wants vigour and originality. Paul ing a country walk one evening, when de Musset is a careful and a polished her companion accuses her of making writer, and whatever he executes con- her rustics speak the language of cities. veys the idea of his having done his She admits the charge, but urges, in best; but his best is by no means first extenuation, that if she makes the rate, and he labours under the great dweller in the fields speak as he really disadvantage of having a younger speaks, she must subjoin a translation brother a far cleverer fellow than him- for the civilized reader. Her friend self. Nevertheless, he is not to be still insists on the possibility of elespoken of disrespectfully. Slight as vating the peasant dialect, without most of his productions are, they are depriving it of its simplicity; of writoften graceful, and sometimes witty. ing a book in language that a peasant One of his recent bluettes, Fleuranges, might employ, and which a Parisian although a thrice-told tale, is distin- would understand without a single guished by its charming vivacity and explanatory note. To professors and lightness. amateurs of literary art, the discussion We turn to François le Champi, by is of interest. Madame Sand agrees George Sand. We need hardly say to attempt the task; and takes for her that Madame Dudevant is anything subject a tale she has heard related but a favourite of ours. Whilst ad- the previous evening, at a neighbourmitting her genius and great literary ing farm-house. She calls it François talent, we deplore the evil application le Champi, but her critic cavils at the of such rare powers,-the perversion very title. Champi, he says, is not of intellect so high to purposes so French. George Sand quotes Monmischievous. And we cannot agree taigne, to prove the contrary, although with M. de Lomenie, who, in his the dictionary declares the word out sketch of her life, asserts the perni- of date. A champi is a foundling, or cious influence of her books to be child abandoned in the fields, the degreatly exaggerated, maintaining that rivation being from champ. And "the catastrophe of almost all of them having thus justified her hero's cognocontains a sort of morality of misfor- men, she at once introduces him, at tune which, to a certain extent, re- the tender age of six years, boarded places any other." This is a specious, by the parish with Zabella, an old but a very hollow argument. How woman who dwells in a hovel, and many of those who read George lives on the produce of a few goats Sand's books have ability or inclina- and fowls that find subsistence on the tion to strike this nice balance be- common. Madeleine Blanchet, the tween virtue and vice, and do not pretty and very young wife of the rather yield themselves captives to the miller of Cornouer, takes compassion seductive eloquence with which the on the poor infant, and finds means poetess depicts and palliates the im- to supply him, unknown to her brutal morality of her characters! Her earlier husband and cross mother-in-law, works gave her a fair claim to the with food and raiment. The child title of the Muse of Adultery, which grows into a comely lad, gentle, insome uncivil critic conferred on telligent, and right-hearted, and deher. The personages were invariably votedly attached to Madeleine. He husband, wife, and lover, and the enters the service of the miller, a former was by no means the best rough dissipated fellow, given up to treated of the three. After a while the fascinations of a loose widow, she deviated from this formula--em- Madame Sévère, a sort of rural Delilah, ployed other types, and produced oc- who tries to seduce the handsome casionally books of a less objection- Champi, and, failing of success, instils able character; but, upon the whole jealousy into the ear of the miller, they are ill to choose amongst. In who drives François from his house. the one before us there is no great The young man finds occupation in a harm, but neither is there much to distant village, and returns to the mill admire. As a literary production, it of Cornouer only when its master is is below the average of its predeces- dead and Madeleine on a bed of sicksors. It is a story of peasant life in ness, to rescue his benefactress from western France. George Sand is tak- grasping creditors, by means of a sum of money his unknown father has transmitted to him. George Sand makes every woman in the book fall in love with the Champi; but he repulses all, save one, and that one never dreams of loving him otherwise than as a mother. At last one of the fair ones who would fain have gained his heart, generously reveals to him, what he himself has difficulty in believing, that he is in love with Madeleine Blanchet; and, further, compassionating his timidity, undertakes to break the ice to the pretty widow. It requires a talent like that of George Sand to give an air of probability to all this. There are at most but a dozen years' difference between Madeleine and the Champi, but the reader has been so much accustomed to look upon them in the light of mother and son, that he is somewhat startled on finding the boy of nineteen enamoured of the woman of thirty. The love-passages, however, are managed with Madame Sand's usual skill. As a picture of peasant life, the book yields internal