What one first notes about _The Queen Pedauque_ is the fact
that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a story which,
curiously enough, is remarkable for its entire innocence of subtlety
and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find
your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward,
plumed romance by the elder Dumas.

Indeed, Dumas would have handled the "strange surprising adventures"
of Jacques Tournebroche to a nicety, if only Dumas had ever thought
to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac
and Tournebroche and Mosaide display, even now, a noticeable
something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the
_Memoires d'un Medecin_. One foresees, to be sure, that, with
the twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jerome Coignard would have
waddled into immortality not quite as we know him, but with somewhat
more of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot of _La Dame
de Monsoreau;_ and that the blood of the abbe's death-wound could
never have bedewed the book's final pages, in the teeth of Dumas'
economic unwillingness ever to despatch any character who was "good
for" a sequel.

And one thinks rather kindlily of _The Queen Pedauque_ as Dumas
would have equipped it... Yes, in reading here, it is the most
facile and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how
excellently Dumas would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in
the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted
by the sense that the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and
stanchions, the sort of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put
together, in a rather different way, for our illicit perusal.