M.
Balzac has introduced us to mystics, and murderers, and old maids,
and doctors, and adventurers, and poets, and a girl with golden
eyes, and malefactors, and bankrupts, and mad old collectors,
peasants, cures, critics, dreamers, debauchees; but all these are
somewhat distant acquaintances, many of them undesirable
acquaintances. In the great "Comedie Humaine" have you a single
real friend? Some of Charles de Bernard's folk are more akin to
us, such as "La Femme de Quarante Ans," and the owner of the hound
Justinian, and that drunken artist in "Gerfaut." But an Englishman
is rather friendless, rather an alien and an outcast, in the
society of French fiction. Monsieur de Camors is not of our monde,
nor is the Enfant du Siecle; indeed, perhaps good Monsieur
Sylvestre Bonnard is as sympathetic as anyone in that populous
country of modern French romance. Or do you know Fifi Vollard?
Something must be allowed for strange manners, for exotic ideas,
and ways not our own. More perhaps is due to what, as Englishmen
think, is the lack of HUMOUR in the most brilliant and witty of
races. We have friends many in Moliere, in Dumas, in Rabelais; but
it is far more difficult to be familiar, at ease, and happy in the
circles to which Madame Sand, M. Daudet, M. Flaubert, or M. Paul
Bourget introduce us. M. Bourget's old professor, in "Le
Disciple," we understand, but he does not interest himself much in
us, and to us he is rather a curiosity, a "character," than an
intimate.
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