evidence of fidelity. The grand daughter of the farmer-general of Berri has called up the memories of her youthful days, passed in happy liberty upon the sunny banks of Indre, and of the years of connubial discontent that went heavily by in her husband's Aquitanian castle, when country rides and the study of Nature's book were her chief resources. It was from this castle of Nohant that the Baroness Dudevant fled, now nearly twenty years ago, to commence the exceptional existence she since has led. We may venture to take a page from her Lettres d'un Voyageur-a page replete with that peculiar fascination which renders her pen so powerful for good or evil. "It grieves me not to grow old, it would grieve me much to grow old alone; but I have not yet met the being with whom I would fain have lived and died; or, if I have met him, I have not known how to keep him. Hearken to a tale, and weep. There was a good artist, called Watelet, who engraved in aquafortis better than any man of his time. He loved Margaret Lecomte, and taught her to engrave as well as himself. She left her husband, her wealth, and her country, to live with Watelet. The world cursed them; then, as they were poor and humble, it forgot them. Forty years afterwards there were discovered, in the neighbourhood of Paris, in a little house called MoulinJoli, an old man who engraved in aquafortis, with an old woman whom he called his Meunière, who also engraved at the same table. The last plate they executed represented Moulin - Joli, Margaret's house, with this device, Cur valle permutem Sabinâ divitias operosiores! It hangs in my room, above a portrait whose original no one here has seen. During one year, he who gave me that portrait seated himself every night with me at a little table, and lived on the same labour as myself. At daybreak we consulted each other on our work, and we supped at the same table, talking of art, of sentiment, and of the future. The future has broken its word to us. Pray for me, O Margaret Lecomte !" It is no secret that Madame Dudevant's Watelet was Jules Sandeau, a French novelist of some ability, whose name still makes frequent apparitions in the windows of circulating libraries, and at the foot of newspaper feuilletons. Let us see what M. de Lomenie says of this period of her life, and of her first appearance in the lists of literature, in his brief but amusing memoir of this remarkable woman. "Some time after the July revolution, there appeared a book entitled, Rose et Blanche, or the Actress and the Nun. This book, which at first passed unnoticed, fell by chance into a publisher's hands; he read it, and, struck by the richness of certain descriptive passages and by the novelty of the situations, he inquired the author's address. He was referred to a humble lodging-house, and, upon applying there, was conducted to a small attic. There he saw a young man writing at a little table, and a young woman painting flowers by his side. These were Watelet and Margaret Lecomte. The publisher spoke of the book, and it appeared that Margaret, who could write books as well as Watelet, and even better, had written a good part, and the best part, of this one; only, as books sold badly, or not at all, she combined with her literary occupations the more lucrative with whom we have not the honour of labour of a colourist. Encouraged by a personal acquaintance, and whose the publisher's approval, she took writings would certainly incline us to from a drawer a manuscript written somewhat ready credence of her irreguentirely by herself; the publisher larities and masculine addictions. examined it, bought it, doubtless very Now that she has attained the ripe cheap, and might have paid a much age of forty-four, we may suppose higher price, without making a bad her sobered down a little. Before the speculation, for it was the manuscript February revolution upset society, and of Indiana. Soon after that, Margaret drove the majority of the wealthy from Lecomte left Watelet, took half his Paris, we happen to know she was a name, called herself George Sand, and welcome guest in some of the most of that half name has made herself fashionable and aristocratic drawingone which shines to-day amongst the rooms of the Faubourg St. Germain, greatest and most glorious." where she was sought and cultivated for the charm of her conversation. Since the revolution, there have been reports of her presiding, or at least assisting, at democratic orgies; but these rumours, as the newspapers say, " require confirmation." Since we have, somehow or other, got led into this long gossip about the lady, we will make another extract from the writer already quoted, who tells an amusing story of his first introduction, obtained by means of a misdelivered note, intended by the authoress of Lelia for a man who cured smoky chimneys. A resemblance of name brought the missive (a summons to a sick funnel) into the hands of the biographer, who, puzzled at first, finally resolved to take advantage of the mistake, to ascertain whether George Sand really did wear boots and spurs, and smoke Virginian in a short pipe. He expected something masculine and alarming, but in this respect was greatly disappointed. Somebody has hazarded the sweep ing assertion that the lover is the King of George Sand's novels. George