Of Gautier's longer books it is not necessary to say much, because, with perhaps one exception, they are admittedly not his forte.[214] Of the longest, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, I am myself very fond. Its opening and first published division, _Le Chateau de la Misere_, is one of the finest pieces of description in the whole range of the French novel; and there are many interesting scenes, especially the great duel of the hero Sigognac with the bravo Lampourde. But some make it a reproach, not, I think, of very damaging validity, that so much of the book is little more than a "study off" the _Roman Comique_;[215] and it is, though not exactly a reproach, a great misfortune that in time, kind, and almost everything else it enters into competition with Dumas, whose gifts as a manager of such things were as much above Gautier's as his powers as a writer were below Theo's. _Le Roman de la Momie_, though possessing the abiding talisman of style, suffers in the first place from being mere Egyptology novelised, and in the second from the same thing having been done, on a scale much better suited to the author, in _Le Pied de la Momie_. Nor are _Spirite_ and _Militona_ free from parallel charges: while _La Belle Jenny_--that single and unfortunate appeal to the _abonne_ noted above--really may fail to amuse those who are not "irked by the style." [Sidenote: _Mlle. de Maupin._] There remains the most notorious and the most abused of all Gautier's work, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. Perhaps here also, as in the case of _La Morte Amoureuse_, I cannot do better than simply reprint, with very slight addition, what I said of the book nearly forty years ago. For the case is a peculiar one, and I have made no change in my own estimate, though I think the inclusion of the _Preface_--not because I agree with it any less--more dubious than I did then. In this _Preface_ the doctrine of "art for art's sake" and of its consequent independence of any _licet_ or _non-licet_ from morality is put with great ability and no little cogency, but in a fashion essentially juvenile, from its want of measure and its evident wish to provoke as much as to prove.[216] Without it the book would probably have excited far less odium and opprobrium than it has actually done; it would, if separate, be an excellent critical essay on the general subject; while in its actual position it almost subjects the text to the curse of purpose, from which nothing which claims to be art ought (according to the doctrine of both preface and book) to be more free.