veille, une merveille, une merveille!' Soit mais la merveille voudrait bien émerveiller autre chose que le Marais un mari, un mari, un mari !"

Needless to say that the mari comes in time,-a prince no less, and in other respects so delightful, that Mademoiselle Catherine actually believes, that she will fall in love with him in earnest a thing totally unnecessary, however, to her scheme. The curiosity, however, is that this little mercenary maiden is delighted; and that her schemes, and her independence of action in the more than narrow quietude of her home, and the calculations which French freedom exacts as to the husband to be chosen, throw a quite new and most amusing light upon the bourgeois interior, so respectable, so peaceful, so well ordered. It is the pleasantest rendering we know of what might very well be rendered as vulgar ambition,-the determination of the nouveaux riches to wriggle into society, se faufiler dans le monde.

Very different from this pleasant froth is the last work of M. Cherbuliez, which ought to have been placed at the head of our list, not less because of the importance of the author, who is an Academician, one of the Forty Immortals, but also because of the book itself, which is in many respects of a very high class, full of philosophical observation, and discussions which are always clever and interesting, if somewhat above the range, we should suppose, of the ordinary readers of fiction. La Bête (the French seem to have taken a fancy to titles of this kind: witness' La Morte' of Octave Feuillet, a lugubrious name quite undescriptive of the book which bears it) is the supposed original foundation of our

human nature, as discussed in different senses by the philosophers who surround M. Sylvain Berjac, the hero and teller of the tale, whose story, as contained in the earlier part of the book, is already a miserable one. He has married-being the educated gentleman-son of a peasant family rich in vineyards, and accordingly a very bon parti in his district-the daughter of a ruined nobleman, with whom he lives in very dubious happiness for a few years, then discovers in flagrante delicto, and proceeds with fury, not to kill, which French law justifies in such circumstances, but to divorce. It is some time before he can get over the agitation and rage into which he is thrown by this catastrophe; and his friends do what they can by reason and argument to restore him to the calm which is natural to him.

One of these is Dr Hervier, the physician of the village, whose first attempt to reconcile Sylvain to his fate is by persuading him that "le monde n'est qu'une grande mécanique," and that it would require a continual series of miracles to keep good men from suffering miracles which, according to his philosophy, are all false and ridiculous. He also lends him, by way of curing him of his misery, deux gros volumes, which make him acquainted with the system of Evolution, a system which Sylvain finds but moderately satisfactory. His arguments on this point are simple, but somewhat embarrassing for his friend the doctor, who begins the discussion by asking, "What do you think of Darwin ?"

"There are things in your Darwin which I approve, and others which go against the little good sense I posHe seems to me a great philo

sess.

sopher; but I suspect he has as much imagination as science, and that sometimes he amuses himself at our expense. If we believe him, there was once in an unfruitful garden a pair of snails who loved each other dearly. . . It was not Darwin himself who saw this; he learnt it from a M. Lonsdale, who, according to his account, had all his eyes about him. From my childhood I have studied these creatures, and all the Lonsdales in the world will not persuade me that they are sensible to the affections. Doctor, do you believe that snails have tender hearts?'

"I must confess,' said he, that up to this time they have shown me no signs of it. But what of that? Fine souls keep their own secrets.'

"The story of the snails,' I resumed, made me suspicious. I have little esteem for bakers who don't weigh their bread, and for people who pay their debts with false coin; and I am not fond of philosophers who give their guesses for certainties. . . . Is it certain, for instance, that an extreme desire to please his mate inspires the Argus pheasant with the happy idea of painting his plumage and ornamenting it with eyes of every colour? Sexual selection seems to me a very doubtful affair; I doubt whether the female pheasant accords her favours only to those who thus decorate themselves. I doubt also whether beings better endowed and better fed have a stronger faculty of reproduction than others, and that this is the secret of the perfection of races. Do not we see the beggar, living on privation, produce a large family, while a duke, fearful of seeing his possessions fall to strangers, marries twice before being able to accomplish the poorest little offspring -the child in whom he would survive and continue the race? Consult the first gardener you find. He will tell you that certain plants too much cared for, too highly nourished, become sterile in the very greatness of their growth. The wood grows and strengthens, but farewell to flowers and fruit while the self-sown plant by its side covers the ground with them, as if in mockery of wasted trouble and vain science. Believe me,

there is a great deal of chance in the world, and much romance in the systems built upon it. .. Doctor, what do you think?'

"Ma foi! I was not there; nor, to tell the truth, was any one there except the Ascidians, who have not written their history. But we must be of our century. Formerly everything was explained by great causes acting in sudden movements. At present, what we believe in are small beginnings which work ceaselessly in the dark-accumulating ef fects. To the theory of violent and successive revolutions has been substituted the theory of an evolution continuous and insensible. it so. I never liked the revolutions.' "In this way, said I, it is an affair of individual preference,-let each take that which pleases him.''

I prefer

The doctor, however, has not by any means said his last word. He has even an ingenious answer ready to the question why the process of evolution is arrested for these few thousand years. It is man who is the cause-not because he is the climax of creation, but because of the unnecessary activities and wants which he has brought with him into the world. L'homme a tout gâté par son industrie. L'outil est le grand criminel -in which Dr Hervier agrees, by the way, with the latest of our own home-born philosophers, who considers the steam-engine the cause of our present troubles and future ruin.

