to his plan in this book after a rather miraculous fashion. The
Goguelat myth may seem disconnected, and he did as a matter of fact
once publish it separately; yet it sets off (in the same sort of
felicitous manner of which Shakespeare's clown-scenes and others are
the capital examples in literature) both the slightly matter-of-fact
details of the beatification of the valley and the various minute
sketches of places and folk, and the almost superhuman goodness of
Benassis, and his intensely and piteously human suffering and remorse.
It is like the red cloak in a group; it lights, warms, inspirits the
whole picture.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way in which
Balzac in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion
(for if Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he
avows his orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in
practice), has almost entirely escaped the sentimentality /plus/
unorthodoxy of similar work in the eighteenth century, and the
sentimentality /plus/ orthodoxy of similar work in the nineteenth.
Benassis no doubt plays Providence in a manner and with a success
which it is rarely given to mortal man to achieve; but we do not feel
either the approach to sham, or the more than approach to gush, with
which similar handling on the part of Dickens too often affects some
of us. The sin and the punishment of the Doctor, the thoroughly human
figures of Genestas and the rest, save the situation from this and
other drawbacks. We are not in the Cockaigne of perfectibility, where
Marmontel and Godwin disport themselves; we are in a very practical
place, where time-bargains in barley are made, and you pay the
respectable, if not lavish board of ten francs per day for
entertainment to man and beast.