long. The citations of _Olympia_ are pushed beyond measure, beyond
what is comic, almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments,
which remind one rather of the heavy jesting on critics in _Un Prince
de la Boheme_ and the short-lived _Revue Parisienne_, are labored to
the last degree. The part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate
exactly, and altogether the book does not seem to me a _reussite_.

The history of _L'Illustre Gaudissart_ is, for a story of Balzac's,
almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance
in the first edition of _Scenes de la Vie de Province_ in 1833, and
entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the
_Comedie_, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared
with _La Muse du Departement_, of _Les Parisiens en Province_ was
given to it.

_La Muse du Departement_ has a rather more complicated record than its
companion piece in _Les Parisiens en Province_, L'Illustre
Gaudissart_. It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the
title of _Dinah Piedefer_, in _Le Messager_ during March and April
1843, and was almost immediately published as a book, with works of
other writers, under the general title of _Les Mysteres de Province_,
and accompanied by some other work of its own author's. It had four
parts and fifty-two chapters in _Le Messager_, an arrangement which
was but slightly altered in the volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives
some curious indications of mosaic work in it, and some fragments
which do not now appear in the text.

George Saintsbury