Today Paul Adam is in all his radiance and on the very eve of glory. Each of his gestures, each pace of his brings him nearer to the bomb-ketch ready to explode, and if he withstands the qualing from the thunderclap, he will be king and master. By this bomb-ketch, I do not mean the great mob, but that large public, already selected, which, insensible to pure art, nevertheless demands that its romantic emotions be served enrobed in true literary style, original, strongly perfumed, of long dough cleverly kneaded, and in a form new enough to surprise and charm. This was Balzac's public; it is the public which Paul Adam seems on the point of reconquering. The novel of maimers (I omit three or four masters whom I have not to judge here) is fallen lower than ever since the century and a half when it was brought from England. Neglecting observation, style, imagination and especially ideas, which were rather general than particular, the fictionists who took up the trade of telling stories, have brought fiction to such a point of disrepute that an intelligent man, mindful of employing his leisure in a manner worthy of his intelligence, no longer dares open one of these books, which even the quay book-stalls rebel against and dam up against the yellow current. Paul Adam certainly has suffered through this convulsion of scorn: the lettered men and women, badly informed, have long supposed that his books were like all the rest. They are different. First by style: Paul Adam uses a language that is vigorous, concise, full of images; new to the point of inaugurating syntactic forms. By observation: his keen glance pierces like a wasp sting through things and souls; like the new photography, he reads through skins and caskets. By the imagination, which permits him to evoke and vivify the most diverse, characteristic and personal beings, he has, like Balzac, the genius not only of giving life to his characters, but personality, of making them true individuals, all well-endowed with an individual soul: in _la Force du Mal_, a young girl is placed so sharply under our eyes that she becomes unforgettable; her character, unfortunately, too abruptly summed up, wavers at the end. By fecundity, finally: fecundity not only linear and of the nature of cleared fields, but of works whose slightest are still works. He has undertaken two great romantic epopees which his ardent bold spirit will perfect to the condition of monuments, _l'Epoque_ and _les Volontés merveilleuses_. He works alone, like a swarm, and at the first ray of sunshine, the bee ideas rush tumultuously forth and disperse across the vast fields of life. Paul Adam is a magnificient spectacle. LAUTRÉAMONT