gorgeous coloring of the Venetian school; now they show the fantastic contrasts of bright light and blackest shadow; now criminals consciously predoomed to the torments of the damned remind us of Michael Angelo's terrible frescoes. Yet they are continually filled in and elaborated with a Teniers-like minuteness of touch. Balzac may be said to have set the fashion of following out an intricate network of lives through an interminable series of volumes. It is little to say that he never loses sight of any one meant to be more than a mere walking gentleman or lady. He develops an infinite variety of character, with growing years and changing circumstances, so that, with fair allowance for altered conditions, they shall invariably be true to their former selves. And any writer who has made similar attempts on the most modest scale will appreciate the triumphs of that subtle physiologist. Since the Revolution swept away the ancient régime, France has been the Paradise of successful adventurers. The Press, the Bar, the Chamber of Deputies, and sometimes the Barricades, have been the stepping-stones to the highest and most lucrative places. The men of the Second Empire undoubtedly deserved much of the abuse they received; but after all, they only improved on the principles and practice of the Imperialists under the great Napoleon, of the Legitimists of the Restoration, and the constitutional monarchists. No one has painted these parvenus like Balzac, with the state of society and the scandals by which they profited. As a rule they could scarcely be called criminals, although they sailed uncommonly near the wind, and were generally accessible to sordid temptations. But the course of justice was systematically perverted; Crown prosecutors and removable judges, on their promotion, were always amenable to the influence of ministers, and of the grandes dames by whom ministers were governed, and to whom they paid their court. A Lucien de Rubenpré compromises himself under the tutelage of a Jacques Collin he is arrested, and will be sent from the Conciergerie to the Cour d'Assizes with the moral certainty of a just condemnation. Had he been friendless and unprotected his fate was sure. No doubt he has bitter enemies, but he has powerful friends. The honor of noble families is involved. Lucien becomes the centre of a subterranean battle, in which procuresses force their way into the bedchambers of fashionable duchesses, and venerated judges of the supreme courts give significant hints to official prosecutors. So Lucien is saved, or at least he would have been saved had he not weakly rushed upon suicide, instead of resolutely seeing matters out. In such a corrupt state of society the cynical student of huur anity saw rare opportunities. The most wellmeaning of men might tamper with their consciences. Even charitable doctors of exceptional talent like Bianchon, devoted to their profession, and rich beyond their needs, become cu pably tolerant. They were men of the world, and consequently men of their world. As for penniless young aspirants such as Eugene de Rastignac, the Gascon soldiers of fortune of the nineteenth century, they would sell their souls for their ambitions on small provocation. If they are ballasted with any scruples to begin with, they very soon throw them overboard. Rastignac, when a student in the pension of the Rue Sainte Genevieve, listens to the Mephistophelian suggestions of Collin, though he shudders at them. As he struggles forward in life he silences the whispers of conscience, and all that keeps him straight is the dread of being found out. With his supple talents, his friends of the softer sex, and his seductive manners, of course he becomes a highly considered member of ministries in point of character, and makes a fair show to the world. So it may be conceived what Balzac, with his relentless surgery, can disclose as to the innermost existence and the secret methods of the adventurers, of whom Rastignac is one of the most respectable. He We know nothing more grandly fascinating in the lurid sensations of crime than the checkered career of Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, alias Trompe-la-Mort. Collin, in the genre of the diabolical and depraved, is a conception that might have done honor to the poets of the "Inferno" or the "Paradise Lost." might have given Milton's Satan useful hints as to how the ruin of the race of Adam might be compassed. He has prostituted to the vilest purposes the soaring and flexible genius which might have made him duke and peer and prime-minister. His extraordinary individuality casts something like a spell over all the individuals with whom he comes in contact. His moral is equal to his physical courage : nothing daunts him, and everybody seems. to realize that. A convict, with the record of numerous convictions, dragging the limb involuntarily which has been fettered in irons at the bagne, he confounds the shrewd intelligence of the most experienced magistrates and jailers, as, with the machinery and the subordinates he has at his disposal, he baffles the best agents of the Ruc de Jerusalem. When he chooses to clothe himself in the skin and priestly dress of Herrera, accredited envoy from the Court of Madrid, he defies detection, or at least conviction. Yet when he is sent on suspicion to the common yard of the Conciergerie, he sinks at once and easily to the brutal level of his old accomplices, La Pourraile and Fil de Soic. He succeeds in bringing them back to subserviency with a glance and a whisper, though he has betrayed his trust as treasurer of