Sand herself is the queen of the class of femmes incomprises, the victim of a mariage de convenance. The death of her grandmother left her, at the very moment she quitted the convent where she had been educated, alone and almost friendless. Ignorant of the world, she allowed herself to be married to a rough old soldier, who led a prosaic existence in a lonely country-house, had no notion of romance, sentiment, or reverie, and made little allowance for them in others. The days that ought to rank amongst the brightest memories of a woman's heart, the early years of marriage, were a blank, or worse, to Aurora Dudevant, and the bitterness thus amassed not unfrequently breaks forth in her writings. It has been urged by her partisans, in extenuation of her conjugal faux pas that her husband was ignorant and brutal. On the other hand, the idle have invented many of the delinquencies imputed to her since her separation, just as they have told absurd stories about her fantastical habits; and have made her out a sort of literary Lola Montes, swaggering and smoking in man's attire, and brandishing pistol and horsewhip with virile energy and effect. The atmosphere of Paris is famous for its magnifying powers. Seen through it, a grain of sand becomes a mountain, an eccentricity is often distended into a vice. We lay this down as a rule, which none who know and understand the French metropolis will dispute; but we do not, at the same time, in any way take up the gloves in defence of George Sand, I saw before me a woman of short stature, of comfortable plumpness, and of an aspect not at all Dantesque. She wore a dressing-gown, in form by no means unlike the wrapper which 1, a commonplace mortal, habitually wear; her fine hair, still perfectly black, whatever evil tongues may say, was separated on a brow broad and smooth as a mirror, and fell freely adown her cheeks, in the manner of Raphael; a silk handkerchief was fastened loosely round her throat; her eyes, to which some painters persist in imparting an exaggerated power of expression, were remarkable, on the contrary, for their melancholy softness; her voice was sweet, and not very strong; her mouth, especially, was singularly graceful; and in her whole attitude there was a striking this ancient dealer in dirt-namely, character of simplicity, nobility, and that he has no deliberate intention to calm. In the ample temples and rich corrupt the morals or alarm the delidevelopment of brow, Gall would cacy of his readers, for that morals have discerned genius; in the frank- and delicacy are words of whose ness of her glance, in the outline of meaning he has not the slightest conher countenance, and in the features, ception. Paul, every Frenchman tells correct but worn, Lavater would have you, is not read in France, save by read, it seems to me, past suffering, a milliners' girls and shopboys, or by time-present somewhat barren, an literary porters, who solace the leisure extreme propensity to enthusiasm, of their lodge by a laugh over his and consequently to discouragement. pages, contraband amongst gens comme Lavater might have read many other il faut. No man is a prophet in his things, but he certainly could have own land; and yet we have certain discovered neither insincerity, nor reasons for believing that, even in bitterness, nor hatred, for there was not a trace of these on that sad but serene physiognomy. The Lelia of my imagination vanished before the reality; and it was simply a good, gentle, melancholy, intelligent, and handsome face that I had before my eyes. 66 Continuing my examination, I remarked with pleasure that the grande désolée had not yet completely renounced human vanities; for, beneath the floating sleeves of her gown, at the junction of the wrist with the white and delicate hand, I saw the glitter of two little gold bracelets of exquisite workmanship. These feminine trinkets, which became her much, greatly reassured me touching the sombre tint, and the politico-philo sophic exaltation, of certain of George Sand's recent writings. One of the hands that thus caught my attention concealed a cigarito, and concealed it badly, for a treacherous little column of smoke ascended behind the back of the prophetess." Whether or no the interview thus described really took place, Madame Dudevant should feel obliged to her biographer for his gentle treatment and abstinence from exaggeration. On the strength of the puff of smoke and the epicene dressing-gown, many writers would have sketched her hussar fashion, and hardly have let her off the mustaches. We are nearly at the end of our parcel, at least of such portion of it as appears worthy a few words. Here are a brace of volumes by M. de Kock, over which we are not likely long to linger. An esteemed contributor to Maga expressed, a few years ago, his and our opinion concerning France, Paul has more readers, avowed or secret, than his countrymen admit. But at any rate, we can offer the old gentleman (for M. Kock must be waxing venerable, and his son has for some years been before the public as an author), the consolatory assurance, that in England he has numerous admirers, to judge from the thumbed condition of a set of his works, which caught our eye last summer on the shelves of a London circulating library. To these amateurs of Kockneyisms," whether