Diderot's _La Religieuse_; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction--as in so many other branches of literature--belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole new worlds for the exploration of the novelist--the world of nature on the one hand, and on the other the world of social problems and all the living forces of actual life. The difference between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. _Les Misérables_ is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and--running through all this--its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure--the most 'wild enormity' ever produced by a man of genius. Another development of the romantic spirit appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealized in a loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.