their secret society, and squandered their treasure on one of his protégés. For the monster is not without redeeming qualities-he has a great fund of affection to lavish, and is even capable of acts of heroic self-abnegation. All that sounds improbable incredible; yet the genius of the novelist has made Collin a reality. There can be no more flattering tribute to the vraisemblance of that phenomenal creation than the fact that the cravate à la Collin has become a fashionable article of attire among the roughs and ruffians in the purlieus of Paris. From the wonderful series of volumes immortalizing Jacques Collin, beginning with the "Père Goriot" and ending with "La dernière Incarnation de Vautrin," we feel as if we had come down to comparatively vulgar crime in opening "La Histoire des Treize." Yet what a wonderful effort it is, when measured against the best work of inferior writers. It is not only that the combination of the conscienceless Thirteen in the highest and the lowest ranks of society, pledged to each other body and soul, gives occasion for stirring and dramatic episode. It is not only that we follow with thrilling interest the fortunes of some luckless victim who stumbles blindly among the snares that are spread for him on every side, till finally he comes to the miserable and inevitable end. It is not only that we assist at the diabolical conceptions of schemes carried out with unparalleled audacity. But the characters are instinct with violent passions, which they control or direct for the comnon purpose they even make their virtues the instruments of crimes which they must have regarded with horror while still unfettered; and if they are shocked by confessions of the most revolting cynicism in the comrades who have been loyally aiding and abetting them, at all events they suppress any show of feeling. All that would appear at the first blush to be at least as incredible as the conception of Collin. But, in fact, the adventures of those high-born and high-charactered villains are made so real to us, that we follow them with the simple faith of a child rather than with the scepticism that is always staggering over difficulties. It is a deep drop from Balzac to Eugene Sue; and so, while the one is likely to live forever, the other, like Giant Pope in the "Pilgrim's Progress," is held in little regard now, and almost moribund. Yet the socialist novelist, like the Giant, was a great man in his day. The "Mysteries of Paris," "The Wandering Jew," and "Martin the Foundling," circulated in the feuilleton-we were going to say by the million-and were greedily devoured when they came out again as books. Sue, who preached equality and the contempt of riches, who made Martin the footman correspond with the Scandinavian king, furnished his Touraine château like a prince, and indulged the sumptuous tastes of a sybarite. He certainly hit off the popular taste, and was clever enough to deserve his ephemeral popularity. Like Balzac, he went to work on an enormous scale, and combined his complicated plots with extreme ingenuity. The intrigues of the Jesuits in Le Juif Errant" are carried out with great skill, especially when they have shifted to moral spheres of action, and when the strings are being pulled by the astute Rodin. Sue detested all Churches and creeds, and satirized the infamous Jesuit con amore. Nor are his pictures so wide of the truth as to be caricatured; but we should have ranked Rodin far higher than we do had we never read Balzac. The schemer is infinitely cunning, but nothing more; and Sue is always more melodramatic than analytical. As for the "Mysteries of Paris," it is melodramatic throughout, and consequently a novel of a far more commonplace type. The Maître d'Ecole, La Squelette, and the rest of them, are simply vulgar but singularly atrocious ruffians, who have graduated high in the Parisian schools of criminality. And Sue set the example to some of our own lady novelists, in never hesitating as to being sensational at the cost of possibilities. Rudolf, the disguised Duke of Gerolstein, is the prototype of the Guardsmen who train upon curaçoa and cigars and sleepless nights for feats of incredible strength and skill. Rudolf, who is of feminine and slender physique, and drinks himself stupid on the vilest liquor in the Assomoirs, rinses out" the terrible Chourineur with a shower of blows when he has caught the head of the Hercules in chancery; and knocks the still more formidable schoolmaster out of time with a couple of hits put in from the shoulder. Suc flies even more recklessly in the face of credibilities when he restores the long lost Princess Marie to her father, as pure in mind as if she had never served an apprenticeship to the passions of the vilest ruffians of the banlieu. by the veritable genius of the detective same. The personages of Gaboriau's misesSue simply described criminals and their en scène are generally much the haunts, or imagined them as they might There is the "suspect" entangled in adhave been he never laid himself out to vance in the meshes of circumstantial evipropound criminal problems for the solu- dence; there is a skulking somebody else tion of ingenious and ambitious detectives. whom sooner or later we begin to fancy It was reserved for Gaboriau to strike out may have had much to say to the atrocity; the new line which has been followed since there is the juge d'instruction, always of he wrote "L'Affaire Lerouge" by hun- rare sagacity, though he changes nature dreds of his countrymen and of ours. He and methods in the different books; and elaborated, if he