Is Maxime perhaps just a thought too "digne," also, in his relations with his little sister—when he visits her at school, for instance, and promises to convey the bread she cannot eat to some deserving beggar? At the moment he is the most deserving beggar he chances to know of, but he is resolved to keep his beggary a secret from Hélène. "Cher Maxime," says she, "a bientôt, n’est-ce pas? Tu me diras si tu as rencontré un pauvre, si tu lui as donné mon pain, et s’il l’a trouvé bon." And Maxime, in his journal: "Oui, Hélène, j’ai rencontré un pauvre, et je lui ai donné ton pain, qu’il a emporté comme une proie dans sa mansarde solitaire, et il l’a trouvé bon; mais c’était un pauvre sans courage, car il a pleuré en devorant l’aumône de tes petites mains bien-aimeés. Je te dirai tout celà, Hélène, car il est bon que tu saches qu’il y a sur la terre des souffrances plus sérieuses que tes souffrances d’enfant: je te dirai tout, excepté le nom du pauvre." It certainly _is_ "digne," isn’t it? Is it a trifle too much so? Isn’t it a trifle priggish, a trifle preachy? Is it within the limits of pure pathos? Or does it just cross the line? I don’t know. I am rather inclined to think that Maxime is at his best—at once most human and most fairy princelike—in his relations with the pre-eminently human fairy Porhoët. He is entirely human, and weak, and nice, when he blurts out to her the secret of his high birth. Hadn’t she just been boasting of her own, and invidiously citing Monsieur l’intendant as a typical plebeian? "En ce qui me concerne, mademoiselle," he has the human weakness to retort, "vous vous trompez, car ma famille a eu l’honneur d’être alliée à la vôtre, et réciproquement." He remains human and weak throughout the somewhat embarrassing explanations that are bound to follow; and if, in their subsequent proceedings, after she has adopted him as "mon cousin," he will still from time to time become a trifle priggish and a trifle preachy, we must remember that mortal man, in the hands of a French novelist, has to choose between that and a career of profligacy. It is by his _Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre_ that Feuillet is most widely known outside of France; it is by this book that he will "live," if he is to live. Certainly it is his freshest, his sincerest, his most consistently agreeable book. HENRY HARLAND. *BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE*