A Century of French Fiction
A CENTURY
OF
FRENCH FICTION
BY
BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. (Harv.)
PROFESSOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1898
BEESI
Copyright, 1898,
By Dodd, Mead and Company.
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Preface
THIS book is a study of novels, not of novelists.
It seeks to show the development of what has
come to be the chief genre in the most artistic of
European literatures. The limitations that this pur-
pose involves are obvious. Biography belongs here
only in so far as heredity or environment influence
those qualities in an author by which he in turn influ-
ences the development of fiction. With some novel-
ists, such as George Sand, these are very significant ;
with others, such as Daudet, they are hardly signifi-
cant at all. The poems, dramas, or essays of novelists
are usually passed in silence, though they may be, as
with Sainte-Beuve, the chief title to literary distinction.
And in regard to the novels themselves, this book is
less concerned with what is done than with how it is
done ; it seeks, not to retell a story, but to convey an
artistic impression, and in the space that it accords to
the 115 novelists and 688 novels or short stories that
it names it is less influenced by an author's popularity
than by the excellence or novelty of his technic, his
style, or his ideas of the functions, ethical, social, phil-
osophical, or artistic, of the novel. Many writers are
little read who have been studied by those who are
read much. The former have more interest to us
102929
vi Preface
than the latter, Stendhal more than Ohnet, the Gon-
courts than Bourget, while writers who offer only
clever reflections of the innovating ideas of others are
from our point of view of no interest at all. I men-
tion that I may not seem to have forgotten, but, fol-
lowing Dante's counsel, I " look and pass."
If, then, I have given more space to Loti or to
Chateaubriand than to Hugo it is because I think
them as novelists more significant than he, though
their fiction be less read and less entertaining. If
more than a quarter of my book is given to Balzac it
is because I think that is his proportionate due. To
eight others I have accorded separate studies. The
remaining 106 are grouped according to the circum-
stances of their birth and education, for, as I have
come to see in the course of this study, there is a con-
nection worth noting between the political condition
of France and the gestation of her men of genius, a
certain family resemblance among the sons of the
First Empire, as among those of the Restoration, of
the Bourgeois Monarchy and of the Second Empire.
Of course, as in every large family, there are eccen-
trics that bear no marked likeness to their brothers,
but I trust this arrangement of heterogeneous mate-
rials will prove the most helpful and perspicuous.
As my book is intended for English readers I have
translated all titles of novels, and where there seemed
any possibility of misunderstanding I have added the
title in its original French form, under which alone it
appears in the Index. I have read, so far as was ne-
cessary to my purpose, every novel mentioned n this
Preface
vn
book. I have taken notes of my impressions. I have
also read such criticism of these works as was acces-
sible to me, both in French and English, note-book in
hand. My ideas have often been clarified or crystal-
lized, my point of view occasionally modified by what
I have read, but to acknowledge such debts in detail,
were it possible, would be misleading, for, if I seem in
any case to echo the opinion of another, it is because
I have been led by independent study to share it.
What I have taken consciously from others is quoted
by name if the citation is exact, indefinitely if the
form is altered or the thought modified.
Two years ago I published a book on Modern
French Literature, which involved brief mention of
the present subject. That phrases of the earlier
volume should occasionally recur in this is perhaps
inevitable. The two books are, however, distinct in
purpose and in method. Chapter VIII. and portions of
Chapter I. have appeared in " The Sewanee Review."
The origins of fiction in France, and its history till the
French Revolution, I hope to treat in another volume,
for which all materials are well in hand.
I desire in conclusion to extend my thanks to the
officers of the Boston Public Library, whose untiring
courtesy has made this book a possibility, while pro-
viding for the author the pleasantest and the most
profitable of his studious hours.
BENJAMIN W. WELLS.
University of the South,
Sewanee, Tenn.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Fiction under Bonaparte i
II. The Novels of Stendhal 30
III. The Fiction of the Romantic School . . 44^*
IV. Alexandre Dumas and the Napoleonic Gen-
eration 68"
V. The Development of Balzac 88 ""
VI. The Maturity of Balzac 130
VII. The Genius of Balzac 165 ""~
VIII. Prosper Merimee 187
IX. Theophile Gautier 203
X. George Sand .... .....219
XI. Gustave Flaubert . 242
XII. The Generation of the Restoration . . 262 4""*
XIII. Emile Zola 283
XIV. Alphonse Daudet 305
XV. The Generation of Louis Philippe . . . 326
XVI. Guy de Maupassant. ....... 348^7""
XVII. The Generation of the Second Empire. . 362
INDEX . 385
A Century of French Fiction
CHAPTER I
FICTION UNDER BONAPARTE
THE nineteenth century is pre-eminently the age of the
novel. What Voltaire could call the work of one
writing with facility things unworthy to be read by serious
minds has become so predominant in France as almost to
absorb in popular literary consciousness all forms of imagi-
native writing except the dram'a. This tendency, manifest
at the outset of the century, has been accentuated by the
spread of superficial culture, the cheapening in the cost of
production of books, and the readier means of diffusion by
post and railway. The French newspapers, too, by their
feuilletons have added greatly to the production of fiction,
though they have tended to lower its literary standard. But
more important perhaps than any of these factors is that
with the first year of our century fiction begins to reflect
popular emotions and states of mind. The novel of the
romantic school was to be lyric in its style, personal
in its appeal. Herein lies the cardinal importance of
Chateaubriand.
The century in fiction opens with the publication of his
Atala in 1801, followed in 1802 by Rene, both short stories
2 A Century of French Fiction
but of far-reaching influence and most characteristic of the
mood of the next generation and of this author, who was its
most eloquent representative. He was a Breton noble,
born at St. Malo, " within hearing of the waves " as he liked
to say, on the fourth of September, 1768, the birth-year of
Napoleon, to whom he was also wont to take this occasion
to compare himself. Neither mother nor father seems to
have been a wise or genial parent, and his chief if not his
only childish affection was for a sister, Lucile, a frail, ner-
vous invalid, who died young. The relation was certainly
morbid, and later in his life Chauteaubriand was pleased to
surround it with a sort of incestuous halo that he might ex-
plain by this aberration of youth the fascinating indifference
that characterised his own relations to women in after years
and found their fullest expression in his Ren, the most
strongly marked character, in a sense we may say the only
character, of his fiction.
He was himself an intense and somewhat morbid youth.
He passed his childhood in an ultra-Catholic environment,
listening to the strange legends of the childlike Breton peo-
ple or nursing meditation by the boundless and mysterious
ocean. As a boy he went to various schools, but all within
the Breton spell, and then to the gloomy ancestral castle of
Combourg ; no wonder that his twentieth year found him
untaught, timid, eager, and gloomy, above all dissatisfied
with all that life gave or promised. He was suffering
already from that maladie du Steele of which it is impossible
not to speak at some length in judging Chateaubriand, but
which we shall perhaps treat more profitably if we first trace
the course of his life until, with the fall of Napoleon, the
man of letters was absorbed in the politician. He tried to
go to sea and got actually as far as Brest ; he contemplated
Fiction under Bonaparte 3
suicide ; then his friends got him a position in the army, and
on the eve of the Revolution the young man found himself
transported from the solitude of ocean and forest, from the
most backward province of France, to Paris, the focus of the
intellectual and political world.
The effect, as was natural, was immediate and strong.
Its literary significance, however, lies in the strength of the
reaction that followed and in the literary stimulus that his
associations gave him. He learned to know most of the
chief writers of the time, Parny the poet, La Harpe the
critic, the two Ch6niers, Chamfort the acute philosopher,
and most important of all to him, Fontanes, who was the
discoverer of his genius, his unswerving friend, and always
a shrewd adviser. He began intense though unsystematic
studies. Ignorant at twenty, his Essay on Revolutions
(1797) published at twenty-nine shows a remarkable mass
of information, which indeed was never fully assimilated.
But acquaintance with the great writings of the century
aroused in him, as greatness always did, mingled admiration
and envy. Could he not, he seems to have said to himself,
catch the imagination of Rousseau and use it to controvert
his ideas and so to destroy his ascendency ? Could he not
eclipse Bernardin de St. Pierre by borrowing his style and
making it the bearer of sturdier thought? There remained
Voltaire, whose wit he could not borrow. Against him and
his ideas he would wage a moral war/and win for himself
the mantle of Bossuet. Such seem to have been the lit-
erary impulses that he gathered from four intoxicating years.