If it had not been for these

unhappy inventions, the gradual processes of evolution would have produced by this time something better than the very imperfect being who occupies the chief place in the universe, and who "loge aujourd'hui la sagesse d'un dieu dans le corps d'un animal médiocre." When Sylvain, however, tired with all his philosophy, and unable to dismiss his own trouble from his mind, demands of his friend to explain to him how it

was possible that a woman, for whom he had done everything, should have betrayed him for a wretched creature like the lover whom she had preferred to him, the doctor crosses his legs, and with perfect calm explains :

"My dear neighbour,' he said, 'you are a bad reader; you have not learned to decipher the Scriptures: otherwise Darwin would have taught you what is meant by a survival. Horses, you are aware, have the power of moving certain portions of their skin by a contraction of the muscles; and some men, by a similar contraction, of which you and I have not the secret, move at their pleasure the skin of the head. It is a pretty accomplishment, and an evident survival. I have told you man is the one being out of order (le grand déclassé) in creation, sometimes aspiring to ethereal regions, sometimes piteously retrogressing towards his humble origin. There are also women whose life is a survival (des femmes à reversions)."

At this period the much-musing hero encounters in a railway carriage an old schoolfellow, a philosophical vagabond, a certain Théodule Blandol, just returned from roaming about the world with another vagabond (but rich) philosopher, a certain English Sir John Almond, who has filled him with maxims and reasonings for every occasion. Sylvain asks his old friend to dinner, and Théodule establishes himself as a permanent visitor, from whence arises again much philosophising and many discussions. This new authority will hear nothing of the theory of survivals. Quoting his great authority,-"The great sage whom I have had the honour of rubbing against, and who has had the kindness to give me a small, a very small pension to recompense me for having been his disciple,".

he exclaims, "Tous mes mépris sont

bêtes; mais le plus bête des mépris est le mépris de la bête !"

"It is in this point above all that the wisdom of the animals, who are our instructors, is made apparent, as well as the follies of the Sylvain Berjacs, who flatter themselves that they can explain, as survivals, our excesses, our immodesties, all our unrestrained appetites. The animals, as a great thinker has said, are always well regulated in their conduct.

Alone

among the animals, man-and who says man says also womanpossesses the fatal gift of limitless desire. And to what does he owe which he has too much cultivated, this? To his accursed imagination, and which represents to him all that him with vain hopes and chimeras, is possible and impossible, amuses disgusts him with what he has while adorning all that is new with lying charms, tyrannises over his will, urges him to exceed his strength, to undertake what is beyond his power, and persuades him that the unknown rehas refused. Let us beware of the serves joys for him which the known intemperance of our imaginations,' said Sir John. There is not an excess, not a disorder which the best in his dreams.' . . . Sir John added, We shall never be equal to the animals, who have nothing to repent of: but, failing instinct, we have a reasonable foresight; let this serve us to forestall our repentances.'"

man in the world has not committed

It is impossible, though very tempting, to enter into the philosophy of Sir John Almond, as set forth by his faithful disciple. The worship of the mystic Mylitta, with her double characteristics, is, we confess, beyond us, as well as a little beyond the all-receptive Sylvain; but the shadow of the whimsical philosopher, who has an answer to every objection, and whose scheme of the universe is so fully reasoned out, is thrown upon the canvas with just the exaggeration and faint uncertainty which such a reflection requires, and is done with the greatest success and power.

The momentary introduction of the sage himself is perhaps a mistake, but it is so very brief as to do little harm. Théodule, with his "petite très petite pension" of a hundred and fifty pounds; his satisfaction in settling down in the house of his friend, and easy assumption of its management; his intellectual superiority, his flute, even the colourless complexion of the blondin, with too little blood in his veins to concern himself about other people's opinions of him,—is also extremely good and characteristic. The book is half ended amidst all these philosophisings before, accompanied by another philosopher, her father, the heroine comes upon the scene. She is not much wanted as a heroine, but she is a good example of the very delightful, sprightly, and sweet young woman, full of French vivacity and charm—a being totally different from the frightened and silent girl who, we are told, represents the unmarried element in French female society-which some French writers have learned to put in as the high light in their pictures. We have not ourselves encountered in real life many specimens of the suppressed and silent girl. Nothing could be more charming than Louise Havenne; and the hero has the good sense at once to see and perceive, notwithstanding the hitherto very indifferent specimens of womankind that have crossed his path, that here at last is one with whom safety and hap piness lies. How, always reflective and cautious, he goes off, on the eve of declaring himself, in order once more to think over this all-important step, and coming back hears that Louise has fallen heiress to a great fortune, and that to declare himself now will be to expose himself to the imputation of seeking that and not her;

how he falls ill, and, on his recovery, finds Theodule and the Darwinian doctor both received as constant visitors at the young lady's house, and both paying their addresses to her in her new position of heiress; and how, finally, her father tricks the two intended suitors into an exhibition of their true motives, and assures the happiness of the really excellent Sylvain,—is in reality the least important part of the book. It is a concession to the requirements of the reader, who wants a story, or something like a story, in everything that calls itself a novel; and it is very pleasant, and comes to a conclusion which has something touching and sacred in its joy: but this is not the object of the book. The philosophisings are resumed with still greater force when M. Havenne, a scientific and learned personage, is added to the little circle of Sylvain's instructors, and la bête becomes again the subject of discussion. M. Havenne begins the following conversation with a little discourse upon the swallows and their migrations, and their forgetfulness, in obeying this social instinct, of the domestic instinct which up to this time had kept them busy with their families:—

"Animals have rarely two ideas at the same time. One nail drives out another. Man alone has the dangerous faculty of combining contrary sentiments so that the stronger does not kill the weaker: he is the himself and of supporting for a time only being capable of carrying within the most irreconcilable contradictions. He suffers from this often, and sometimes even dies of it.

"I don't know if the swallows

have a conscience,' said Théodule, but I know that ours is a very odd

machine.

"Conscience,' cried the Abbé Poncel, striking his fist against his knee, is the protest of God against the devil.'