did not invent, the ro- there is the shrewd but kindly old surgeon, mance which turns entirely on the detec. of rough or forbidding manners, who is tion of a crime. He glorifies and idealizes told off for the autopsy of the corpse, and the exploits of the élite of the handful of whose experience draws invaluable deducmen who control the dangerous masses of tions. Paris. If he is not incapable of the delineation of character--like Boisgobey, his most promising pupil-he is quite indifferent to it. The natures and temperaments of his heroes, as originally indicated, are continually contradicting themselves. He has his heroines; he is fond of arranging unequal marriages; he introduces love-affairs, but they only lead up to striking situations, and the sentimentalism and the pathos are alike fictitious. On the other hand, there are no inconsistencies in the careful construction of the plot. From the first to the final chapter it works smoothly and without a hitch. En passant, or incidentally, he lays him self out to explain away whatever seems improbable and incredible. He is inspired Above all, there is the brilliant detective, who, by the light of intuitive perception, follows out his profession as a science. He is an enthusiast, of course, whether he has taken to the pursuit in his ripe maturity like Tabaret, or in his boiling and ambitious jeunesse like Lecoq, who builds his hopes of fortune on the favor of the Prefecture. They are enthusiasts to the point that old Tabaret compromises his reputation without regret, keeping the most irregular hours; while young Lecoq is ready to sell a masure belonging to him, that he may take his revenge on the subtle and mysterious Mai who has befooled him on several occasions at their game of blindman's-buff. Those enthusiasts always go in terror of their lives-for sundry convicts have sworn to slay them on their re turn from Cayenne, or their dismissal from forced works at Melun or Fontrevault. No wonder the criminals they have hunted down owe them a bitter grudge, for the concentrated zcal they bring to the chase seems beyond the limits of fair professional business. The Josephs Coutouriers and the other chevaux de rétour have no such feeling toward" the general," who represents the good old school of gens d'armes, although Gevrol is rough-handed and sufficiently keen. And they may well dread the instinctive astuteness of ce diable de Tabaret," the more so that they are not in the secrets of M. Gaboriau's manner of workmanship. Take that scene at the first "instruction" of the Affaire Lerouge in the cottage where the woman has been murdered. Tabaret astounds eren the judge and the commissary by the exact description he gives of the unknown murderer. He describes his height, his hat, his paletot, his cigar, and the amber mouthpiece of his cigar-holder. Had a Tabaret really evolved the personality, and clothed and equipped it from almost imperceptible indications, he might have ranked in more prosaic romance with the Joseph Balsamo of Dumas. As it is, we are bound to remember that it is a case like Lecoq's de ductions at the Poivrière of those who hide knowing where to seek. Nothing shows more the extreme care of Gaboriau's workmanship than his development of the systems" he attributes to the Tabarets and Lecoqs. In the reflection in the fic tion of the imaginary facts, the whole fabric is based on logical deduction; the minutest details must be mutually self-supporting; and the demonstration of some insignificant flaw involves the collapse of the entire structure. The demonstration cf one of these mathematical problems is worked out indirectly when Tabaret throws up his hands in remorseful horror at the Vicomte de Caumarin, who is charged with an atrocious murder, but is not provided with an irrefutable alibi. Otherwise the circumstantial evidence is complete; but that fundamental omission is sufficient to invalidate it, and Tabaret is in despair because the prosecutors, clinging to the ideas he has been laboring assiduously to drive into their heads, are bent upon sending an innocent man to the guillotine. For of course the favorite trick of the criminal novelist is to send suspicion running on a fa'se trail, as in the case of de Caumarin, 66 or in that of Prosper Beitomy in the ' Dossier, No. 113. Then some detective of transcendental intelligence comes to the rescue, and the mining and countermining go briskly forward. We remarked on the conditions of modern Parisian life, because they give the French novel-wright exceptional advan. tages. When Governments are corrupt and morals exceptionally lax, adventurers who have enriched themselves, and even men in high station, must have discreditable secrets they are eager to conceal. So the discovery and the trading upon them in other words, la chantage—becomes a regular business. It has its risks in the shape of long sentences with hard labor, but it is extremely lucrative. No doubt Gaboriau and his imitators have exaggerated; but there is no smoke without fire, and we cannot doubt that there were many penetrable secrets which, in the jargon of criminal fiction, are well worth a farm in Brie." It would sound ludicrously improbable to charge Lord Salisbury, or the President of his Board of Works, with sharing by arrangement in the profits of swindling contractors. But we know there were ministers of the Second Empire and the Republic who freely indulged themselves in pots de vin, and never quenched their insatiable greed. Troublesome enemies were sent summarily to Cayenne or New Caledonia, and there were still darker stories