Paul Bourget was of the former opinion when, after Barbey’s death, he wrote a clever and valuable essay upon him, aided by the advantage of a personal acquaintance. This essay is now out of print; he omitted to republish it in his _Etudes Psychologiques_ on celebrities of the age, like the Goncourts, Amiel, Turgenev, even Taine and Stendhal. For Barbey is too strong, he leaves the Renaissance figure of Stendhal far behind. It was a sad, quiet worshipper of Barbey’s who first turned my attention to his works. The author had dedicated a small book to her, almost with his dying hand; the dedication was one of those graceful, pathetic inscriptions which are now a lost art. When I began to read him his style influenced me like the sharp, bitter smell and the infinite breadth of the sea, while his descriptions of life’s mystery ran through me like the stab of a knife, causing me to shudder with a suppressed cry as only a woman can cry when she sees the innermost sanctuary of her womanhood exposed to the public gaze. Shakespeare is the only one who has this greatness without mercy, this self-sufficing completeness of a human being, this pride which is justice, moral law, religion and a world to itself. There is nothing so vile, nothing so horrible but would necessarily experience a shudder of exaltation when exposed to the world’s gaze. Barbey D’Aurevilly belongs to the race of Shakespeare. He belongs to it in the actual sense of the word and also on account of his Norman descent. There is nothing of the Gaul in him either in his moral judgment, in his views of life, or in his sympathies and antipathies. He is a landscape painter, which no truly French writer has ever been, he is a lover of solitude in remote country districts, a lover of nature on the lonely seashore. He is not a townsman and he escapes as often as he can from Paris, the centre which is looked upon by every successful Frenchman as the only beautiful, honourable, interesting and pleasurable place in which to dwell. He has no frivolity, he does not care for pleasure, but on the contrary he has a grandiose mood and an iron grasp of the situations which he describes. He seeks the more veiled sides of human nature, but there is a modesty in his descriptions known only to Northerners, and not to Italians and Gauls. He is the fellow-countryman of Flaubert and Maupassant, but he has none of the plebeian exclusiveness of the first or the Rabelais Gallicism of the second. He is of pure race to an extent that is unheard of and inconceivable--a Scandinavian Norman without any of the ponderous blood of the Anglo-Saxon, so often found in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but which the course of centuries has served to dissipate until it has completely vanished.