A FALSE marriage between a heartless man of the world and an innocent, trustful girl ; the long suspense in which both conceal their relation, till the violent death of the betrayer reveals it; many dramatic scenes in the most dramatic society ; vivid sketches of character, the whole closing with the recompense of a worthy love for the woman who has suffered so cruelly : these are the most obvious features of a novel which we have read with great interest.
The story opens in Switzerland, but most of its events occur at Turin. All the people but two are Italians, and it is to be valued as a study of Italian society in its modern phases, almost as much as for its dramatic force. The hero — the husband and the betrayer of Ina — is of a type perhaps commoner in Italy at this time than anywhere else, for even in France men are apt to believe more than he. Bertani is an expression of the intellectual revolt from the religion of the Church and the profound and all-embracing scepticism so common amongst his countrymen, who, not being able to rid themselves of their passionate natures at the same time with their emotional faith, do little for non-believing thought or inquiry, but remain mere enjoyers, epicureans, more or less amiable or cynical. His character, both in its boldness and its subtlety is well painted ; he dies, as he has lived, outside of the Church, and makes a formal confession in the hour of death only as a necessary step toward the legalization by a priest of his Protestant marriage with Ina. There is a strong contrast between him and Marcello, whom we should be glad to believe not more exceptional, but who affects us as less natural. We do not find him so good, artistically speaking, as some more slightly sketched persons, — his father, for example, the elderly Italian of fixed habits, of kindly heart and somewhat sarcastic mind ; and his young sisters, the submissive and obedient good little Italian girls, who, whatever their future, live at home a life of exemplary dulness, emptiness, and restriction. The character of Madame de Turenne strikes us as true and forcible, both in its defects and in its virtues, in its tendency to extreme flirtation and its capability of generous indignation. The scenes between her and Ina, and then Bertani, when, having learned the wrong that he has committed against her, she lavishes the scorn of her torrid nature upon him, and dismisses him, are very dramatic and very good. So, too, is the encounter between Ina and her brother, when with her babe in her arms she refuses to give her husband’s name ; and in fact wherever impassioned people are confronted, either in anger or in love, the author succeeds. It is in other things that her failure lies, as the irrelevant story of Sofi, and the lugged-in and poor caricature of the American lady on her travels, and in the protracted speech-making of the lovers. There is sometimes, also, rather more hyperbole in the talk than even the warmth of Italian temperament will account for.
But the story is absorbing, and generally well managed, and the book is more than a promise of better tilings to come Such a character as Ina’s — true in its love and trust, and true in its inability to forgive — are proofs of more than common invention ; and redundancies of the sort we have mentioned are more easily mended than poverty in the same degree.