genuine cockneys, or naturalized cooks and barbers from Gaul, Taquinet le Bossu will be welcome. The bunchback, everybody knows, is a great type in France. Who is not acquainted with the glorious Mayeux, the swearing, fighting, love-making hero of a host of popular songs, anecdotes, and caricatures, and of more than one romance- -especially of a four-volume one by Ricard, a deceased rival of De Kock? Well, Paul-who, we must admit, is quite original, and disdains imitation-has never meddled with the hackneyed veteran Mayeux, but now creates a hunchback of his own' Taquinet is the dwarf clerk of a notary, luxuriating in a wage of fifty pounds a-year, and a hunch of the first magnitude. Pert as a magpie, mischievous and confiding, devoted to the fair sex, and especially to its taller specimens, he is a fine subject for Monsieur de Kock, who gets him into all manner of queer scrapes, some not of the most refined description. The French hunchback, we must observe, is a genius apart-quite different from high-shouldered people of other countries. Far from being susceptible on the score of his dorsal protuberance, he views it in the light of an excellent joke, a benefaction of nature, placed upon his spine for the diversion of himself and his fellowmen. The words bosse and bossu (hunch and hunchback) have various idiomatic and proverbial applications in France. To laugh like a bossu implies the ne plus ultra of risibility: se donner une bosse-literally, to give one's self a hunch-is synonymous with sharing in a jovial repast where much is eaten and more drunk. An excellent caricature in the Charivari, some years ago, represented a group of half-starved soldiers sitting round a fire of sticks at the foot of Atlas, and picking a dromedary's scull-" Pas moyen de se donner une bosse!" exclaims one of the dissatisfied conscripts. On twelve hundred francs per annum, poor Taquinet often makes the same complaint; and, ir. hopes of bettering his fortune, wanders into Germany on a matrimonial venture, there to be jilted by Fraülein Carottsmann, for a strolling player with one coat and three sets of buttons, who styles himself Marquis, because he has been occasionally hissed in the line of characters designated in France by that aristocratic denomination. Then there is a general of Napoleon's army who cannot write his name; and a buxom sutler and a handsome aide-decamp, sundry grisettes, and the other dramatis persona habitually to be met with in the pages of Paul-the whole set forth in indifferent French, and garnished with buffoonery and impropriety, after the usual fashion of this zany of Parisian novelists. fame by his Scènes de la Vie de Province, by his Peau de Chagrin his Père Goriot and other striking and popular works. The hour of his decline then struck, and he has since been rolling down the hill at a faster rate than he ascended it. His affectation of originality is wearisome and nauseous in the extreme. He reminds us of a nurseryman we once knew, who, despairing of equalling the splendour of a neighbour's flowers, applied himself to the production of all manner of floral monstrosities, mistaking distortion for beauty, and eccentricity for grace. He strains for new conceptions and ideas till he writes nonsense, or something very little better. And his mania for introducing the same personages in twenty different books, renders it necessary to read all in order to understand one. The question becomes, whether it is worth while going through so much to obtain so little. Our reply is a decided negative. If the system, however, be annoying to the reader, for the author it has its advantages. It is, in fact, a new species of puffery, of considerable ingenuity. Backwards and forwards, M. de Balzac refers his public; his books are a system of mutual accommodation and advertisement. Thus, in the Député &c., apropos of a lawsuit, we find in brackets and in large capitals,-" See UNE TENEBREUSE AFFAIRE." A little further on, an allusion being made to the town of Provins, we are requested to "See PIERRETTE." Similar admonitions are of constant recurrence in the same author's writIs it true that M. Honoré de Balzac ings. The plan is really clever, and is married to a female millionaire, who proves Paris a step or two ahead of fell in love with him through his books London in the art of advertising. We and his reputation? If so, let him have not yet heard of Moses and Doudtake our advice and abjure scribbling ney stamping on a waistcoat back an -at least till he is in the vein to turn injunction to " Try our trousers," or out something better than his recent embroidered on a new surtout a hint productions better, at least, than the as to the merits of a "poplin overcoat." first volume of the Député d'Arcis, Buy our bear's grease!" cries Mr. now lying before us. What heavy, Ross the perfumer. 'Prenez mon vulgar trash, to flow from the pen of ours?" chimes in M. Balzac the a man of his abilities! After begin- author. O Paris! Paris! romantic ning his literary career with a series and republican, political and poetical, of worthless books, published under of all the cities of the plain thou art various pseudonymes, and whose the queen, and humbug is the chief authorship he has since in vain en- jewel in thy diadem! deavoured to disclaim, he rose into |