the few characters introduced, increase the intensity of the narrative, the only defective point of which is the length of the descriptions of agonised personal feeling, the cries and tears of which a French hero is nowise ashamed. The hero in this case begins his story at a tragical moment when, being nine years old, an only and much-beloved child, the news of his father's murder is suddenly brought to the house. The father, simple, gentle, and kind; the mother, a beautiful, superficial, but tender creature; and a friend of the house, a man superior to both, cultivated and eloquent,-form the party, fixed in the boy's imagination, on the occasion of the last family meal, from which M. Cornélis withdraws, saying that he has an appointment. He does not return for dinner, nor is there news of him next day. "The evening came again. My mother and I sat alone at the square table where the empty chair seemed to give a body to our anxiety. M. Jacques Termonde, whom she had informed by a letter of what had happened, arrived after the meal. I was sent away when he came, but not before I had time to remark the extraordinary light in this man's eyes -blue eyes which usually shone coldly out of that refined countenance, framed in light hair, and a beard almost pale in colour. Children collect the smallest details, quickly effaced, but which return to the memory later, in contact with life, as certain invisible inks show themselves on paper when brought near the fire. While I insisted to be allowed to remain in the room, I observed mechanically with what agitation his fine hands, which he held behind his back, turned and re-turned his cane, which was the object of my secret envy. If I had not so much admired this cane, and the combat of centaurs in Renaissance work which ornamented its silver head, that sign of extreme motion would have me." Next day the body of André's father is found in a room in a hotel where he had gone on leaving home to keep a business appointment with a stranger. The circumstances are all wrapped in mystery, the murderer having had two days to secure his escape before the body was found. The horror of this murder, and the burning desire to bring its perpetrator to punishment, come over the child's life like a cloud; but nevertheless he is childishly happy with his mother, whom he admires as much as he adores her, for the short period which remains before she becomes the wife of M. Termonde. Then a great change comes over his life. He cannot identify in his mind the moment when he begins to suspect and fear this man who had caressed and petted him from his childhood, but it is not long before he finds that his home is no longer his, and that his mother's new husband has no pleasure in seeing him there. The enmity that grows between the man and the boy, the consciousness of wrong and dim perception of an answering jealousy and opposition which André feels to the bottom of his heart-yet the strict justice and apparent care for his wellbeing which actuates his stepfather, are worked out with great care and skill. The constant selfrestraint and calm of Termonde, and the petulant passion, indignation, and strain against an inexorable will that rules him however he may resist, in the boy-grow gradually in intensity and concentrated bitterness with the progress of the years---though there is nothing to complain of in the action of the be consistent with an enlightened step-father, nothing that might not desire for the best interests of his wife's son. Between the extreme self-command and power of her hus band, and the passionate nature of her son, the mother, a pretty slight creature, full of tenderness and kindness, of parties and balls, of chit-chat and toilet, who perceives nothing of the dark and silent struggle going on beside her, and never indeed suspects its existence, is a wonderfully fine and delicate study. A suspicion which he can neither formulate nor explain, the consciousness, quite unjustified by anything he knows, of some connection between his father's unavenged murder and his mother's second husband, weighs upon the young man when he grows up, and is emancipated from all bonds, which his step-father takes care to accomplish on the earliest possible occasion, placing his fortune in his own hands, and launching him upon life. André, however, has no heart for Parisian life; and he has begun secretly to open up again the longarrested search for his father's murderer, when he is suddenly summoned to the deathbed of his aunt Louise, the only other personage in the self-restrained and severe tale. She has been struck with palsy, and when he arrives is unable to speak to him, but he makes out by signs that she is agonisingly anxious to have a certain packet of letters which she indicates burnt, before she can dispose herself to die. André sees that the letters are his father's, and written in the year preceding his death and unable to resist the temptation to read them, only pretends to obey his aunt's directions. When she is dead he reads the fatal letters, and sees as in a mystic picture the tragedy of his father's life. First his melancholy persuasion that his wife does not love him as he loves her, then the gradual appearance of Termonde between them, the growth of his influence, the persistence of a com panionship in which there was nothing to reprove, the gradual displacement of the husband though the intruder was no lover, and transgressed no law or decorum—all of which is told to his sister unconsciously in detail, sometimes with prayers for her advice, and accusations of himself for miserable jealousy and fear. "C'est si triste de sentir qu'on est de trop dans sa propre maison, qu'on possède une femme par tous les