These fates, and especially the last, have weighed upon the minor French novelists of the early nineteenth century perhaps even more heavily than upon our own: for the circulating library was an earlier and a more widely spread institution in France than in England, and the lower and lowest middle classes were a good deal more given to reading, and especially to "light" reading, there than here. Nor can it be said that any of the writers to be now mentioned, with one possible and one certain exception, is of importance to literature as literature. But all have their importance to literary--and especially departmental-literary--history, in ways which it is hoped presently to show: and there is still amusement in some. The chief, though not the only, names that require notice here are those of Mesdames de Montolieu and (again) de Genlis, of Ducray-Duminil, born almost as early as Pigault-Lebrun, even earlier a novelist, and yoked with him by Victor Hugo in respect of his novel _Lolotte et Fanfan_ in the sneer noted in the last volume;[37] the _other_ Ducange, again as much "other" as the other Moliere;[38] the Vicomte d'Arlincourt; and--a comparative (if, according to some, blackish) swan among these not quite positive geese--Paul de Kock. The eldest put in his work before the Revolution and the youngest before Waterloo, but the most prolific time of all was that of the first two or three decades of the century with which we are dealing. With these, but not of them--a producer at last of real "letters" and more than any one else except Chateaubriand (more "intensively" perhaps even than he was) a pioneer of Romanticism--comes Charles Nodier. [Sidenote: Paul de Kock.]