THE ATELIER DU LYS.* OF the two great classes of
works of fiction, the one supremely excellent, the other, if not supremely, at least highly enjoyable,
the one written for the initiated, the other for the unconscious —" the great multitude who are ready to perish, but never to speculate "—we have had this year two admirable examples.
The one is, it is unnecessary to say, Daniel Deronda ; the other, it is perhaps necessary to say, is The Atelier du Lys, the latest work of the author of Mademoiselle Mori. There may be noticed by the careful reader slight resemblances between the two books ; Mirah Lapidoth and Edmee Leroux are alike in this, that in both the consuming power of indignant virtue has put out the weaker fire of filial affection, and in both faith and esteem ripen into love, and fall naturally when ripe into the proper bands. But yet they are as essentially different in type as in style. Daniel Deronda is some- thing more than a tale of emotional and intellectual struggle, it would not have been "George Eliot's" had it not also embraced a series of psychological studies. But there is no philosophy, except of the unconscious sort, certainly no philosophising, in the Atelier du Lys ; the characters in it live and move and have their troubles, but one disease they escape being attacked by, "the disease of thinking ;" there is nothing complex in one of them, except the villain, and he is, artistically, the blemish of the book. A romance dealing with the Reign of Terror, in which every one except, of course, the villain has faith in religion, in a wise Pro- vidence that works through good to evil, and that for those who adhere to duty works out a happy destiny ; in which a simple Berrichonne girl nurses her loyalty to a husband whom she married by accident, and from whom she has been separated by necessity, until it becomes an all-absorbing passion, and in the words of Goethe, "Destiny grants her her wishes, but in its own way, in order to give her something beyond her wishes;" in which a consumptive painter lives calmly in Paris during the reign of Robespierre, because perfect love of his art has cast out fear of everything else,—such a book deserves to be read, not dissected, and even criticism of it appears almost as inappropriate as the chemical analysis of the constituents of a good meal during its progress.
The Atelier du Lys is founded upon a singular, an almost idyllic, and yet not altogether an impossible occurrence, .during that first period of revolutionary excess in France, in which simple folks always expected that the unexpected would come to pass,—and were frequently right. Edmee Leroux, the daughter of Jacques Leroux, the Jacobin steward to St. Aignan, a Royalist noble, in trying to warn the son of St. Aignan of a plot against his life, is apprehended in his company by a posse of Repub- licans with her own father at their head, and to save him from death goes through the ceremony of civil marriage with him, which is supposed to convert him to the opinions of his wife. The two have never met until the young noble of twenty-four sees a pale and fluttering girl of sixteen in his presence, beseeching him to flee for his life ; the only thing that unites them is the fact that the mothers of both are Berrichonnes, and have been on such terms of intimacy as the will of Leroux and their own different social positions permitted during their lives ; and that Edmee Leroux has been named after the mother of Alain St. Aignan. Alain places the wife he has thus singularly obtained under the protection of his aunt, Mademoiselle St. Aig- nan. How a 'strong affection springs up between the aunt and * The Atelier du Lys; or, an Art-Student in The Reign of Terror. By the Author Of 'Me demoiteBe Mon." 2 vole. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1876. the poor girl whom, in spite of her aristocratic prejudices, she persists in considering her nephew's wife ; how they both find their way into Paris when the Reign of Terror is at its worst, where we have glimpses of Robespierre, David the painter, and Theroigne Lafarge, one of those Parisian viragoes who never found their proper function till research placed petroleum within their reach ; how, through their acquaintance with one painter, they find themselves in the atelier of another ; how they spend there a time of contentment, sufficiently spiced with anxiety to make it piquant, we leave to those whom Mademoiselle Mori made admirers of its author to discover. The plot is a strong one, and the semi-historical narrative which forms the back-bone of the second volume is remarkably spirited. Many passages in it will recall the late Lord Lytton's Zanoni, but there is none of that frantic straining after effect, that display of " got-up " reading showing itself in foot-notes, which, along with its grotesque metaphysics—a combination of Mr. Disraeli and Dr. Slade—make Zanoni perhaps the least satisfactory of its author's works. This author has a competent knowledge of French history, and of the lights and shades of French character, and her (we presume, not his) writing is free alike from rhetorical " patches " and useless erudition. This account in the second volume of the fall of Robespierre is as bright as any description of the same event which we have read in history or in fiction :— ", Let us go up on the roof ; we can see thence all over the Place do Greve, said Efadelon, and they followed, scrambling through a trap- door, to a flat part of the roof, where they clustered, gazing over the city, whose towers and domes rose dark into the sky, though the houses were full of lights, and torches flitted up and down the streets, shedding a yellow, wavering light on the river, on the dark masses of men moving along the quais, and on the serried crowd round the Hotel de Ville, where cannoniers were standing with lighted matches by their guns, and the gleam of the torches mingled with the cold pale starlight showed bristling pikes and bayonets, and the