loveless marriages, envy, fawning, bitterness, perpetual small cheating or endless insect-like toil; and the land, in whose service men work themselves and their kindred to the bone, and grudge a pittance to old age. The bourgeoisie and their customs vary with their nationality, but peasant life is much the same all over Europe. Clemenceau found similar traits of life and character in Galicia to those of La Vendée; and others will tell us that from Ireland to Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the peasant and the small farmer conduct their lives upon the same lines: hard work, dependence upon the seasons, family authority, tribal feuds, and a meticulous social system of comment and convention, under which the individual finds himself far less free than in the unhampered, unnoticed life of the towns. Yet many of the "ambushes of life" are to be found in the cities; and about a third of these tales are laid in the towns and among the well-to-do middle class. M. Clemenceau's satire plays freely upon the "marriage of convention," by which two families agree, after a certain amount of haggling and mutual sharp practice, to bind two young strangers together in the closest of relationship, for time, and also, we are told, for eternity, in the interest of property alone. Still, human nature adapts itself to anything, and even such marriages have their compensations, as our author lightly and ironically points out. Being a genuine sociologist, he does not handle these tales of the bourgeoisie and their vagaries within what is, after all, an artificial and exclusive form of existence, as seriously as he does the great plain outlines of peasant life. Whether he writes of town or country, of _Fleur de Froment_ and _Six Sous_, or of a _ménage à trois_; whether he calls up a Greek courtesan to theorise about her profession, or describes a long-standing bitter, and motiveless peasant feud, his style is always fluent and charming, vivid with irony, and graceful with poetic thought. Yet the defect as well as the merit of M. Clemenceau's fiction and essay-writing is just this admirable, unvarying ease and fluency. One feels that he writes with perfect unconsciousness, as the thoughts come into his head. And, after a while, the ungrateful reader is inclined to ask for some kind of selection in the feast before him, where all is good, very good, even, but nothing is _excellent_. Like a far greater writer, Clemenceau--on paper at least--"has no peaks in him." His literature was an admirable "by-product" of his almost limitless capacities; his actions and not his writings are the achievements of his life. CHAPTER XII CLEMENCEAU AND THE DREYFUS AFFAIR