Then in 1791 as the clouds of revolution thickened he set
sail for America, where he had a commission to search for
the Northwest Passage, obviously a mere pretext. He
travelled more or less widely in the United States, met
4 A Century of French Fiction
Washington, and, according to his own account, which is
never above suspicion, saw Labrador and the Great Lakes,
the prairies of what was then Louisiana, and the semi-trop-
cal forests of Spanish Florida. Here he might observe the
" state of nature " as Rousseau had dreamed and Bernardin
described it. Here the morbid imagination of his youth
was vivified by contact with a primeval world and untutored
man. He was gone but a year and landed again in France
in January, 1792, but that year gave him the scene and the
direct inspiration for the greater part of his fiction and the
indirect inspiration for the rest.
The execution of Louis XVI. made Chateaubriand an
emigre ; he was wounded in the expedition against Thion-
ville, went to England in 1793, and remained there till 1800.
It was during this period of exiled poverty that he wrote
The Natchez, a huge manuscript of 2,383 folio pages, in
which he strove to involve his impressions of America and
of life. Of this far the greater part was not printed till
1826, but it served as a sort of storehouse from which he
drew successively Atala (1801), Rene (1802), and con-
siderable par^s of the Genius of Christianity (1802). This
last lies outside our immediate field. Chateaubriand's
other contributions to fiction are The Martyrs (les Mar-
tyrs, 1809), and The Last Abencerage (Aventure du dernier
Abencrage, 1826), written about the same time. To
these last works he brought the added experience of two
years of official life at Rome, but he seems to have wel-
comed the murder of the Duke d'Enghien as an excuse for
resuming a haughty opposition to Napoleon, " who," as he
somewhat fatuously assures us, " made the world tremble,
but me never." Yet these works were not the immediate
result of those years, but of what he called a Journey from
Fiction under Bonaparte
Paris to Jerusalem (1811), a trip undertaken partly to
gather materials for The Martyrs, partly at the suggestion
of a lady who was not quite ready to yield to his seductive
morgue and who met him, on his return, in the Alhambra,
where for some years their names could be deciphered
together. The intermingling of sensuality and religious
sentiment is as constant in Chateaubriand as it was in
Bernardin and Rousseau.
Thus much of the life of Chateaubriand is necessary to
any understanding of the ethical purport of his novels.
Atala claims to be a story told at the close of the seven-
teenth century to a melancholy young Frenchman, Ren,
in whom the author intends that we shall see himself. It
is narrated by the old Indian Chactas, who has been in
France in the grand siecle, has talked with F^nelon, listened
to Bossuet and to Ninon, seen the tragedies of Racine, and
acquired enough of civilization to combine an (Homeric
simplicity of picturesque imagery with the dainty refine-
ments of the Hotel Rambouillet. ) All of which is ridiculous
enough, but it serves Chateaubriand's purpose, which is to
bring civilization and the " state of nature " into more
effective contrast than Rousseau or Bernardin had done.
For Chactas, knowing the best that culture has to offer,
deliberately prefers the wilderness, as does Rene* himself,
and, as Chateaubriand gives us to understand, he would do
also were it not that a weary condescending charity forbids
him to deprive society of his presence. Both Chactas and
Rene* have had experiences somewhat similar to that of
Chateaubriand and Lucile. Rene* loves his sister, Chactas
a young Indian girl who has sworn perpetual virginity. He
is a captive among her nation. She saves him, and to save
herself they are forced to fly together. The solitary jour-
6 A Century of French Fiction
ney of the young lovers, for she returns his affection though
guarding her vow, is described with a lingering dalliance
that some take for sentimental purity and others for lurking
lubricity. As Joubert said, the passions here are " covered
with long white veils." However, the pair come at last to
the mission station of Father Aubry, the counterpart of
Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar and Bernardin's Solitary Walker.
There Atala, who " had extreme sensitiveness joined to pro-
found melancholy," presently died of the disease that poets
call unrequited love, martyr to a romantic and therefore
false conception of duty. But while this might detract now
from the interest of the story, it added greatly to its charm
in 1800, in a generation already predisposed to that maladie
du Steele of which Chateaubriand was in part the first tal-
ented exponent and in part the cause.
