Anne of France took a more dispassionate view: she saw clearly enough that girls ought sometimes to put aside the church fathers, if only for the pleasure of going back to them, and she did not despair of finding a practical solution of the difficulty. Her dream was a very simple one—the dream that recurs again and again and yet remains but a dream: namely, to have good romances for young girls, pure, high-toned stories, replete with the practical philosophy of life, and at the same time interesting, dramatic, thrilling. She has left us a specimen, somewhat archaic indeed, of what she desired: a historical romance founded on a passage in Froissart about an unfortunate captain of Brest, one M. du Chatel, whose son is, with flagrant bad faith, threatened with death by the English if he does not betray the town into their hands. This eminently patriotic subject is the groundwork of a little story, short, simple, illustrated with a fair number of pictures, and in every way innocuous. In the opening scene, Madame du Chatel swoons; further on, however, it is she who, like a true woman, has all the strength of character, and cheers her trembling husband with words worthy of a Roman matron, or with magnificent appeals to the divine mercy, “although,” as she says, “children are in a special sense the sons and daughters of their mothers.” (How touching is this claim, interpolated quite incidentally!) So the story proceeds with alternations of strength and weakness. On coming to after a long swoon, the poor mother learns that her son is dead. “God’s will be done!” she says, without a tear; “may our Lord receive his soul!” And then she goes and dons her mourning, and, as soon as she is alone, weeps! And here, so please you, you have a story for young girls! Unluckily, for a girl of eighteen or twenty life is no longer “such stuff as dreams are made on,” and as a rule the romances, good or bad, are at last thrown into the shade by a certain practical romance in which she must needs play her part, and which demands her whole attention.