The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in _Vanity Fair_ itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without God in the world." There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature (which he never was) if he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people are married in church as well as at the _mairie_, and I remember one casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to mass, the whole spiritual region--religious, theological, ecclesiastical, and what not--is left blank. I do not remember so much as a _cure_ figuring personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting that Paul was born in 1794, and therefore passed his earliest childhood in the time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in France--when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever hearing the name of God, except perhaps in phrases like _pardieu_ or _parbleu_. It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or draw inferences; I merely indicate the fact. Another fact--perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs stating--is that Paul de Kock is not exactly the person to "take a course of," unless under such conditions as those under which Mr. Carlyle took a course of a far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one regrets to remember) very ungrateful for the good it did him. He is (what some of his too critical countrymen have so falsely called Dumas) a mere _amuseur_, and his amusement is somewhat lacking in variety. Nevertheless, few critical readers[59] of the present history will, I think, consider the space given to him here as wasted. He was a really powerful schoolmaster to bring the popular novel into still further popularity; and he made a distinct advance upon such persons as Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil--upon the former in comparative decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the latter in getting close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the _furniture_ of his novels--the scene-painting, property-arranging, and general staging. This has been most unfairly assigned to Balzac as originator, not merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention our own men, Paul began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of those curious efforts, half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal with later, and nearly two decades before _Les Chouans_. And, horrifying as the statement may be to some, I venture to say that his mere _mise en scene_ is sometimes, if not always, better than Balzac's own, though he may be to that younger contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard Street in respect of plot, character, thought, conversation, and all the