M. France has some good things to say about Stendhal’s style. M. Bourget calls his prose algebraic, which is rather hard. But there are many ways of writing, says M. France, and one can succeed at it perfectly without any art, just as one can be a great writer without correctness, as Henri IV. was in his letters and Saint-Simon in his memoirs. No one would read “Le Rouge et le Noir” or “La Chartreuse de Parme,” as the Duchess in a Pinero play said she read her French novel, for the style. Anatole France commits himself to a very definite statement. No Frenchman, he says, in Stendhal’s time wrote well, the French language was altogether lost, and every author at the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote ill, with the sole exception of Paul Louis Courier. “The disaster to the language, begun in the youth of Mirabeau, increased under the Revolution, despite those giants of the tribune, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, compared with whom our orators of to-day seem noisy children, despite Camille Desmoulins, author of the last well-written pamphlet France was to read; the evil was aggravated under the Empire and the Restoration; it became a frightful thing in the works of Thiers and of Guizot.” This, from the greatest living master of French, is not without its interest. No one could say the same thing of our English prose in the same period—a period that gave us, to take a few instances at random, Cowper’s letters and Byron’s, and the Essays of Elia. Stendhal, then, was not remarkable for style. But one gathers that, in the rare occurrence of congenial society, he was a good talker. One would give something to have been a third in the box at La Scala when Stendhal, a young officer of Napoleon, met an old, lanky, melancholy general of artillery—no other than Choderlos de Laclos, author, before the Revolution, of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Stendhal, as a child, had known the original of Laclos’s infamous Mme. de Merteuil, an original who appears to have been even worse than the copy. Some years later George Sand, on her way to Italy with Musset, met Stendhal on a Rhone steamer, and he told her a story which, she said, shocked her. She does not repeat it. One would really rather like to hear a story which could shock George Sand. JULES LEMAÎTRE