Charles Nodier, who belongs only by virtue of a couple of early works to the period with which we are dealing, and who, except for these, must be classed as a French Romanticist prior to the existence of the French Romantic School, was born at Besançon in 1780. His father was a magistrate, a gifted and honourable man, severe in his public capacity and amiable in his home; he was a declared adherent of the eighteenth-century philosophy, and educated his son according to the principles laid down in Rousseau's _Émile_. Charles early showed an astonishing aptitude for learning, and much talent in various directions. At seventeen years of age he was so capable a philologist as to have compiled a dictionary of French onomatopoeic words, a work which the Minister of Education considered worthy of a place in the school libraries. By the time he was eighteen he was so accomplished a naturalist that he brought out a work on the antennae of insects and their organs of hearing. His first romance was given to the press about the same time. [Illustration: NODIER] Nodier's was a stirring childhood and early youth. At the age of thirteen he had some experience of the horrors of the Reign of Terror, for his father was head of the revolutionary tribunal at Besançon. In 1793 the warmhearted and determined little boy saved a woman's life. A lady of the town was accused of sending money to an émigré relation in the Royalist army of the Rhine. The charge was proved beyond a doubt, and the provisions of the law in such a case being unmistakable, the lady's fate was apparently sealed. A mutual friend of his family and the lady told the whole story to young Nodier, who first vainly attempted to move his father by entreaties, and then declared that he would kill himself if the death sentence were passed. He was so much in earnest, and seemed so resolved to carry out his threat, that at the last moment the father, in dread of losing his son, did violence to his Roman virtue, and acquitted the offender. In the same year, Besançon not offering sufficient educational advantages, young Nodier was sent to Strasburg. It so happened that he was boarded there in the house of the notorious Eulogius Schneider, the cruel governor of Alsace, who shortly afterwards perished on the scaffold in Paris. The scenes he saw in Strasburg were well adapted to quicken the imagination of a future writer of romance. As a youth in Paris he was a witness of the frivolity and pleasure-seeking that prevailed under the Directory, and after his return to Besançon in 1799 he interested himself in the cause of the state prisoners and suspected persons in that town. This led to his being denounced as dangerous to society; one night his door was broken open and his papers were examined, but nothing more incriminating was found than his works on the antennae of insects and the roots of words. The excitement of the situation satisfied his romantic love of adventure; it pleased him to be at war