tolerably well authenticated. for domestic scandals, they abounded: we have it on the official evidence of the tribunals. Darkening the colors and accentuating details, Gaboriau has turned chantage to excellent purpose. The most thrilling sensations of Le Dossier No. 113" depend upon it; and still more exciting is "La Corde au Cou," of which chantage is the theme, as it supplies the title. As We follow with sympathy and indignation each new pressure of the cord, as a turn of the operator's wrist intensifies the torture. We know that the victim must live on and endure; he can never find a refuge in suicide and repose in the Morgue, since his miseries are to end in a blissful dénouement. But those novels on chantage remind us of Gaboriau's worst fault as a story-teller. Explaining the source of the secrets-and it is the same, though in a lesser degree, with his mysterious murders-he wearies us with interminable and explanatory digressions. As a clever artist he must have known it was a mistake we can only suppose that the method paid him. An innocent suspect is under lock and key: the real offender begins to have good cause to tremble, and our interest is being wrought up to the highest pitch, when, with the "crak-crak" of some chorus in a vaudeville, a dramatic chapter closes, and in commencing the next we are stagnating in the back-waters of some episode of family history which came off in the provinces forty years before. On the whole, we prefer the plan of "Monsieur Lecoq," which devotes an entire volume to the crime, and the second and succeeding volume to its causes. Per haps for that reason we rank the short and unpretentious "Petit Vieux des Batignolles" among the very best of Gaboriau's books. It goes straight to the point, and is all to the purpose. And the culmination is not unworthy of that brilliantly condensed bit of workmanship, when the murderer is ineffably disgusted at his genius having been misunderstood. He had operated in the knowledge that his victim was left-handed, and the detectives would never have hunted him down, had they not-turning from the false trailgone blundering in discreditable ignorance of the fact. As for Boisgobey, it is difficult to deal with him without doing him injustice. He is the pupil, and seems in most respects the mere copyist, of Gaboriau. We know not what we might have thought of him had not Gaboriau preceded him. He has originality and force, and wonderful gifts of facile composition and construction. In fact he is infinitely the more fertile of the two; indeed his fertility appeared inexhaustible, and he was in the habit of throwing off two or three novels in the year. His plots must have come rather from inspiration than slow thought, yet though some of his stories were better than others, very few of them fell far short of a satisfactory average. He was laboring hard to make hay while the sun shone, and he never let his fancy lie fallow for a moment. Latterly his plots have necessarily been weaker, and he would seem at length to have recognized that. At least, "Le Fils de Plongeur," which appeared the other day, is a nere tale of vicious Parisian society, and decidedly a very feeble production. He is at his best in the Crime de l'Opera," which is really masterly in the way the mystery is maintained to the last. Had we not gone on M. Lecoq's plan of rejecting probabilities, and suspecting the lady who seemed altogether superior to suspicion, we should never have guessed the solution till we had reached the last chapters. And yet her guilt is duly brought home without doing any violence to our intelligence. One thing goes far to explain Boisgobey's greater fertility. He takes more license in the way of character, or rather in the range of social position, than Gaborian. When a Duc de Sairmeuse or a Duc de Champdocé gets mixed up in shady or criminal transactions, the probabilities must be artistically safeguarded on all sides. Boisgobey, by predilection, takes us into a world on the Bourse and the Boulevards, a sort of Bohemian Debatable Land, remote from the bourgeois respectability of the Marais, and still farther removed from the Faubourg St. Germain. There is no lack of factitious and ephemeral wealth, any more than of indebted and reckless poverty. But the wealth belongs to tainted capitalists, to Russian princes and Roumanian boyars of semi-savage manners and suspected antecedents; to South American proprietors of silver-mines and countless flocks and herds, who take palaces in the Champs Elysées for the season, and launch promising lorettes in landaus with "eight springs.' With these are mixed up gay young Parisians or provincials squandering their patrimonies, and officers on long leave from Algiers, dissipating with selfish frugality the arrears of their pay. The ladies, although some of them have highsounding titles and handsome jointures, belong, with rare exceptions, to the world of immoral adventure. These foreign gentlemen, if they do not wear" sinister expressions, are generally unsyinpathetic," and of course are capable of any crime. We are shocked but not astounded at a Tartar autocrat forgetting his geography, and executing an act of summary justice behind walls and grilles near the Parc de Monceau, as if he had been among his serfs and his servile tribesmen on his native steppes. We consider it a strong situation, but little more, when a cosmopolitan speculator, on the eve of quitting the capital, consigns a corpse in a coffinshaped strong-box to the compartment he has hired in the premises of a Parisian safe company. So the ladies who seek to out |