joyousness which he means to repeat at the end, though the book is one that threatens, almost to the last page, to end on a note of despair. For _Un Mariage dans le Monde_, if far from being the most successful of Feuillet’s novels, exhibits, none the less, some of his cleverest craftsmanship. He hoodwinks us into the fear that he meditates disaster, only pleasantly, genially, at the right moment, to disappoint us with the denouement we could have wished. Feuillet’s geniality, for that matter, runs through all his books, and is one of the vital principles of his talent. It is never the flaccid geniality, the amiability, of the undiscerning person; it is, rather, the wise and alert geniality of the benign magician, who is sometimes constrained to weave black spells, because that is a part of the game, and in the day’s work, as it were, but who puts his heart only into the weaving of spells that are rose-coloured. This is perhaps why Feuillet’s nice people nearly always take flesh and live and breathe, his horrid people hardly ever—another resemblance, by-the-bye, between him and the writer of fairy-tales. The nice women, with their high-bred lovers, who step so daintily through his pages, to the flutter of perfumed fans and the rustle of fine silks, are as convincing as the palpitantly convincing princesses of Hans Andersen and Grimm; but Feuillet’s villains and adventuresses, like the ogres and the witches we never very heartily believe in, are, for the most part, the merest stereotypes of vice and wickedness, always artificial, too often a trifle absurd.