Around a Spring

By GUSTAVE DROZ. Translated by MS. New York : Holt and Williams.

FRANCE has not vanished from among the nations, though at moments we are tempted to think so. It is a peculiar satisfaction, in this era of eclipse and confusion, to meet a genuine example of the better genius of the land. Such an example is furnished us in this excellent novel of M. Gustave Droz, which is here carefully translated. When the sanguinary mist obscuring that motley swarm which lived and prospered a few months since in the broad hot glare of the Empire shall have faded away ; when the blood-stains shall have been washed out (in so far as blood-stains may) and the ashes swept up, our eyes will rest upon an altered stage and a modified mise en scèine. We may hope that behind that lurid warcloud the sheep have been sifted from the goats. Among those who may have survived for the sake of art, to keep the pledges given in more joyous days, we hopefully number the author of Mademoiselle Cibot and Autour d’une Source. His works — these two novels at least — belong to the best and ripest fruits of that huge literary harvest of recent France, amid which so many products were of monstrous and morbid growth. Reading over his novels in the light of late events, they acquire an interest quite independent of this matter of their intrinsic merits. The one before us has already something of the value of an historical document. It is impregnated with the flavor of the Empire. Balzac dreamed of transmitting to future ages a perfect image of the France of his day, and erected for the purpose that ponderous mechanism among whose cranks and derricks and scaffolds and ladders we wander now as among the pillars and arches of a dim cathedral. But M. Gustave Droz, going more simply and lightly to work, has resolved the social forces of his own brief hour into a clearer essence than his great predecessor. The light literature of recent France has always seemed to us to reflect the central lustre of the Empire very much as a heap of broken bottles reflects the noonday sun, — with the same cheap, untempered glare. It was the pretension of the system which perished at Sedan to pervade and invade all things, — to set the tune, to pitch the universal voice, to leave its visible stamp in every corner. On the top of the page, in every clever French novel of the last ten years, you seem to read that mystical N. which greeted you endlessly from the cornices of the Louvre. Novelists, feuilletonists, critics, outscampered each other in the panting effort to keep pace with the tendency of which it was the symbol, to urge it in its headlong course, to re-echo its phraseology, its morality. Up to the very edge of the great silence of the past year, — the silence which among arms falls upon letters as well as laws, — you hear the swelling of this vast concert of Imperial harmonies; up to the very verge of that collapse which fell as suddenly as the “driving in” of Comus and his rout. M. Gustave Droz was one of the freshest and clearest of these concerted voices ; he gives us the latest social news of the France of the past.

His great merit is that he gives it so intelligently. Of all the amuseurs of preCommunal Paris, he seems to us to have been the most open-eyed. We speak, not of his philosophy, — we doubt if he boasts of one,—but of his singularly clear and penetrating perception. Through the mask of the jester and conteur we see the gleam of a sagacious human eye. In him the latter French generations have assuredly had a “chiel” among them taking notes. These notes were first gathered into those two amusing volumes, Monsieur, Madame et Bébé and Entre Nous. The field occupied by M. Droz in these little books is not wide. His task has been to turn the laugh on good society, to satirize the manners and customs of the moneyed aristocracy of the current year of grace, to reflect in the minutest detail its passing follies and fashions and infatuations. Social Paris of the last few years will find itself more lastingly embalmed, we imagine, in these light pages than in many works of larger pretensions. They are flavored with that old Gallic salt of humor which is ground in the mills of Rabelais and Molière. It is often too pungent for our Anglo-Saxon palate, but it comes from the best bag. We might say of M. Droz, that he is the wittiest of humorists. The deep smile and the broad laugh, as you read, contend for precedence. Of pure comicality he is a genuine master; though perhaps personally we enjoy him most in his lighter forms of irony. The delicacy of his touch at these moments, the modulation of his tone, the refinement of his phrase, are those of an accomplished artist. We recommend him to the consideration of some of our own heavy-handed jokers and satirists. But especially noticeable, as we say, is the penetrating niceness of his observation. This has been more striking in each successive volume, and has grappled in each with more substantial facts. It revels for the most part in the finer shades of truth, and is most at