Bulwer says that "French nature is not human nature," and if human nature was necessarily the Anglo-Saxon conception of life it would be true. Nothing so points French heterogeneousness from ourselves as the attitude of our two chosen masters of the novel, Balzac and Thackeray. Not a gleam of humour ever irradiates for a moment the pages of the former. A mere glimmer would make impossible his story of the young man who endeavours to compromise a pretty woman, whose refusal to yield to his dishonourable suggestions so puzzles and disgusts him that he can only explain her coldness as being the probable results of some secret but mortal disease!... A lover abducts a reluctant fair by mingled force and stratagem, and attempts to brand her with hot irons; accompanying this gentle gallantry with the mummeries of a thirteenth-century Inquisition. This picturesque proof of devotion so touches the lady that she promptly grovels in an agony of affection for this chivalrous admirer.... All this is told with perfect gravity, the author having not the smallest suspicion of its absurdity--and yet there be actually Anglo-Saxons who solemnly announce that Balzac knew human nature to its depths. French nature, perhaps; certainly not ours.... A spinster lives twenty years in a family, all of whose members she venomously hates, and not one of them suspect her unselfish devotion until she aids in humiliating them and wrecking their fortunes.... Madame Hulot is a saint, and yet at fifty years of age offers her person to a repulsive scoundrel in order to provide a marriage portion for her daughter; Balzac evidently considering this one of her noblest acts. The point at which one finds the widest divergence of the French and English attitudes toward life is in the essay made by each of these chosen spokesmen to show us the adventuress. Taine, who honestly tried to see English literature from English eyes and interpret it to his countrymen, breaks down entirely when he reaches this angle of vision. He says: "There is a personage unanimously recognized as Thackeray's masterpiece, Becky Sharp.... Let us compare her with a similar personage of Balzac in 'Les Parents Pauvre,' Valerie Marneff. The difference in the two works will exhibit the difference in the two literatures"--and they do indeed. Valerie to the English reader is the old commonplace, stereotyped adventuress of the melodrama. One can imagine none save those as vile and stupid as herself being deceived by such a greedy, outrageous creature. The descriptions of her looks and behaviour smack of the unhumorous shilling shocker. She gives glances from beneath "her long eyelids like the glare of cannon seen through smoke!" ... and again "her eyes flashed like daggers." Such figures of speech sound like the pompous rhodomontade of a Laura Jean Libby, yet Taine quotes them with much admiration.