desperate and haggard faces of the rabble gathered to defend their chief, while from every quarter of the city the tramp of innumerable feet came nearer and nearer to the attack. On the Place du Carousel, Henriot was desper- ately appealing to the National Guard, only to read in their sullen silence that Robespierre's fate was sealed, and that of his friends with it. From unknown hiding-places, Royalists who had been lurking in daily fear for their lives crept out, and urged on the populace against the Hotel de Ville, while even more powerful was the stimulus sup- plied by the fears and supplications of fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, who had relations among the 10,000 prisoners awaiting death in the prisons. With one of those tremendous, inconceivable re- vulsions which characterise Paris, Robespierre and all belonging to him suddenly became the objects of universal execration; to seize him, to destroy, annihilate him and his party, was the cry of the throng pour- ing out to crush the insurgents in the Place do Greve. What would hap- pen next ! The first shot, nay, a mere nothing, the opening of a window, the lighting of a torch, and the troops of the Convention and the friends of Robespierre would be at each other's throats, and Paris deluged with blood, perhaps sacked and burned. On every roof where foot could stand spectators were clustering, gazing towards the Place de Greve, in breathless silence, too anxious for words. The heads of the advancing columns were seen debouching on the square ; they paused ; neither side dared fire the first shot, and a deep, brief silence, more awful and intense than any sound, ensued. It was broken—suddenly, unexpectedly, by a cry of Viva in Convention !' from the midst of the insurgent ranks, raised none knew by whom, but the effect was decisive ; a roar of applause from the Government troops drowned all token of dissent from the Robespierrists ; another silence followed, interrupted this time by a single voice, addressing the insurgents, and audible in the deep hush all over the square. Those on the roofs strained their ears in vain ; they could only see that there was a fluctuating, uncertain movement round the Hotel de Ville, as if friends and foes were mingling, whether peaceably or not none could tell; it was all a dark, surging mass. The cannon are not fired,' murmured Edmde. That was all which they were sure of; the shouts and cries might be those of joy or anger. The hundreds of anxious eyes bent on the square could see nothing for many minutes but the heaving crowd ; after a time it seemed thinner ; there were empty spaces here and there, and though the cannon re- mained, those of the insurgents facing the guns brought up by the Garde Nationale, the gunners had disappeared. Madelon ran down stairs to see if Crocq had returned, and try to hear what was happening; the others stood watching until convinced that they could see nothing which would tell them anything more, and wearied out, they went back to their rooms, but no one in the Maison Crocq, or in hundreds of other houses in Paris, went to bed that night. At daybreak Balmat went out, promising to return soon, and Michonnet came in, to find himself instantly surrounded by all the inhabitants of the house, demanding news of the night's events. From him they gathered more or less of the arrest of Robespierre, the terrible scene when the Garde Nationale seized him and his friends in the Hotel de Ville, and that they were now in the Conciergerie awaiting sentence of death. For a moment no one could speak ; then a sort of shriek of mingled joy and fear escaped every lip, embraces, kisses, tears, broken words followed., a scene of confusion, gratitude, almost incredulous rapture, such as was being enacted all over Paris, as if every one felt his own life and that of his best-beloved given back, when beyond hope of reprieve; Paris only recognised the intensity of its terror by the intensity of its relief, but mingled with all was a sort of incredulous amazement that such a thing was possible as that Robespierre could be thus cast down. 'How art thou fallen, 0 Lucifer, son of the morning !' was the thought in every heart, and each would turn and ask his neighbour if indeed it were true, and shed tears of rapture at the assurance that it was so,
that the death-day of the tyrant was come—that tyrant whom their own hands had set up. All Paris was in the streets, from adjacent windows from roof-tops, messages were telegraphed to the prisons, whose inmates had watched in terror all through the evening and night, believing themselves about to be murdered, and now flocked to the windows, scarcely able to believe that it was Robespierre, not themselves, whose last hour had come, reading the altered condition of things in the humbled, downcast air of their gaolers, and in the glad faces which looked at them from without, some of friends, some of strangers, but all gratulatory alike. Meanwhile Robespierre, mute, impassive, giving no sign of pain either from tortured mind or shattered body, awaited the death which his less stoical companions were trembling to meet. Neither as they passed through the streets, more thronged and by a more exulting crowd than even when Louis Seize went to his death, nor when, last of the condemned, he left the cart for the scaffold, did he show any emotion ; once only his eye glanced round, when a man standing near murmured, 'Yes, Robespierre, there is a God !' Physical agony wrung one cry from him as the executioner roughly snatched away the handkerchief which bound the jaw shattered by a brutal shot from a Garde in the Hotel de Ville, otherwise the stoic Re- publican died as he had lived, calm, immovable, terrible. And Paris, mad with joy, rushed forth for what was called a manifestation promenatoire,' and in the evening thronged to the theatres, to see Amide, with Teldmaque for the ballet at the Opera, or the Combat of Thermopylre in the Citd. So ended the 9th of Thermidor."