This is even more clearly the central point of the interest
of Rene, a second fragment detached from the Genius of
Christia?iity in 1807, probably because its author felt that
it would appeal to many who did not fancy the religious
dilettantism of the latter work, and would offend perhaps
some that the other attracted. The hero of this tale, as the
name implies, is the person to whom Atala had been
related, namely Chateaubriand himself, as he aspired to be
or to be thought at twenty-three. He is a young Werther,
full of discouraged world-pain, such as was forced on many
men of genius, first by the revolt against the dry rot of
eighteenth-century philosophy, then by the lie direct given
to the Utopian dreams of the reformers by the bloody satur-
nalia of the Revolution. Where men a decade before had
felt full of hope and strength, they felt now, at least those
of more delicate organization, for it is they alone who had
literary genius at this time, helpless and hopeless. From
Fiction under Bonaparte
this resulted an anxious introspection and an eager utter-
ance of egoism that had begun with Rousseau and cul-
minated in Chateaubriand and in Byron. Chateaubriand
and all the victims of the maladie du siecle are prisoned in
themselves. All their invention consists of creating a new
environment for their individuality. Hence the growing
predominance in fiction of local colour. As Brunetiere says,
" wherever the poet may set up the scenery of his work he
is and remains its centre."
Doubtless other agencies contributed to evoke this state
of mind in Chateaubriand and in those who read Rene with
eager enthusiasm. Among these it is probably safe to
reckon the new cosmopolitanism that had inoculated the
literature of France with a virus from the North contrary to
its nature and so for the moment toxic. The interest in
foreign literatures, the knowledge of English and German
masterpieces through translations, which grew more frequent
in this generation, troubled as it were the equilibrium of
the French genius. Speaking of a period a little later, and
of the novel Obermann, George Sand says : " Ambitions
took on a character of feverish intensity, minds over-
wrought by immense labours were suddenly tried by great
fatigues and piercing agonies. All the springs of personal
interest, all the forces of egoism, extremely developed under
great tension, gave birth to unknown ills for which psychol-
ogy had as yet assigned no place in its annals." Of this
malady all sensitively organized natures seem to have felt
more or less since the days of Werther and Saint- Preux.
Goethe threw off the disease and attained an Olympian
calm, Rousseau became mentally deranged, Bernardin was
saved from it by his fatuity, Chateaubriand wrapped himself
in egoistic indifference, and in Rene, or the Effect of the
8 A Century of French Fiction
Passions he has given us the most noted French exposition
of this state of soul. It is this that made him the father of
romanticism.
The moral influence of Rene was almost wholly evil and
obviously so, yet it was so great and the little tale so sums
and characterises the morbid virus of romanticism that it
is well to let Rene" tell his story, as far as may be in his
own words as he sits by the banks of the Mississippi, re-
garding the world with indifference and his wife and child
near by with a weary ennui of which we may read particu-
lars in The Natchez quite worthy to rank with the rankest
" flowers of evil " of Baudelaire.
Rene" is a character for whom it is hard to feel respect
or patience, a man of brilliant genius who becomes the
spendthrift of his talent through a complete lack of even a
rudimentary sense of social duty or self-control. He has
an utter lack of will, being indeed a monstrosity of egoism,
very like in this to Chateaubriand, so self-absorbed that
nothing outside himself seems worth desire or contempla-
tion. Chateaubriand has told us that " people wearied him
by dint of loving him," and it was with a somewhat simi-
lar condescension to the solicitations of his friends that
Ren at last consented to tell them " not the adventures of
his life, for he had experienced none, but the secret senti-
ments of his soul," of which those of his kind were always
replete to nausea. He describes himself at the outset,
very justly, as " a young man without force or virtue, who
finds in himself his own torment, and has hardly any evils
to bemoan save those that he had himself caused." We
know that Chateaubriand was uncongenial to his parents.
