One can recognise Feuillet’s bad women, too, by the uncanny influence they immediately cast upon his men. "More taciturn than ever, absent, strange, as if she were meditating some profound design, all at once she seemed to wake; she lifted her long lashes, let her blue eyes wander here and there, and suddenly looked straight at Camors, who was conscious of a thrill"—that is how Mme. de Campvallon does it, and the fact is conclusive, so far as her moral character is in question. None of Feuillet’s good women would ever dream of making a man "thrill" at her first encounter with him. But Feuillet’s bad women will stop at nothing. Julia de Trécoeur takes her own step-father, a middle-aged, plain, stout, prosaic country gentleman, and throws him into a paroxysm that has to be expressed in this wise: "It was a mad intoxication, which the savour of guilt only intensified. Duty, loyalty, honour, whatsoever presented itself as an obstacle to his passion, did but exasperate its fury. The pagan Venus had bitten him in the heart, and injected her poisons. A vision of Julia’s fatal beauty was present without surcease, in his burning brain, before his troubled eyes. Avidly, in spite of himself, he drank in her languors, her perfumes, her breath." _Julia de Trécoeur_ has sometimes been called Feuillet’s master-piece. One eminent critic remarks that in writing it Feuillet "dived into the vast ocean of human nature, and brought up a pearl." Well, there are pearls and pearls; there are real pearls and artificial pearls; there are white pearls and black pearls. It might seem to some of us that _Julia de Trécoeur_ is an artificial black one. Frankly, as a piece of literature, the novel is just in three words a fairly good melodrama. Julia herself is the proper melodramatic heroine. Her beauty is "fatal," her passions are ungovernable, and she dearly loves a scene. Now she contemplates retirement into a convent, now matrimony, now a leap from the cliffs; and each change of mood is inevitably the occasion for much ranting and much attitudinizing. Her history is a fairly good melodrama. That it is not a tip-top melodrama is due to the circumstance that Feuillet was too intelligent a man to be able to make it so. He can’t keep out his wit; and every now and again his melodrama forgets itself, and becomes sane comedy. He can’t keep out his touches of things simple and human; the high-flown, unhuman remainder suffers from the contrast.