Pipette is marked out for fate, and here no sudden angel intervenes; Pipette commits suicide,--an almost comic suicide, in keeping with her character; she makes a hearty meal of plum-pudding and then takes a sea-bath! M. Boylesve is a traditionalist, a lover of the ancient faiths and disciplines of France (a lover, perhaps, rather than a believer). He delights to show us, in his magic mirror, the neat, well-ordered world of civilised society; but sometimes the figures that move there become transparent, revealing behind them the great primeval forces, never completely disciplined, which drop into our neatest systems some soul irreducibly irregular, a grain of sand throwing all things out of gear. All his novels are _une invitation à réfléchir sur la vie_. There is decidedly something English in the talent of M. René Boylesve--perhaps his patience, his slowness, his minuteness, his lambent humour, as also his repugnance to all that is spasmodic, jerky, or effective--for sometimes his art reminds us not only of _David Copperfield_, but also of _The Mill on the Floss_; and perhaps we must go back so far to find a novel whose moral effulgence is as persuasive. A pure and lonely soul, accustomed to the quiet meditations of the inner life; a young pilgrim of the ideal, suddenly plunged into the robust materialism and frivolous worldliness of a middle-class coterie, abruptly brought up face to face with passion--with unlawful passion, in which, none the less, the young soul recognises something more akin to the altar of her inner worship than was to be found in the daily round and common lot; the swift temptation, the sick revulsion. ‘There came and looked him in the face An Angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight!’ Are we not telling the story of Maggie Tulliver? It is also the history of Madeleine Serpe. It is her story, with one great, one incalculable difference. There is an old tale, familiar in many variants to the students of monastic lore. Tempted, a nun leaves her convent, errs, returns full of shame, to find that no one has missed her, that her sin is unguessed at, since the Virgin has taken her place and her semblance, performing all her duties in her place. This interior Virgin, who saves Madeleine Serpe, who intervenes too late for Maggie Tulliver, is the habit of goodness, the inheritance and practice of virtue, which protects some natures half against their will. For (and there lies the delicacy and naturalness of M. Boylesve’s story) Madeleine’s soul is saved against her will! She feels all the attraction of the abyss. For one dizzy moment she leans over, longs--but something pulls her back, and places her reluctant feet on the dusty highway they had thought to quit for ever. * * * * *