Be it remembered, that the wife and mother, sneeringly called La Femme Vertueuse, is the cause of all this; and what becomes of herself in the meantime, the author does not think it worth while to tell us. The conclusion which the reader is expected to arrive at is, that having been so silly as to be not only virtuous, in the vulgar sense of the term, but also pious, she deserved to be abandoned, and left to her whims. It matters little which novel of M. De Balzac we turn to, we find the same sentiments expressed— the same lessons taught, under one form or other. In Le Père Goriot, for example, which is the first of the series entitled Scènes de la Vie Parisienne, there is not one of the women, of high or low rank, but is an adulteress. The Père is an old corn factor, who made sufficient money during the revolution to enable him to induce the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nuncingen to marry his two daughters. This being accomplished, his next care is to introduce to the latter such young gentlemen as he thinks would pay them proper attention in the absence of their husbands. Accordingly, M. Eugene de Rastignac, the hero of the story, soon becomes an inmate of the same obscure boarding-house in which the Père lodged, and is soon introduced both to the Countess and Baroness. He offends the former by unwittingly mentioning her father's name in her presence, at a fashionable party; but he obtains the last favors from her sister, the Baroness; and this merely for getting her invited to one of the reunions of Madame de Beauséant. Nor is love by any means his chief object in his attentions to the lively and beautiful Baroness, as he gives us to understand himself, plainly enough, in one of his soliloquies: "If," he says, "Madame de Nuncingen should take an interest in me, I will teach her how to govern her husband. He deals in money, and no doubt could help me to make my fortune in a hurry." Owing to the growing extravagance of his daughters, who, while disowning him in public, rob him in private, the Père is in time forced to betake himself to a miserable garret, where he is forced to live on bread and water; and finally, he sells a little annuity he had purchased in his better days, in order to secure decent furnished lodgings, in which M. de Rastignac could meet the baroness, his daughter, without the fear of being interrupted by her husband! Still more revolting, if possible, are the teachings in the Vicaire des Ardennes, in which a young man and a young woman, who be lieve themselves brother and sister, are violently enamored of

each other; while a married lady, of high rank, is equally in love with her own illegitimate son. The young man becomes a priest in order to restrain his passion for his supposed sister. After taking orders in the church, he discovers that she is only his cousin, and proceeds at once to the altar with her, solemnly asseverating, on being asked the question, that he was not a priest, never had been. The fact soon transpires, however, and the young wife dies of horror, his mother of remorse, and himself of grief; and the triple tragedy is scarcely consummated, when he proves to be the illegitimate son of a bishop. As if all this was not sufficiently scandalous, it is duly interspersed with episodes of rape, robbery, murder, etc. But M. De Balzac does not merely describe and exaggerate the most dangerous passions of our nature, decking them with all the charms of which he is capable; he actually presents the worst of them as more to be admired than deprecated. We could fill our whole article with examples of this kind; but one or two will suffice, and in these we will let the author speak for himself. Without entering into any analysis of the novel entitled Peau de Chagrin, we may remark, in passing, that the hero is a student, ruined by dissipation and extravagance, who resolves to commit suicide. This affords M. De Balzac an opportunity of giving free expression to his views, both on suicide and debauchery, which he does accordingly, in two passages, which we will place side by side :—

"There is something as grand as terrible in suicide. The extinction of multitudes is as nothing in comparison. They are mowed down on the level on which they stand.. But when an individual voluntarily dashes himself to pieces, it is from a great precipice that he plunges. Implacable must be the tempests that impel us to seek peace for the soul at the pistol's mouth. The idea of suicide is gigantic in its proportions. Between a voluntary death, and the ambition of life, which is so strongly felt by young men in Paris, how many chefs d'ouvres have perished! How many burning poetic conceptions must precede the act of despair. Every suicide is a sublime poem of melancholy. In the ocean of literature where shall we find a book comparable in genius with these three lines:-' Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the Seine from the Pont des Arts.'

"Debauchery soon appeared to me in all its majesty. Certainly it is an art like poetry. To be initiated into its mysteries, to appreciate its beauties, one must have a strong soul. War, power, the arts are also corruptions, as far from the attainment of common men as the excesses of debauchery. But when once one has mounted to the assault of these great mysteries, one invades a

new world. Generals, ministers, artists, are all more or less carried away by libertinism. The habitual severity and tension of their lives demands violent reactions of sensual indulgence. After all, war is but the debauch of blood, as politics are of the material interests; all excesses are brothers. These social monstrossities possess the power of abysses; they draw us into them as Moscow attracted Napoleon; they fascinate, they make the brain dizzy, and we plunge into their depths without knowing why. There is, perhaps, a sense of the infinite in these precipices or some vaster flattery for man. Alas! are not potent enchantments necessary to enable us to support the bitter pains which encircle the passions as with a wall of fire!"

We have selected these extracts not because they are by any means the strongest proofs we could adduce in the author's own words of the tendency of his writings to glorify crime and licentiousness, but because they are less offensive than many others. Is it strange, then, that even in France, where literature is permitted to be more immoral than in any other civilized country, more than one of Balzac's works have been suppressed by the liberal government of Charles X., as being too disgusting in their licentiousness? Yet, these are the novels which "enterprising publishers" of New York have undertaken to introduce, in all their naked deformity, to the wives and daughters of Amèrica, with the assurance that "the series will be unusually attractive," and with the additional assurance, on the part of the translators, that they "will not hesitate, at least upon moral grounds, to translate anything that he (Balzac) has written."