Ren6 too has no sympathies in childhood, but it is because
he has cost his mother her life and his father has died
Fiction under Bonaparte
while he was still young. As Chateaubriand owed what he
was pleased to imagine his conversion to the emotions
attending the death of his mother and sister, so Rene
receives from his father's death his first presentiment of
immortality. The effect of religion, so called, on character
was about equally absent in both cases. Chateaubriand
could not describe that of which he knew nothing. His
character never attained an adult development. It was
neither Christian nor pagan, but hermaphrodite. And so
was Rene's. In youth this young hopeful , " used to go
apart to contemplate the fugitive clouds or to hear the rain
fall on the foliage." Naturally, therefore, when he stood
before " the entrance to the deceptive paths of life " he
cared to enter on none of them. The monastic life, being
the most obviously unnatural and apparently useless, at-
tracted him most, but " whether through natural inconstancy
or prejudice" he changed his plans and resolved to nurse
his melancholy on the relics of antiquity till " he grew
weary of searching in these grave-clothes where too often
he stirred only a criminal dust."
At Paris Rene" found he was only " belittling his life to
bring it to a level with society," in the country he was
" fatigued by the repetition of the same scenes and ideas."
No wonder that after amusing himself by throwing leaves
into a brook he reflects : " See to what a degree of puerility
our proud reason can descend." Ren6 had reached this
point in his mental and moral degeneration when he began
to feel the desire of sharing it with another. His feelings,
here too, are a curious perversion of mingled Christianity
and paganism. " Oh, God," Rene exclaims, " if thou
hadst given me a wife after my desire, if as to our first
parent so to me thou hadst brought an Eve drawn from
io A Century of French Fiction
myself ! Heavenly beauty, I should have prostrated myself
before thee, then taking thee in my arms, I should have
prayed the eternal to give thee the rest of my life."
This is Chateaubriand's ideal of romantic love. As
Sainte-Beuve says (*' Causeries," ii. 151), " what he sought
in love was less the affection of any particular woman than
an occasion of agitation and fantasy ; it was less the per-
son that he sought than the regret, the recollection, an
eternal dream, the cult of his own youth, the adoration of
which he felt himself the object, the renewal or the illusion
of a cherished situation." This appears in the relation of
Chactas to Atala, it reappears in the Velteda episode of The
Martyrs, and especially in the astonishing later relation
that unites Rene" to Celuta. To this we shall recur pres-
ently. For the moment Rend finds in the kisses of his
sister, Amelie, the Lucile of fact, the nearest approach to
contentment of which his distorted heart was capable.
" In this delirious state," he says, " I almost came to desire
to feel some evil, that I might have at least a real object of
pain." His sister shares his feelings, but, with more per-
spicacity and decision than Chateaubriand would have
thought sympathetic in his blase" hero, she takes refuge in a
convent. She writes to him, painting to him the charms of
matrimony with a quivering pen that almost betrays itself at
the close. But her separation from her brother is only for
a time, the same cradle held them in childhood and the
same tomb shall soon unite their warm dust. " If I snatch
myself from you in time it is only that I may be joined to
you in eternity." Meantime she makes the sensible prop-
osition that he should adopt some profession, a suggestion
that he must have received with a languid smile. He visits
the convent as Am61ie is making her monastic profession,
Fiction under Bonaparte 1 1
and hears her ejaculate beneath her shroud : " God of
mercy, grant that I may never rise from the funeral couch,
and crown with thy blessings a brother who has not shared
my criminal passion."
Rene" now resolves to abandon civilisation, but while
waiting for his ship he " wanders constantly around the
monastery," reflecting that " here religion lulls the sensi-
tive soul in sweet deception. For the fiercest loves she
substitutes a sort of chaste glow in which the virgin and the
lover are fused in one." But Amlie finally died, very
much as Atala had done, and Rene* seems to have thought
it proper to spend the rest of his life in diffusing a general
atmosphere of unhappiness around him. Of this we learn
chiefly from The Natchez.
The Natchez, it may be explained, are a tribe of Indians,
now extinct, into which Rene has been adopted. This has
compelled him to take a wife, Celuta, from among them,
but nothing could compel him to act like a Christian or
even like a gentleman to her or to their child. Such a
conversion as Chateaubriand describes his own to have
been implies far less depth of heart than shallowness of
mind. " I became a Christian," he says in his preface to
the Genius ; " I did not yield, I confess, to any great super-