M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story of _Les Rois_, says with a sneer that one of his personages was 'née pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans de la _Révue des Deux Mondes_.' Now in his own volume, entitled _Les Rois_, published this season, and received with great curiosity in Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling, the mystery of Johann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on social and political problems into his reproductions of these personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph, or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet's _Rois en Exil_. There is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions, which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself. The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters. It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M. Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of the _Révue des Deux Mondes_, in which, to go no further back than last year, such admirable works as _La Vie Privét de Michael Teissier_ and _Le Secret du Précepteur_ have first seen the light. To be a critic of it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.