droits, qu'elle vous donne tout ce que ses devoirs l'obligeant à vous donner, tout excepté son cœur qui est à un autre, sans qu'elle s'en doute peut-être, à moins que-à moins que—!" This broken sentence, conveying as it does a most dreadful doubt, penetrates the son's heart. He has no longer any doubt that it is Termonde who has killed his father: is it possible that his mother is culpable too? The most powerful chapter in the book, though the least tragic, is that which follows, in which the mother arrives to do the last duties to the aunt Louise whom she has never loved, all unconscious of the horrible doubt with which her son meets her, and notes her every word and look to see if he can discern any sign of guilt. fears are dispersed by the sound of her familiar voice, by the naturalness of the sight of her, and the softness of her tones, and all the well-known indications of that character he knows so well. His "Neither her sorrow for me, nor her anxiety for the health of her husband (whom she had left ill), had prevented that poor mother from providing, even during the absence of a few days, for her little habitual comforts and elegancies. Her maid was there, accompanied by a porter, both of them charged with three or four bags of different sizes in English leather, carefully buttoned into cloth cases; a dressing-case; a box with her writing-materials; a satchel for her purse, her handkerchief, her book; and besides, a bottle for hot water on which to place her feet, two cushions, and a carriage-clock in an open case. "As I put her into the carriage she added, There is still a bonnetbox and a trunk.' She half smiled in saying this to make me smile in my turn. It was an old subject of little quarrels between us, the quantity of small and useless packages with which she encumbered herself. In any other condition of mind, I should have suffered to find in her, even while she gave me so great a mark of affection in coming, the constant traces of frivolity. But that very frivolity was sweet to see at this moment. This was, then, the woman whom I had imagined to myself as arriving with the gloomy purpose of searching through the papers of my dead aunt, to steal or destroy the accusing pages which might be found among them! This was the woman whom I had represented to myself that very morning as a criminal bending under the weight of a cowardly murder. What a tranquilising power was in that folly, that gentle weakness! I held my mother's hand. I longed to ask her pardon, to kiss the hem of her robe, to tell her that I loved her. She saw my emotion, and attributed it to the grief with which I had been stricken. She was sorry for me. Several times she said to me, Mon André!' It was so rare to me to find her thus, all mine, and in exactly the sympathy of heart of which I had need." The poor lady confirms this gentle impression both by her natural emotion and by her simple self-indulgences. She sits by the fire and cries, and tells him how his father brought her to this house on their marriage, and the whole story of that marriage, which he had never heard before. In the midst of the gloom of the book, this picture of the innocent woman, disculpating herself with every unconscious word, while her son, ashamed of his doubts, happy in his shame, relieved of the most horrible of fears, sits patient and listens, is very fine and touching. The tremendous duel which takes place after, prolonged from interview to interview, between André and Termonde, the little French Hamlet struggling into proof and certainty and the final scene in which, that certainty being attained, André calls upon the murderer to kill himself, or else given up to justice, is gloomy and terrible enough to make it unpleasant reading late at night or in a lonely place. But much the highest note in the book is struck in the scene with the mother. Revenge is apt to be tedious, and the record of mental struggles must be made more or less in a monotone; but the fine discrimination of such a sketch is possible only to a fine artist. We are compelled by space to put aside several books which demand notice, and which we had intended to add to the handful of the newest efforts of French fiction. Madame Henry Greville, who is an established favourite in England, gives us in Frankley' a sketch of American manners as they appear to a stranger, which no doubt is as true as a stranger's ideas on such a subject can be, and illustrate the wonderful "young girl" of that great country with some originality and power; but we have so many of these studies at first hand, that it is scarcely necessary to choose the reflection when the original is so easily obtainable. The work with which we shall conclude is one which has made a sensation of another than a literary kind. A military book is by no means a rarity, but a book which really tells us something about soldiers is. Tales of military adventure are - tions; from the pacific National Guard, reluctant even to defend the town he lives in, to the fierce heroism of the peasant volunteers. But, at any rate, no one has yet touched the barrack life in time of peace, which is the study of M. Abel Hermant. "The 21st had charged at Niederbronn, and Miserey, the father, got a scar across his face, and won his stripes there. As for the other names, common enough, and there will always be far too great a supply of sketches of garrison life and its humours; but we scarcely know where a genuine description of the soldatenleben, the interior life of the soldier, is to be found. This is the more remarkable in France, where, as the author of Trooper Miserey's experiences the 'Cavalier Miserey' says, are so entirely in time of peace, "Nous avons tous dormi sous that