With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp
which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a
gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances!
You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the
corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honourable and
brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make
the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through
how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I
take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois ("La Reine
Margot," "La Dame de Montsoreau," "Les Quarante-cinq"), and the
Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze ("Les Trois Mousquetaires,"
"Vingt Ans Apres," "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne"); and, beside these
two trilogies--a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three
pyramids--"Monte Cristo."

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn
incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your
people worship. You had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you had Retif,
and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of
voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present
naturalistes. From these alcoves of "Les Dames Galantes," and from
the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting
sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have
turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You
had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and
tragical true love of La Mole's, that devotion--how tender and how
pure!--of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour
of D'Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of
Athos: Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters
are real people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the