That absurd Sabine Tallevaut, whose feet scarcely touch the earth, with poison in her hand and adultery in her heart, is the one disfigurement upon what might otherwise have been Feuillet’s most nearly perfect picture. In spite of her, _La Morte_ remains a work of exquisite and tender beauty; and I’m not sure whether Aliette de Vaudricourt isn’t the very queen of all his women. If Feuillet was too much a gentleman to be able to paint a bad woman, he was too much a man not to revel in painting a charming one. As we pass through his gallery of delightful heroines, from Aliette de Vaudricourt to Clothilde de Lucan, to Mme. de Técle, Marie FitzGerald, "Miss Mary" de Camors, Marguerite Laroque, even to Jeanne de Maurescamp, we can feel the man’s admiration pulsing in every stroke of the artist’s brush. He takes the woman’s point of view, espouses her side of the quarrel, offers himself as her champion wherever he finds that a champion is needed. And he sticks to his allegiance even after, as in the case of Jeanne de Maurescamp, she might seem to have forfeited her claim to it. Of Jeanne he can still bring himself to say, at the end of _L’Histoire d’une Parisienne_: "Decidedly, this angel had become a monster; but the lesson of her too-true story is, that, in the moral order, no one is born a monster. God makes no monsters. It is man who makes them." In this instance, however, Feuillet is, perhaps, rather the apologist than the champion. His contention is that Jeanne was by nature virtuous, and that her virtue has been destroyed by the stupidity and the brutality of her ill-chosen husband. But Feuillet has too fine and too judicious a wit to insist upon the note of strenuousness. Seeing the woman’s point of view, he sees its humours as well as its pathos. Admitting that men for the most part are grossly unworthy of her, and that woman has infinitely the worst of it in the arrangements of society, admitting and deploring it, he doesn’t profess to know how to set it right; he has no practical reform to preach. His business is to divert us, and, if he must be serious, to be serious gaily and charmingly. And perhaps he is most serious, not when composing an epitaph for Jeanne de Maurescamp, but when he is lightly saying (in the person of the Comtesse Jules): "Always remember, my poor dear, that women are born to suffer—and men to be suffered."