‘Il me semble que votre principale objection porte sur le double effet d’une double aventure, qui vous paraît un artifice littéraire. Mais, dans ma pensée, il fallait que Fortunade complétât Denise, que la pitié spirituelle pour le maudit aboutit au même échec que la pitié plus physique pour le malade. Fortunade, c’est, en tout petit, Eloa. Je crois que ces ‘doubles’ ne sont pas sans exemples dans les grandes œuvres de la littérature, et que de glorieux précédents auraient pu m’enhardir, si j’avais hésité. Dans la réalité même on voit des âmes de même nature se deviner et se rapprocher.’ The literary doubles of which our author speaks are a charming device when the novelist treats of what is normal, salutary, or pleasant: we love to see Rosalind by the side of Celia, or the Two Gentlemen of Verona; but we should not care to look at two Quilps, or two Deformed Transformed, or two Gretchens, or even two dumb girls of Portici. The abnormal does not suffer repetition. So I persist in my protestation, and all the more because I love and admire the two sweet girls, so pure, so devoted; ruined and debased, the one by pity for a man’s bodily sufferings, the other by compassion for his moral state. For Madame Tinayre, following the theories of Spinoza and Nietzsche, looks on pity as a debilitating emotion, relaxing the fibres of the soul and predisposing to an ignoble self-surrender. But how charming is the first half of this novel; the opening scene in the country doctor’s dining-room, with the two girls seated in the red-paved parlour that smells of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples. Denise, the young lady of the house, is the soul of a home:-- ‘A perfect woman, nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command----’ a large human type, as easily imagined in England or Scotland as in Central France. But the girl who sews at her side is essentially Limousine, her very name, Fortunade, recalls the pathetic head of the girl-saint of the Corrèze whom she resembles--pensive and slim, with the pursed, plaintive mouth, the suffering grace of her profile, and the something dreamy, sweet, yet almost sullen that makes her appear half a Gothic angel and half a scolded child.