The difficulty of discussing or illustrating, in short space and due proportion, the novel or _roman_ element in such a writer must be sufficiently obvious. His longer travels in Germany and the East are steeped in this element; and the shorter compositions which bear names of novel-character are often "little travels" in his native province, the Isle of France, and that larger _banlieue_ of Paris, towards Picardy and Flanders, which our Seventy Thousand saved, by dying, the other day. But it is impossible--and might even, if possible, be superfluous--to touch the first group. Of the second there are three subdivisions, which, however, are represented with not inconsiderable variation in different issues.[241] Their titles are _La Boheme Galante_, _Les Filles du Feu_, and _Le Reve et la Vie_, the last of which contains only one section, _Aurelia_, never, if I do not mistake, revised by Gerard himself, and only published after his most tragic death. Its _supra_-title really describes the most characteristic part or feature of all the three and of Gerard's whole work. [Sidenote: Their general character.] To one who always lived, as Paul de Saint-Victor put it in one of the best of those curious exercises of his mastery over words, "in the fringes[242] of the actual world," this confusion of place and no place, this inextricable blending of fact and dream, imagination and reality, was natural enough; and no one but a Philistine will find fault with the sometimes apparently mechanical and Sternian transitions which form part of its expression. There was, indeed, an inevitable _mixedness_ in that strange nature of his; and he will pass from almost "true Dickens" (he actually admits inspiration from him) in accounts of the Paris _Halles_, or of country towns, to De Quinceyish passages, free from that slight touch of _apparatus_ which is undeniable now and then in the Opium Eater. Here are longish excursions of pure family history; there, patches of criticism in art or drama; once at least an elaborate and--for the time--very well informed as well as enthusiastic sketch of French seventeenth-century poetry. It may annoy the captious to find another kind of confusion, for which one is not sure that Gerard himself was responsible, though it is consistent enough with his peculiarities. Passages are redistributed among different books and pieces in a rather bewildering manner; and you occasionally rub your eyes at coming across--in a very different context, or simply shorn of its old one--something that you have met before. To others this, if not exactly an added charm, will at any rate be admitted to "grace of congruity." It would be less like Gerard if it were otherwise. [Sidenote: Particular examples.]