It is not the Frenchwoman whom Barbey describes, and no Frenchman either could or would describe her as he has done. He is no more of a Gaul than Millet, any more than the Italians of the early Renaissance were real Romans. Like the author Tolstoy, in whom the Mongolian blood is more clearly manifested as he grows older, so with Barbey and Millet, the two great Normans, the Teutonic element appears on the surface, the same element that we recognise in the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites, and which was afterwards set aside by the intrusion of the Spaniards and the Classics. Millet’s landscapes represent the Teutonic aspect of nature; while Barbey’s writings are the essence of the Teutonic style, with its characteristic expansion, its abrupt pauses, its utter indifference with regard to the main point, its dislike of concluding the story as soon as the climax is reached. It is here that we find the Teutonic sense for the infinite--a feeling that is the peculiar property of a people who dwell near the sea--a kind of absorption into nature, whither men vanish like black spots. Both are equally possessed of that feeling for the real which has not existed anywhere in the same degree since the days of the early Italian Renaissance. Millet shews it in the reality of his drawing, Barbey in the reality of individualism in the sexes. It is in this that Barbey stands alone and unequalled by any of the authors of the present day or of the past, and it is this that reminds us that three hundred years of physical and spiritual refinement of human feeling and comprehension lie between him and the age of Shakespeare. His first youthful work, _Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is broad as a novel by Bulwer and as full of feeling as a poem by Lamartine; already here he strikes the key in which woman’s inmost soul vibrates, resounds and awakens to a sense of its most intimate and complicated delight in man. _Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is woman’s eternal affection, which eternally manifests itself, even when the woman is no longer young; she is the beloved mother whom the man, especially when he is quite young, loves more ardently than he could possibly love a young girl, and through him she becomes a mother--a matron already in her soul. Both in his aphorisms and in the most popular of his novels, _Vieille Maîtresse_, Barbey continually returns to this deepest of all man’s passions for the woman whom he sees growing old beside him, and who for him grows young again; the woman to whom he is bound by a thousand inextricable memories, memories of his childhood when his own mother was young, memories of youthful happiness and of his own youthful manhood spent with this same woman, whom he still loves. A refined man expects a great deal from woman, and in her who binds him with the cords of love, he will always love the whole woman--the girl, the wife, the mother.