Yet the stories he reeled off had a certain
market value. _The Heiress of Birague_ was sold for eight hundred
francs, _Jean-Louis_, or the _Foundling Girl_, for thirteen hundred;
and a higher price still was obtained (whether the money was actually
received is uncertain) for the _Handsome Jew_, afterwards republished
under a fresh title, _The Israelite_.
Contemporary critics declined to acknowledge that, in these books and
their congeners,[*] there were some traces of a master-hand. To-day
the traces are perceptible, because criticism has a better opportunity
of discovering them. Here and there, and especially in _Argow, the
Pirate_, is to be noticed a beginning of the realism that was
afterwards the novelist's excellence. The theme, that of a brigand
purified by love, is, as Monsieur le Breton remarks in his study of
Balzac, a romantic one in the manner of Byron, and has things in
common with Walter Scott's _Heart of Midlothian_, Victor Hugo's
_Bug-Jargal_, and Pixerecourt's _Belveder_. There is an atmosphere of
imagination in it, the action is quick, and the characters are
strongly though distortedly drawn. Moreover, a breath of healthy
sentiment runs through the story, which is not always the case in the
later and more celebrated novels.
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