There is a certain kind of ingenuity in making César Birotteau the initial volume of the American series, because of all the numerous works of Balzac, it is the least objectionable. If the rest were like it they would do little, if any harm. Indeed, few would read them, for the author must either be so licentious as to repel all who have any regard for virtue or religion, or any respect for woman, or the family compact; or otherwise so dull and monotonous as to be scarcely readable. The work under consideration has attracted little attention in France; though the language and conduct of its women are by no means such as it would be desirable to present as a model to the young maidens of America. Thus, the very first time that Madame Birotteau opens her mouth to speak, she is familiarly suggestive of mistresses, brothels, etc. In finding (page 3) that her husband has got out of bed unknown to her, the first thought that occurs to her is, whether he has not a mistress. "A aurait-il une maitresse ?" She answers herself,

"Il est trop bête, reprit-elle, et d'ailleurs il m'aime trop, pourcela." The plain English of her reply to her own query is, that he is not so much good as to have a mistress; and besides, that he loves her too much for that. She likes, however, to dwell on the idea; for she asks the question again and again, and in doing so, she takes occasion to make such "interesting" remarks, as "Il quitte si peu ma jupe qu'il m'en ennuie ;" which is thus elegantly translated by Messrs. White and Goodrich: "He sticks so close to my petticoat that he actually bores me!" (p. 12.) This, it seems, is what those gentlemen mean by saying that they render idiomatic French by idiomatic English. But who hears an American or English lady tell anybody that her husband "sticks so close to her petticoat as actually to bore her?" Yet this sort of translating may be taken as a pretty fair specimen of the manner in which César Birotteau is Americanized. The truth is, that the very first sentence is like the rendering of a school-boy just commencing Bolmar's Fables. "Durant les nuits d'hiver," says the author, "le bruit ne cesse dans la rue Saint Honoré, que pen dant un instant," etc., which the translators have : "In Paris upon winter nights, the din in the Rue St. Honoré is but for an instant suspended," etc. The next sentence of the original is, "Au melieu de ce point d'orgue qui dans le grande symphonie du tapage Parisien, se recontre," etc., which, being interpreted, as in the book before us, becomes, "In the very dead of this moment of repose, which occurs in the symphony of Parisian tumult," etc. Madame Birotteau remarks, at p. 3: "Il est tout, je ne sais, comment," etc. In the translation it is, "He has been all topsy-turvy(!)" The same lady, in remarking on business affairs, observes: "Navons-nous pas vendu pour cinque mille francs oujhourd'hui," which, being traduced by Messrs. Wight and Goodrich, becomes thus classical, (like our New York "French Classics) :" "Didn't we make sales to-day to the tune of five thousand francs ?" But renderings like these are, after all, the redeeming features in the new enterprise; for they will render even Balzac all but harmless; not, however, by putting any restraint on his licentiousness, but by making him so absurd, silly, and vulgar, that he will be thrown aside as a stupid blunderer.

That Balzac is a man of great talent, no one capable of judging will deny. It is equally indisputable that he is well educated; but there is scarcely a worse specimen of French than the lan

guage of his novels. That he could write pure and even elegant French is sufficiently evident; but he is licentious in this as in everything else. His cumbrous, crabbed, prolix style, is much more German, or low Dutch, than French. That grace, 'idiomatic ease, expressiveness and brilliancy which render the latter a universal language, are seldom met with in the writings of Balzac. He affects peculiarities of style which set the rules of grammar at defiance; such, for instance, as using active verbs in passive senses, &c. But execrable as his style is, it is not quite so bad as it is made to appear in the translation. As we have remarked already, no subject is too indelicate or too sacred for the pen of Balzac. He does not scruple to bestow on his characters the most loathsome diseases. In his Le Menage de Garçon, he describes the physical effects of abstinence and incontinence; in his "La Veille Fille," he takes similar pains to give his readers a correct idea of the sexual desires of an old maid, &c. But no matter how disgusting are his images, he is seldom or never coarse in his language; most of his male characters are scoundrels of the worst character, as his females are adulteresses; but he makes all talk as decently as possible. In other words, he gives vice in its worst forms a polish, so that it has almost the appearance of virtue. Add to this the fact, that he paints the most consummate rascals, without finding anything to censure even in their worst crimes; and it will not seem strange that he has been accused by his own countrymen of doing more mischief than any other individual of equal talents in ancient or modern times. But, as we have already seen, this polish disappears in the translation. The French has, so to speak, a decent drapery for ideas, which in almost any other modern language become vulgar and repulsive; but the drapery is completely thrown aside by the translators; so that although they are evidently unconscious of the fact, they give us the antidote with the poison.

The writings of Madame Dudevant, although, as already observed, by no means so vicious in their tendency as those of Balzac, have done not a little harm even in this country. It does not seem to be generally known that our Woman's Rights Societies, and several other kindred organizations, owe most of their logic to the brilliant and impassioned author of Le Secrétaire, Intime, Metella, Rose et Blanche, Lelia, and La Marquise Lavina. Whether the numerous divorces and elopements of women from