But I take what Musset has given me, and, having an intense admiration for the author of _A Saint Blaise_ and _L'Andalouse_ and the _Chanson de Fortunio_, a lively gratitude to the author of _Il ne faut jurer de rien_ and _Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, call _Emmeline_ a very badly told and uninteresting story. The almost over-elaborate description of the heroine at the beginning does not fit in with her subsequent conduct; Gilbert is a nonentity; the husband, though noble in conduct, is pale in character, and the sister had much better have been left out.[236] So the rest may be silence. [Sidenote: Gerard de Nerval--his peculiar position.] I have been accused (quite good-naturedly) of putting Rabelais in this history because I liked him, though he was not a novelist. My conscience is easy there; and I think I have refuted the peculiar charge beforehand. But I might have a little more difficulty (though I should still lose neither heart nor hope) in the case of the ill-fated but well-beloved writer whom gods and men call Gerard de Nerval, or simply Gerard, though librarians and bibliographers sometimes insist on his legal surname, Labrunie. It certainly would be difficult, from the same point of view of strict legality, to call anything of his exactly a novel. He was a poet, a dramatist, a voyage-and-travel writer, a bibliographer (strange trade, which associates the driest with the most "necta_w_eous" of men!) even sometimes a tale-teller by name, but even then hardly a novelist. Yet he managed to throw over the most unlikely material a novelish or at least a romantic character, which is sometimes--nay, very often--utterly wanting in professed and admitted masters of the business; and he combines with this faculty--or rather he exalts and transports it into--a strange and exquisite charm, which nobody else in French, except Nodier[237] (who very possibly taught Gerard something), possesses, and which, though it is rather commoner in English and in the best and now almost prehistoric German, is rare anywhere, and, in Gerard's peculiar brand of it, almost entirely unknown.