It is a mistake, too, to think that their novels and plays are immoral or hinge always on the eternal triangle. Various passions are treated by them in their air-tight receiver; their methods of psychological evisceration recall the laboratory of an analytical chemist. In Germinie it is the degradation of a woman through weakness; in Madame Gervaisais--that Odyssey of a woman's soul--it is the mystic passion for religion; in Manette Salomon, art and woman and their dangers to the impressionable artistic temperament; Charles Demailly pictures the gulfs of despair into which the literary, the poetic soul may be plunged; Sœur Philomène shows the combat between religious vows and nature; and so on through a wide gamut. And these two nervous artists have been mockingly called maniacs, their work has been derided as inutile--that work which practically reconstructed the artistic life of the eighteenth century and discovered to itself the artistic soul of the nineteenth. If they had remained normal units of their class, they would have gambled, shot pigeons, sported mistresses, and dabbled in racing, drinking, and the other sterilities of fashionable life. They preferred art, and they were rewarded in the usual fashion. The singular thing is that they expected, ingenuous souls, encouragement from their world. Fame came only when Jules was dead and Edmond too old and embittered to appreciate it. The survivor saw his ideas appropriated by Zola and the younger crowd, and cheapened and coarsened beyond all likeness to the original. What, then, must have been the dismay and perplexity of the brothers when they heard the hissing, catcalls, groans, and yells of an organized clique sworn to kill Henriette Maréchal? The body of the house was not hostile; but politics, the Republican opposition to the patronage of the Bonapartes, aroused students on the other side of the Seine, and a scandalous scene, only equalled by the Parisian productions of Hernani and Tannhäuser, occurred. Strangely enough, Théophile Gautier, who had figured in the Hernani fracas, had written the prologue to Henrietta Maréchal, and spoke it without opposition from the malcontents, though he was the librarian of Princess Mathilde. Not a word could be heard in any of the scenes, and when Got, the comedian who played in the cast,--the rest were Delaunay, the Lafontaines, Arnould-Plessis, Bressant, and other distinguished artists,--appeared to announce, as was the custom, the authors' names, he stood for ten minutes unable to make himself heard in the terrific hubbub. The Journal of the brothers contains a minute account of the affair, and of their terror as they stood, pale, breathless, peeping out upon a disordered sea of human faces. After all, it is a joy, despite its frequent injustice, to see a community take its drama seriously and not merely as a first aid to digestion.