How Gautier managed to keep all this comparatively serious, if not quite so, in treatment, is perhaps less difficult to make out than why he took the trouble to do so. But it is the entire absences of irony on the one side and on the other of the dream-quality--the pure imagination which makes the impossibilities of _La Morte_ and of _Arria Marcella_, and even of the trifle _Omphale_, so delightful--that deprives _Fortunio_ of attraction in my eyes. Such faint glimmerings of it as there are are confined to two very minor characters:--one of the courtesans, Cinthia, a beautiful statuesque Roman, who has simplified the costume-problem by wearing nothing--literally nothing--except one of two dresses, one black velvet and the other white watered silk; and the "Count George" (we are never told his surname), who gives the overture-orgie. One might, as the lady said to Professor Wilson in regard to the _Noctes_, say to him, "I really think you eat too many oysters, and drink too much [not indeed in his case] whisky," and I can find no excuse for his deliberately upsetting an enormous bowl of flaming arrack punch on a floor swept by women's dresses. But he is quite human, and he makes the best speech and scene in the book when he remonstrates with Musidora for secluding herself because she cannot discover the elusive marquis-rajah tiger-keeper,--and, I fear I must add, "tiger" himself,--from whom the thing takes its title.[211] [Sidenote: And others.] It is, however, almost worth while to go through the freak-splendours and transformation-scene excitements of _Fortunio_ to prepare the palate[212] to enjoy _La Toison d'Or_ which follows. Here is once more the true Gautieresque humour, good humour, marvellous word-painting, and romance, agreeably--indeed charmingly--twisted together. There is no fairy-story transposed into a modern and probable key which surpasses this of the painter Tiburce; and the disorderly curios of his rooms; and his sudden and heroic determination to fall desperately in love with a blonde; and his setting off to Flanders to find one; and the fruitlessness of his search and his bewitchment with the Magdalen in the "Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp (ah! what has become of it?); and his casual discovery and courtship of a girl like that celestial convertite; and her sorrow when she finds that she is only a substitute; and her victory by persuading her lover to paint her _as_ the Magdalen and so work off the witchery.[213] Of course some one may shrug shoulders and murmur, "Always the _berquinade_?" But I do not think _La Morte Amoureuse_ was a _berquinade_. [Sidenote: Longer books, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ and others.]