M. Jules Claretie has written many novels. But he has also written plays, histories, biographies, leading articles: he is the most indefatigable of writers, as he is one of the most intelligent and clear-headed. He has, however, the defect of being a literary Don Juan, wasting his smiles amid the _mille e tre_ instead of consecrating his pen in legitimate wedlock to a single Muse. The immense facility with which he writes is fatal to the enduring success of his novels. They abound in powerful episodes and strong bits of description, and here and there some single scene, original in conception and forcible in treatment, starts out from the mass like the scarlet draperies in a faded piece of Gobelin tapestry. His gifts are those of an historian or of a critic, not those of a novel-writer. When in his historical novels, such as _Les Muscadins_ or _Le Beau Solignac_, he trenches on the firm ground of the Real, his true force displays itself. In these works he has attempted to revive the lengthy chronicles of the elder Dumas, but without that irrepressible verve, that headlong vehemence of animal spirits, which, like the rush of a locomotive, bore the reader, breathless and interested, over rough places and smooth alike. The draught M. Claretie brews for our drinking bears no affinity to that intoxicating and sparkling champagne. The Dumas brand is exhausted, and all imitations are but as flat cider in comparison. In the _Renegade_, which is a specimen of a style of fiction largely in vogue at present in France--one that might be called the contemporaneous historical novel--M. Claretie found himself once more on firm and familiar ground. The hero of the _Renegade_ is a Republican politician who turns Bonapartist, and who finally commits suicide something after the fashion of M. Prevost-Paradol, whose career, it is indeed said, suggested the book. But M. Claretie is seen at his best when he lays down the pen of a novel-writer and takes up that of a critic or that of a chronicler of passing events. His plays possess the same defects as his novels, being diffuse, devoid of incident and overloaded with unnecessary details. But the clearness and vigor of the style, the strong sense and daylight intelligence that reign in all his writings, prevent his poorest works from being commonplace or uninteresting.