the former first wrote, some persons conjectured his name to be a pseudonyme adopted by the latter, to the detriment of publishers, to whom, it was said, he had contracted to deliver all he should produce. And the malignant hinted, that the author of "Eugenie Grandet" was sufficiently unscrupulous and hungry of gain to render such a stratagem on his part any thing but improbable. Whether Charles de Bernard be an assumed name or not, it has long since been evident, that the books published under it proceed from a more guarded and uniformly sprightly pen, than that of M. de Balzac.

The plot of the "Gentilhomme Campagnard," is based on the dissensions of two villages, or more properly speaking, of a hamlet and a very small town, situated within a mile of each other, and which had once constituted two separate parishes, but had been amalgamated at the revolution of '89, greatly to the detriment and indignation of the weaker party. It is in 1836 that M. de Bernard takes up the imaginary history of their jealousy and squabbles, as a canvass on which to embroider the flowers of his invention. The hamlet, Châteaugiron-le-Vieil, is inhabited, and virtually governed, by the Gentilhomme Campagnard, the Baron de Vaudrey—a retired colonel of cuirassiers, whose services under the empire do not prevent his stanch adherence, under the citizen monarchy of July, to the legitimate and exiled sovereigns of France. His nephew, the Marquis of Châteaugiron, less addicted to the fallen Bourbons, arrives, at the opening of the tale, at his family mansion in Châteaugiron-le-Bourg, with certain electioneering projects, highly displeasing to the baron, who resolves vigorously to oppose them, and accordingly gives the whole weight of his influence to a neighbouring iron-master, M. Grandperrin, also a candidate. The iron-master has married a second wife, a heartless vindictive woman, and former mistress of the marquis. She plays an important part in the clever plot, which, although complicated, is perfectly clear. To sketch at any length even the principal of the numerous characters in the amusing comedy, would lead us much too far; we can barely afford to glance at a few of them. On the foremost line—after the Gentilhomme Campagnard himself, a fine, generous-hearted veteran, an excellent compound of the soldier and the nobleman, possessed of great good sense and shrewdness, and altogether one of those personages of whom, whether real or imaginary, one reads with pleasure—stands Madame Bonvalot, or de Bonvalot, as she best loves to be styled, the parvenue widow of a Bordeaux wine merchant. Her beautiful and amiable daughter, an excellent model of a virtuous French lady, gracefully and delicately drawn, is married to the Marquis of Châteaugiron. The mother, an affected, frivolous, rouged, bejewelled dowager of fifty, who, through ambition to figure at the Tuileries, has extorted from her noble son-in-law a promise that he will adhere to the new order of things, is followed from Paris by one Pichot, ex-clerk to a notary, also a former lover of Madame Grandperrin, and self-styled Viscount de Langerac. This fortune-hunter has managed to worm himself into the intimacy of the marquis, and to kindle, in the too-susceptible breast of Madame Bouvalot, a tender flame, which he diligently fans. Then we have a young country-lawyer, Froidevaux, an honest, independent fellow, and desperate sportsman, who gives advice gratis, thinks more of partridges than parchments, prefers a day's shooting to a profitable lawsuit, and is consequently as poor as he is popular, and, to all appearance, has very little chance of obtaining the hand of Mademoiselle Victorine, the iron-master's only daughter and heiress, a plump little beauty, who views Froidevaux with special favour and affection, and with whom he is deeply in love. Amongst the personages of a lower class, the most prominent is Toussaint Gilles, landlord of the Cheval Patriote, and son of one of the revolutionary butchers of the Reign of Terror; a furious republican, who wears a carmagnole and a red cap, inherits his father's hatred of the vile aristocrats, and prides himself on his principles, and on a truculent and immeasurable mustache. Amoudru, a pusillanimous mayor; Bobilier, a fiery old justice of the peace, and devoted vassal of the house of Châteaugiron; and Rabusson, once a sergeant in M. de Vaudrey's regiment, now his game-keeper, must not be forgotten. A festival got up by Bobilier to celebrate the marquis's arrival at the castle of his ancestors, stirs the bile of Toussaint Gilles, who sees in it a base adulation of the çi-devants. As president of the republican club of Châteaugiron-le-Bourg, he, on the following day, incites a few discontented spirits to a popular demonstration, to consist in burning down the triumphal arch erected by the servile justice of peace, and in hoisting a brand-new tricolored flag on the tree of liberty—a poplar planted, during the glorious days of July, close to the gate of the marquis's château, but which had long since withered into a dry and unsightly maypole. A number of bad characters mingle in the crowd, and the demonstration assumes a more turbulent and criminal aspect than its original promoters had contemplated. The outer gate of the château is forced, and stones are thrown, one of which grazes the cheek of the Viscount de Langerac, who receives the wound, so he affirms, whilst heroically interposing his person between Madame de Bonvalot and the shower of missiles. At last the marquis arms his servants, and repels the rioters, already frightened at their own deeds; the justice of peace menaces them with the assizes, Froidevaux exerts his influence, and the disturbance is nearly at an end, when the flames communicate from the triumphal arch to the tree of liberty. Toussaint Gilles, as captain of the firemen, hurries to extinguish the conflagration that menaces the flag-staff, on whose summit Picardet the blacksmith, another zealous member of the democratic club, is busy fastening the tricolored symbol of freedom. The following scene, one of the most detachable in the book, will give a notion of M. de Bernard's lively and pointed style.