occupation. He is extraordinarily unconventional for a French figure
in fiction, even for a figure drawn by such a French genius as Balzac.
But he is also hardly to be called a great type, and I do not quite
see why he should have succumbed before Philippe as he did.

Philippe himself is more complicated, and, perhaps, more questionable.
He is certainly one of Balzac's _fleurs du mal_; he is studied and
personally conducted from beginning to end with an extraordinary and
loving care; but is he quite "of a piece"? That he should have
succeeded in defeating the combination against which his virtuous
mother and brother failed is not an undue instance of the irony of
life. The defeat of such adversaries as Flore and Max has, of course,
the merit of poetical justice and the interest of "diamond cut
diamond." But is not the terrible Philippe Bridau, the "Mephistopheles
_a cheval_" of the latter part of the book, rather inconsistent with
the common-place ne'er-to-well of the earlier? Not only does it
require no unusual genius to waste money, when you have it, in the
channels of the drinking-shop, the gaming table, and elsewhere, to
sponge for more on your mother and brother, to embezzle when they are
squeezed dry, and to take to downright robbery when nothing else is
left; but a person who, in the various circumstances and opportunities
of Bridau, finds nothing better to do than these ordinary things, can
hardly be a person of exceptional intellectual resource. There is here
surely that sudden and unaccounted-for change of character which the
second-rate novelist and dramatists may permit himself, but from which
the first-rate should abstain.

This, however, may be an academic objection, and certainly the book is
of first-class interest. The minor characters, the mother and brother,
the luckless aunt with her combination at last turning up when the