_L’Amour Artificiel_ is a truer and more striking picture of the age. Jules Cazes has emancipated himself from the conventional French custom of never describing any erotic experiences except those of married women. This story takes place before marriage. Stella is a daughter of the Plutocracy, probably half a Jewess, spoilt, pretentious, talented, with all the coldness of soul and temperament that belongs to the emancipated woman, and which she mistakes for pride, she has that same feeling of superiority over the man combined with the consciousness of being unloveable--a new type that is very un-French, and which offers a singular proof of the manner in which foreign influence has forced its way through the closed circle of culture belonging to French perception. Stella is a young lady imbued with the tone of Ibsen’s and Kielland’s women’s rights women. Her story is a continual withering of the soul. She has a fine voice and a remarkable talent for execution, but what is she to sing when she feels nothing? She is a stranger to the depths of life; a young girl _comme il faut_, belonging to the moneyed aristocracy, is not likely to experience anything very deep--from lack of disposition, lack of opportunity, or both; she is unbearably bored in the society to which she belongs, and has a longing for sensations; her mornings are spent in gazing at herself in the looking-glass, in paying visits and trying on dresses, in annoying her friends, and in practising the newest songs; but how in the world is she to spend her evenings? She lures a penniless young author, flirts with him and makes prodigious advances, only to chase him away again like a dog. The young man sees through her game, but his poor, foolish head is turned by her perfumes, her fashionable dresses and her cold, proud beauty, and his sufferings are quite sufficient to afford her an agreeable distraction. The type which she represents bears a certain resemblance to that which Marie Bashkirtseff records in her diary. It is the same fever of girlhood, the same wild desire to attract men, the same self-deification combined with the utter incapacity for loving which undermined that great talent and hot temperament, and drove its possessor to an early illness and death. But Stella is far from possessing a hot temperament. She has that injured consciousness of her actions which is the property of all calculating souls. She seizes one initiative after the other with regard to the poor silly youth, to whose modest mind the idea never occurs of seducing such a self-possessed young lady. But Stella, who has been over hasty in breaking with her intended who did not allow himself to be sufficiently tyrannised over to please her, has grown anxious to be married. Without love, without tenderness, without ever forgetting herself, cold and brutal, she tempts him to the act of love. The hardness of her heart undergoes no change through the experience, and when soon afterwards