As for the _Comedies-Proverbes_, it is impossible for the abandoned reader of plays who reads them either as poems or as stories, or as both, to go wrong there, whichever of the delightful bunch he takes up. To play upon some of their own titles--you are never so safe in swearing as when you swear that they are charming; when the door of the library that contains them is opened you may think yourself happy, and when it is shut upon you reading them you may know yourself to be happier. But in pure prose narratives this exquisite poet, delightful playwright, and unquestionable though too much wasted genius, never seems quite at home. For though they sometimes have a poignant appeal, it is almost always the illegitimate or at any rate extrinsic one of revelation of the author's personal feeling; or else that of formulation of the general effects of passion, not that of embodiment of its working. [Sidenote: _Frederic et Bernerette._] Thus, for instance, there are few more pathetic stories in substance, or in occasional expression of a half-aphoristic kind, than _Frederic et Bernerette_. The grisette heroine has shed all the vulgarity of Paul de Kock's at his worst, and has in part acquired more poignancy than that of Murger at his best. Her final letter to her lover, just before her second and successful attempt at suicide, is almost consummate. But, somehow or other, it strikes one rather as a marvellous single study--a sort of modernised and transcended _Spectator_ paper--a "Farewell of a Deserted Damsel"--than as part, or even as _denouement_, of a story. When the author says, "Je ne sais pas lequel est le plus cruel, de perdre tout a coup la femme qu'on aime par son inconstance, ou par sa mort," he says one of the final things finally. But it would be as final and as impressive if it were an isolated _pensee_. The whole story is not well told; Frederic, though not at all a bad fellow, and an only too natural one, is a thing of shreds and patches, not gathered together and grasped as they should be in the hand of the tale-teller; the narrative "backs and fills" instead of sweeping straight onwards. [Sidenote: _Les Deux Maitresses, Le Fils du Titien_, etc.]