would dare to present that fact or those names in his fiction; neither
would be accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Fleabody is _ben
trovato_.




A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"

THE night-scene on the battlefield of Wagram in "L'Aiglon"--an episode
whose sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagination like the point
of a rapier--bears a striking resemblance to a picturesque passage in
Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." It is the one intense great moment in
the play, and has been widely discussed, but so far as I am aware none
of M. Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the resemblance
mentioned. In the master's romance it is not the field of Wagram, but
the field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled with contending
armies of spooks, to use the grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the
mind's eye. The passage occurs at the end of the sixteenth chapter in
the second part of "Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as follows:

Le champ de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui appartient a la terre,
support impassible de l'homme, et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La
nuit pourtant une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si quelque
voyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, s'il reve comme
Virgile dans les funestes plaines de Philippes, l'hallucination de
la catastrophe le saisit. L'effrayant 18 juin revit; la fausse
colline-monument s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de
bataille reprend sa realite; des lignes d'infanterie ondulent dans la
plaine, des galops furieux traversent l'horizon; le songeur effare voit