"'CHARLES EDWARD.'


"Assuredly (to avail ourselves yet further of Sainte-Beuve's
Babylonish dialect), this far outpasses the raillery of Sterne's
_Sentimental Journey_; it might be Scarron without his grossness. Nay,
I do not know but that Moliere in his lighter mood would not have said
of it, as of Cyrano de Bergerac's best--'This is mine.' Richelieu
himself was not more complete when he wrote to the princess waiting
for him in the Palais Royal--'Stay there, my queen, to charm the
scullion lads.' At the same time, Charles Edward's humor is less
biting. I am not sure that this kind of wit was known among the Greeks
and Romans. Plato, possibly, upon a closer inspection approaches it,
but from the austere and musical side--"

"No more of that jargon," the Marquise broke in, "in print it may be
endurable; but to have it grating upon my ears is a punishment which I
do not in the least deserve."

"He first met Claudine on this wise," continued Nathan. "It was one of
the unfilled days, when Youth is a burden to itself; days when youth,
reduced by the overweening presumption of Age to a condition of
potential energy and dejection, emerges therefrom (like Blondet under
the Restoration), either to get into mischief or to set about some
colossal piece of buffoonery, half excused by the very audacity of its
conception. La Palferine was sauntering, cane in hand, up and down the
pavement between the Rue de Grammont and the Rue de Richelieu, when in
the distance he descried a woman too elegantly dressed, covered, as he
phrased it, with a great deal of portable property, too expensive and