home in that cool demi-jour of well-appointed drawingrooms, in which the accustomed eye finds it of profit to detect and compare the subtler gradations of social fact. His discrimination, his intuitions, his innuendoes, are as delicately uttered as the vocal flourishes, the trills, the roulades, of a fine singer. All this excellent perception, however, is, in the two volumes of sketches, lavished on very flimsy subjects. In his novels M. Droz approaches with a firm step the serious side of life, and converts himself from a clever trifler into a real inventor and dramatist. It is pleasant to see a writer proceed so resolutely from small things to great; nothing offers such promise of his having a career to run. Mademoiselle Cibot deserves, to our minds, to stand among the very best fictions of recent years. It belongs to really superior art. In its rapid brevity, its density of texture, its unity of effect, its admirable neatness of execution, it is a model of narrative tragedy. It is tragic, as a matter of course ; for, as a matter of course, the story deals with the Seventh Commandment,—the breach, naturally, not the observance. The subject was ready-made to the author’s hand ; it has the faded, threadbare quality of things overworn ; but his presentation of it, his figures, his details, his “tone,” as painters say, are peculiarly original and vivid. We hardly remember in fiction a figure more incisively outlined, more potently realized, more shaped, as Wordsworth says, “to haunt, to startle and waylay,” than the terrible little invalid husband of the heroine. Rarely, either, have we been admitted into the personal confidence of a fictitious character with that palpable closeness which we enjoy in our conception of the unhappy woman herself. We have seen her, known her, lived through the dreary hours of her miserable life. M. Droz is a master of what we may call sensuous detail ' he thoroughly understands the relation between the cultivated fancy and the visible, palpable facts of the world. On one side of his talent he is an excellent genre painter. His work, moreover, suggests the interesting reflection that intelligent realism, in art, is sure to carry with it its own morality. Told in the vulgarly sentimental manner, the history of Mademoiselle Cibot might mean nothing at all ; told in its hard material integrity, as our author tells it, it enforces a valuable truth,—the truth that sooner or later, here if not there, love demands its own ; that under all its forms it remains the same imperative and incorruptible need ; and that if it finds in its path no idol of marble and gold, it will turn into evil places and make one of mud and straw. There is an admirably sagacious irony in the contrast between the clear, deep-welling passion of Adèle and the shallow, cynical self-possession of the lover on whose condescension she lives and from whose indifference she dies.

In his second novel M. Droz has been more ambitious ; he has chosen a broad, fresh subject, and treated it with a freer hand. The work lacks the simplicity and compactness of its predecessor; it is more diffuse and ponderous; but it indicates a proportionate growth of power. Autou d'une Source is the history of the origin of a watering-place,— an unfolding of those personal passions and motive accidents which lurk beneath the surface of broad public facts, like the little worms and insects we find swarming on the earthward face of a stone. The fable is extremely ingenious; it has the advantage of a moulded plot, turning on a central pivot, as distinguished from those mere measured chains of consecutive incident which suggest a yard-stick as their formative implement. The hero is a poor curé of an obscure village among the mountains of (presumably) Franche Comté and the Jura. Perched on the mountain-side is the old abandoned castle of the Counts of Manteigney, former lords of the land. The degenerate scion of this noble race, a petit crevé of the latest pattern, domiciled in Paris, having repaired his shrunken fortunes by a marriage with the sole daughter and heiress of an ex-vendor of water-cocks, enriched by prosperous traffic, comes with this shrewd father-in-law and his charming young wife to resume possession of his crumbling towers. The château is restored, refurbished, modernized ; the curé, a man still young and stalwart enough to know the pangs of passion, but too good a son of the Church to endure them without protest, becomes entangled in relations with his new neighbors and of course with the pretty Countess in especial; and the retired faucetmaker, with plenty of comfortable leisure for dreams of quintupling his millions, wanders through the innocent country-side, seeking what he may devour. This M. Larreau is perhaps the most finished figure in the work ; a Frenchman of the Yankee type (not the best), self-made, sharp as a razor, “genial,”ambitious, bent on finding an “ operation ” in all things. He descries in Grand-Font-le-Haut the capacities of a Wiesbaden or a Vichy,— save and except the medicinal