he finds it hard to realise that la couverture grise et dans les there is any such thing as war, or, lits étroits de la chambrée," at any rate, that his regiment where every one, or almost every should ever have to take part in one, has served his time in the it. The idea strikes him with army, and is liable to be called astonishment when he notices the upon to serve again in case of names of battles inscribed on the emergency. For us it is differ- walls of the school of arms. He ent. We grumble enough when only knows the last one, at which we have to, pay taxes to keep up his father, who had risen from the the army, reserving the right to ranks to be lieutenant in the same crouch behind it in times of dan- regiment, was present. ger; and when our soldiers return victorious from distant climes, it is open to us to wave our hats and shout, or sit at the club window and sneer, according to our different temperaments; but as a rule we can remain placidly unconscious of their existence. In France, the military service forms a real part of the national life; yet, even there, M. Hermant tells to him of any such things since he us he can find nothing but "Chau- had joined the regiment. He asked vinist tirades, conventional carica- himself if it was not all stories. tures, the sentimental reminiscences Fancy the 21st charging! He could of one year men, the indiscretions understand his comrades in their of fashionable officers whispered fatigue-jackets, at their work, quiet at the confessional of the Vie and contented. He could understand Parisienne,' or mere flying pages, to the nines, capable of keeping their them in full uniform, pipeclayed up picturesque bits caught by ama- ranks fixed and immovable for an teurs" in contemporary literature. hour; but how about really sharpened We do not exactly see under which swords,-swords that strike someof these heads fall the delightful thing else than the Turk's head, points works of MM. Erckmann - Chat- that prick and edges that cut? Berian, who have presented to us sides, what would be the good of it many types of military life, from than to get up at the réveillé, to go to all? Has one any other duty to do the enthusiasts of the first rethe instruction, to rub one's horse publican armies to the unwilling down, to eat one's rations, and sleep soldier of Napoleon's conscrip- at night? And then he read again Jemmapes, Austerlitz, Puebla,—he remembered that they were the names, of battles inscribed on the colours. And for the first time he began to think that there were really battles and charges, and men who fought to the death. No one had yet spoken 1 Le Cavalier Miserey, 21o Chasseurs. Par Abel Hermant. on the wall, Honneur et patrie-Gloire learns it by chance, that their coloà la France; and he had a confused nel is leaving them, go in a body kind of notion that these things were to salute him at a small station not included in the system-that he which his train must pass. Their was not taught that. silent muster in the early morning is thus described : The reception of the recruit by his new comrades, the kindness and consideration with which the older soldiers initiate him into his duties, the gradual absorption of the individual into the community till he loses all consciousness of himself except as a part of his troop, are minutely described by our author, and form, with some rough sketches of character and a few distinct scenes, the principal subject of the earlier part of the book. The officers of the regiment, with their different little peculiarities, Simard, with his stuttering "Ahé, ahé; " Weber, with his catchword of "C'est embêtant ; Coudougnan, with his scraps of Latin,-give one more the idea of faithful portraits than of fancy sketches; and, indeed, we believe that the publication of the 'Cavalier Miserey,' besides causing a considerable sensation in the French army, has induced certain officers, who believed themselves to be personally caricatured, to defy M. Hermant to mortal combat-a consequence which our English authors fortunately have no need to fear. Perhaps the most remarkable figure is that of the colonel of the regiment, the Comte de Vermandois-one of those excellent law abiding citizens whom a paternal Government has lately expelled from France for the crime of being descended from its former sovereigns. The departure of the Prince from his regiment, when the order for his dismissal has been resolved upon, is one of the most striking scenes in the book, and has probably a foundation in fact. His officers, warned by Miserey, who "There were no more stars in the sky. The day was breaking over the silent streets of the slumbering quarter of St Sever. From time to time the gallop of a horse was heard on the stones. Then the sound of the gallop grew fainter, and died away in the distance. Officers met each other, called out to each other, Are you going?-You too?' and they galloped on side by side. A group had halted in front of the barracks. Pimpernel shouted, 'This way, gentlemen! The others are here.' Captain de Simard Place des Chartreux. was waiting on the grass-plot in the "At the same moment Commandant de Marcy la Tour appeared in the Place. He did not slacken the speed of his horse; he said simply, as he passed, 'Come, gentlemen.' And he started first. Coudougnan came up behind, crying, 'Here I am, here I road but the gallop of the close troop am!' Nothing more was heard on the of horses. The road was straight, the country bare and unbroken. The thirty officers galloped on in a light cloud of dust. The morning sun was pale, and the blue dolmans looked very light in colour. Some officers had wrapped themselves in their black cloaks. Swift had his little cape with its hood. |