[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people to that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the development of the more serious elements of character amid the refinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good company. The proper function of fictitious literature in affording us a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better finished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less through the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist, than by the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The situations of M. Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic importance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of human nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditions of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result, they become subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the characters they help to form. Often, his most attentive reader will have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul, tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the memory. He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journal d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh, the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yet with no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages, with the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and then unravels some moral embarrassment, really worthy of a trained dramatic expert. But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult, revealing situations, such a reader will recognise as old acquaintances after the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted and attractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys, Henri de Lerne, Madame de Tecle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de Fremeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de Vaudricourt. "How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madame de Sevigne and some other of her literary favourites in the days of the Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they took in high things! How much more worthy they were than the people who live now!"--What good company! That is precisely what the admirer of M. Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf, to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to tell his last story, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his most recent effort at characterisation.