springs, alas ! But by wondering intently enough whether the soil may not contain the precious fluid, he ends by causing it to flow. The central episode of the book is the victimization, in the interest of M. Larreau’s scheme, of the poor curé as accessory to a kind of “ bogus ” miracle, by which, as it filters and reverberates through the superstitious peasantry, the outer world is to be charmed into a wondering suspicion of the merits of the locality. The mineral spring, in M. Larreau’s argument, is to make the fortune of GrandFont ; and to make the fortune of the spring there can be nothing like a good Catholic legend. The Abbé Roche, by a fatal accident, finds himself implicated in an impious fraud which he detests and despises, and the secret burden of which he shares with the Countess. This latter fact (the result of circumstances too complex to relate, but extremely well devised) forbids him to exculpate himself: a word of explanation will “ compromise ” the lady. The weak point here is not far to seek,— the excessive sensitiveness, namely, of the heroine’s reputation. To English minds, at least, the Abbé’s scruples and all that comes of them seem suspended by a hair. “ Speak, speak, and risk it,” we should say. But in French tradition this weak point seems strong enough. For the sake of the Countess, at all events, the Abbé is silent; for her sake he sustains unaided the brunt of obloquy. When the inevitable reaction sets in, and the half-hatched miracle becomes an addled egg to pelt him withal, he suffers for her sake to the bitter end, and endures expulsion, disgrace, and ultimate martyrdom. The main element of the tale is this troubled passion of the honest priest for the charming reckless Countess, with her Parisian graces and follies and dazzling audacities, — the strife between his generous native manhood and his rigid clerical conscience. It is the temptation of St. Anthony, transferred from legend into prosaic fact. The situation is admirably rendered ; with force, with color and sympathy, and yet with notable purity of tone. The Countess herself is, like all our author’s women, a peculiarly vivid creation. M. Droz lias measured the Frenchwoman of the period. He knows her secrets, he enters into her personality ; she is scarcely more of a heroine for him than, borrowing a hint from the commoner adage, we may suppose her to be for her femme de chambre. The figure of the Countess lingers gratefully in the mind, in spite of the cynicism of the author’s last touches. Madame de Monteigney is meant for better things ; she judges her position, she despises her follies ; she is in a manner, like the Abbé, the victim of a destiny she is too weak to combat; but she has drunk of a maddening wine, and we see her, hurried along in the turbid current of vanity, fling over one by one the light fragments of her maiden’s conscience, till she passes from our eyes tossed in feverish unrest on the crest of the wave of pleasure,— like Mazeppa bound helpless on his unguided steed. The supreme interest of the story, however, is lodged in the large and dusky soul of the stalwart Abbé, lighted only by the votive taper of his simple primitive faith. In this connection it becomes extremely deep and poignant. What situation indeed is more tragical than to be condemned to dumbness just in proportion as you cease to be blind, as need and occasion for speech urge you the more harshly ; to be forced to watch through a fiery mist of tears the hurrying, unpitying, consuming progression of fate ; the fruitless strife of the old and familiar, the loved and consecrated, with the new, the unsparing, the elements of that cold future from which we shall be absent ? The fierce irruption of modern life into the little mountain parish of the poor curé produces a cruel confusion of his life-long notions of duty and faith. His vague spiritual doubts and anxieties, his personal temptations and tribulations, are reproduced with a skill which sets a seal upon the masterly character of the work. Occasionally the metaphysical side of the matter, as we may call it, is somewhat meagre and pale ; but considering the author’s beginnings, we can only congratulate him on his success. The situation is one which demanded real analytic imagination for its treatment, and something very like this has been used. It would not be easy to find anything as much like it among the younger French romancers. As an artist M. Droz has all, and more than all, the common gifts ; as a humorist he is peculiarly rich and exuberant; as a moralist, even, he is not to be dismissed in silence. This last term may have an irrelevant sound. What we mean is, that he will be unlikely ever to write a tale which will not project a certain moral deposit and leave the reader, after many broad smiles, in a musing mood. Such is the effect of all really analytic work. That he will write many tales we confidently hope. His two novels are surely the beginning of a career, not the end. It cannot fail to be brilliant. M. Droz was in the Empire, but not of it.