Vestibule Limited_, was published in New York in the spring of 1891.]

There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. Halévy's treatment of all
this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages
of _Lothair_, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things.
There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets
us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little
enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that
perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer.
The amiable egotism of the hero of _In the Express_, and the not
unkindly selfishness of the heroine of that most Parisian love-story,
are set before us without insistence, it is true, but with an irony so
keen that even he who runs as he reads may not mistake the author's real
opinion of the characters he has evoked.

To say this is to say that M. Halévy's irony is delicate and playful.
There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not
find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant
characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halévy, as
to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be
taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it
must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not
disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as
are so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer
darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they have brought
on themselves.

Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not
Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow
blindly. Now, while the author of _Salamnbo_ was a romanticist turned