Now from these latter, which had nearly ruined _L'Homme Qui Rit_, _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if not entirely free, suffers comparatively little. The early and celebrated incident of the carronade running amuck shows characteristic neglect of burlesque possibilities (and, as I believe some experts have maintained, of actual ones), but it has the qualities of the Hugonian defects. An arm-chair critic may ask, Where was the English fleet in the Channel when a French one was allowed to come out and slowly mob the _Claymore_ to destruction, without, as far as one sees, any interference or counter-effort, though the expedition of that remarkable corvette formed part of an elaborate and carefully prepared offensive?[121] Undoubtedly, the Convention scenes must be allowed--even by sympathisers with the Revolution--to be clumsy stopgaps, unnecessary to the action and possessed of little intrinsic value in themselves. The old fault of verbosity and "watering out" recurs; and so does the reappearance, with very slight change, of figures and situations. Cimourdain in character is very much of a more respectable Claude Frollo; and in conduct, _mutatis_ not so very many _mutandis_, almost as much of a less respectable Javert. The death of Gauvain is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which had preceded it; and the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew who is about to liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the _peripeteia_, merely gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportion and of his flux of rhetoric. All this and more is true; yet _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ is, "in its _fine_ wrong way," a great book, and with _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, completes the pillars, such as they are, which support Hugo's position as a novelist. The rescue of the children by Lantenac is superb, though you may find twenty cavils against it easily: and the whole presentation of the Marquis, except perhaps the speech referred to, is one of the best pictures of the _ancienne noblesse_ in literature, one which--to reverse the contrast just made--annihilates Dickens's caricature thereof in _A Tale of Two Cities_. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by "L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began with Quasimodo's similar act in _Notre-Dame_; but the reader who cannot "let himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worship more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the third volume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one may say that through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ as such, there is the great Victorian _souffle_ and surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, which carries the reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles. [Sidenote: Final remarks.]