But it is for the portrait-painting in it that the Atelier du Lys is most to be admired Alain, the hero in it, has little to do ; he merely appears in the first scenes in order to be miserable, and in the last to be happy ; but even from the vignette we have of him we can see that he must have been an excellent specimen of the better sort of Liberal noble to whom the Revolution brought new ideas, but whom it did not demoralise. His cousin, De Pelven, the villain—the struggle between whom and Edmee constitutes the whole plot of the work—is the noble demoralised by the Revolu- tion, a relined Philippe Egalite. De Pelven—is he intended as a portrait of Payan ?—is fairly drawn, and there is an admirable scene between him and Heron, the police spy, in which, when Heron informs him that they are both likely to be denounced by the Convention, he colours up, not with fear for the consequences to himself, but with shame at the idea of being denounced in such company. In some other respects, however, the portrait of De Pelven is not absolutely satis- factory. It is difficult to conceive that a man of his brain and culture should have condescended to such tricks as tampering with letters, telling clumsy lies, or have died with a melodramatic confession of his scepticism. Between Be Pelven and his cousin is the aunt, Mademoiselle St. Aignan. On the whole, hers is the best portrait in the book. This clever woman, warm-hearted, so full of esprit that in all her misfortunes she can make a joke ; tinged with the radical and sceptical ideas of the time, and yet so thoroughly aristocratic that she snubs poor plain Balmat, the painter, because he styles her cousin simply " Be Pelven ;" who believes herself Voltairean, and yet is so enamoured of Racine and Corneille that her criticism of Shakespeare reduces itself to" three old women capering round a pot, grave-diggers jesting over their work,—it is unimaginable," is the soul of the book, and even be- comes the life of its plot ; and we could wish that it was her destiny never to leave the atelier, in the society of which she found her- self more in her element than in the salons of the ancienne noblesse. Passing over Balmat, the Swiss Protestant painter, a perfect success morally, a great failure as an artist, and M. Delys, the chief of the Atelier, who, because he is easily annoyed, believes himself to be a new Timon, and is so absent-minded that he boils his inkstand for an egg, and lights his lamp with an assignat of a hundred francs, we come to Edmee herself. Among the Undines of modern fiction, with her intense clannish loyalty, which binds her to the St. Aignan family, and ends in her devoted love for that member of it who becomes a student in the same atelier, and her purity, which shrivels up her growing love for Be Pelven when she discovers his unworthiness, she ought to hold a foremost place, and yet she is so natural that when she is smarting under the knowledge that her husband has not recognised her, she comforts herself with "Luckily I do not love him !" and breaks into stormy sobs by way of proving it.
Such a work as this abounds in passages worthy of quotation purely for their literary excellence, and we cannot do better than leave a book which is French in essence, and yet is the reverse of Frenchy, without giving the joint description of England con- tributed by M. Delys and his pupil, and which reads like an epitome of M. Taine :—
" Singular people those English! Gluttonous and drunken, but not -without some poetry, though paralysed as to all fine and delicate enjoy- ment of life, by their rigid sense of duty, is it not so, Count ? I picture them to myself in their lonely houses, lost in some forest, or built by their roaring sea, swallowing their muddy beer and salt beef beside a
smoky hearth no intellectual pleasures, no gaiety, no society but their spleen. Extraordinary people !'—' There is another side to
this English life, my dear master,' said Alain, laughing; beside the hearth, on which we will see a bright fire, if you please, is the faithful wife, loved and loving, the children, who grow up under the father's eyes, a book or gazette on the table, a friend coming in to talk over the local affairs, in which they both have a hand, or the Government, of which they speak ill, without any desire to change it. The hour grows late, the little ones clamber on his knee to say good night; the servants enter ; he reads a chapter of the old family Bible, in which the name of each child is inscribed, as a gift from the God in whom he believes ; they end with a prayer, and go peacefully to their beds, friends with all round them.'"
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