"BY ORDER OF THE KING."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:]
SIR,—In justice to the publisher who has spent lavishly, to me, who have laboured diligently, and to the eminent French an English scholars who have assisted the effort to do justice to Victor Hugo's latest published work, will you allow me to comment briefly on your reviewer's criticism of "By Order of the King "? Your reviewer announces himself to be utterly "baffled" by this sentence, which, however, he is good enough to admit "may be presumed to have some meaning in the French" :—
" Yon felt that the man had known the foretaste of Evil which is the' Calculation, and the aftertaste which is the Zero."
In the original, the sentence stands thus :— " On comprenait, quo cot homme avait coman Pavatit-goilt du Mal qui, eat le Caloul, at l'arriere-goilt qui eat is Zero."
I cannot see that the translation mystifies the text, nor do I per- ceive any difficulty in understanding the sentence in either form but I cannot of course gauge the understanding of your reviewer, who does not suggest any more lucid rendering of the passage.
Your reviewer dwells on Victor Hugo's errors, which are as patent as the ugliness of a swan's feet ; he says nothing of the grace and tenderness of Dea's character, nor of the inimitable pathos of the final chapter which describes her transfiguration (for we cannot associate the word "death" with such an image of purity). To continue the simile of the swan,—the gleam of its- wings and the grandeur of its motion in its own element, seem to have escaped your reviewer's mental vision.—I am, Sir, &c.,
THE TRANSLATOR OF "L'H.OMME QUI RIT.Th
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