In this novel, Madame Tinayre shows us the clash and the conflict, the attraction and the repulsion, which cause a continual contest between the two halves of France, equally important and irreducibly different. Born into one of these spheres, married into the other, Madame Tinayre is at home in either. Her Augustin, so pure and grave and true, so narrow, so weak, so passionate, is the brother of M. Rolland’s Antoinette, is the great-nephew of Pascal. He is a type which has always existed in France, admirable but dangerous, for he is incapable of understanding his contrary. Among French Protestants, Jansenists, strict proverbial Catholics, in certain austere university circles, there are many variations on the type of Augustin. And Fanny, the charming Bohemian, light-hearted Fanny, an artist to the tips of her fingers but only very dimly conscious of being an immortal soul (a pretension which Augustin never abandons for an hour), is not Fanny the very flower of a different, a more frivolous, a lighter, brighter France? The contact and the conflict of these two natures, their ill-starred, impossible love, is all the story of _La Maison du Péché_: one of the most moving stories of our times. There are readers, there are even critics, who prefer Madame Tinayre’s subsequent novel, _La Rebelle_. I have some difficulty, I admit, in catching their point of view. I prefer not only _La Maison du Péché_, but even that exquisite piece of still-life, _François Barbazanges_, which some have condemned on the ground that, though it was art, it was not life. _La Rebelle_ is much more life than art. The background, a fresco of popular Paris, is vast, living, and exact; indeed it is too vast, too living, too exact, for it distracts our attention from the rather ordinary characters who occupy the foreground. And yet there is a great charm in the drawing of Josanne Valentin, the brave young woman-worker married to a neurasthenic invalid--that charm of poignant sincerity which sometimes, in a woman’s work, makes the reader’s heart beat quicker, as though he had suddenly stumbled on a private confession. Josanne is so courageous, so tender, so kind, that we forgive her conjugal infidelity, and chiefly regret that her lover should be so obviously unworthy of her. He abandons her--we knew it!--and how pathetic is the scene of their parting--out of doors, in the street, poor Josanne encumbered with the _filet_--the net--in which she is carrying home the materials for the family dinner. That parting scene is unlike any other in fiction in its heart-piercing realism! But Josanne is young, and when the morphino-maniac of a husband (tenderly nursed to the last) departs this life; when Josanne falls in with a high-minded radical philanthropist of the most advanced views, we murmur, much relieved: ‘Tout s’arrange.’