To ascend a step higher in the social hierarchy and learn what a queen, wounded in her feelings as a woman and a mother, can suffer, read M. A. Daudet's last novel, "Les Rois en Exil" (Dentu), in which he continues to work the vein he opened so successfully in "Le Nabab," the portraiture of Parisian life, viewed from its most brilliant side as from that most flecked with impurity, disorder, and adventure. In the "Nabab," M. Daudet had the advantage of describing the world he had been most familiar with, since his two chief personages were M. de Morny, whose secretary he had been for several years, and M. Bravay, his former friend. But this advantage was also a defect, for no true novel is possible with very well-known contemporary personages for the characters; and the "Nabab," marvellous as regards truth and vivid detail, was poor as regards composition. In "Les Rois en Exil" we again meet with a number of well-known personages: the King of Hanover, the Queen of Spain, the Prince of Orange, the Queen of Naples, Don Carlos. Elysée Méraut, the little prince's tutor, is said to be the portrait of an excellent youth, by name Thérion, also entrusted with a prince's education, and who was horrified to find that he believed more firmly in the principles of legitimacy and divine right than his pupil's parents. The father of Elysée Méraut, the old Legitimist peasant who sees his son's future insured because the Comte de Chambord promises to bear him in mind, is no other than A. Daudet's own father. But all the real portraits are secondary characters that form the background of the picture. The leading personages of the drama, Christian II., the dethroned king of Illyria, who takes his exile very lightly, and forgets it by wallowing in the mire of Parisian dissipations; his wife, the noble Fréderique, who lives but for one thing, the recovery of the throne of her husband and son, and in that hope endures every affront; their trusty attendants, the two Rosens; and finally John Lévis, the unscrupulous man of business, who knows the tariff of all the vices, and with his wife Séphora, takes advantage of the dissolute weakness of Christian II.,--all these leading figures, though compounded of traits, if not real at least profoundly true, are the author's own creation. They are artistically superior, moreover, to those of the "Nabab," more complete, more lifelike even, for they are stripped of such traits as are too personal, secondary, fleeting, contrary to actual reality, and wear rather the character of types. Types they truly are, this king and queen, representative of all the grandeur and vileness, the heroism and cowardice, the noble pride and foolish prejudice, dwelling in the exiled sovereigns who came to Paris, some to weep for monarchy, others to hold its carnival, some as to the centre of pleasure, others to that of political intrigue; and is there not a philosophy, historical and political, in M. Daudet's novel, in his picture of Christian II.