The determinism of Taine stems in Germany and his theory of environment has been effectively utilised by Barrès. In The Uprooted, the argument is driven home by the story of seven young Lorrainers who descend upon Paris to capture it. Their Professor Bouteiller (said to be a portrait of Barrès's old master Burdeau at Nancy) has educated them as if "they might some day be called upon to do without a mother-country." Paris is a vast maw which swallows them. They are disorganised by transplantation. (What young American would be, we wonder?) Some drift into anarchy, one to the scaffold because of a murder; all are _arrivistes_; and the centre figure, Sturel, is a failure because he cannot reconcile himself to new, harsh conditions. They blame their professor. He diverted the sap of their nationalism into strange channels. A few "arrive," though not in every instance by laudable methods. One is a scholar. The account of his interview with Taine and Taine's conversation with him is another evidence of the intellectual mimicry latent in Barrès. He had astonished us earlier by his recrudescence of Renan's very fashion of speech and ideas; literally a feat of literary prestidigitation. There are love, political intrigue, and a dramatic assassination--the general conception of which recalls to us the fact that Barrès once sat at the knees of Bourget, and had read that master's novel, Le Disciple. A striking episode is that of the meeting of the seven friends at the tomb of Napoleon, there to meditate upon his grandeur and to pledge themselves to follow his illustrious example. "Professor of Energy" he is denominated. A Professor of Spiritual Energy is certainly Maurice Barrès. In another scene Taine demonstrates the theory of nationalism by the parable of a certain plane tree in the Square of the Invalides. For the average lover of French fiction The Uprooted must prove trying. It is, with its two companions in this trilogy of The Novel of National Energy, a social document, rather than a romance. It embodies so clearly a whole cross-section of earnest French youths' moral life, that--with L'Appel au Soldat, and Leurs Figures, its sequels--it may be consulted in the future for a veridic account of the decade it describes. One seems to lean from a window and watch the agitation of the populace which swarmed about General Boulanger; or to peep through keyholes and see the end of that unfortunate victim of treachery and an ill-disciplined temperament. Barrès later reviles the friends of Boulanger who deserted him, by his delineation of the Panama scandal. Yet it is all as dry as a parliamentary blue-book. After finishing these three novels, the impression created is that the flaw in the careers of four or five of the seven young men from Lorraine was not due to their uprooting, but to their lack of moral backbone.