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Updated: June 28, 2025
The final scene has been graphically described by Madame Octave Feuillet as she witnessed it in her childhood some sixty years ago. "My parents invited friends to see, from the top of the tower of Jeanne Couillard, the funeral procession passing.
And we may doubt whether the important class of men and women who write and read the novels of illicit love, could ever have existed, had not the psychological artists of modern times, from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the countries not re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation of romance, heroism, and ideality with mere adulterous passion, which was unknown to the corruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark Ages, and which remained as a fatal alloy to that legacy of mere spiritual love which was left to the world by the love poets of early feudalism.
Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins vi., p.22. Letter of the Prince de Nassau-Siegen to the Russian Empress Catherine, Feuillet de Conches, iv., p. 316; of also Madame de Campan, ch. xxi. Letter of the Princess to Madame de Bombelles, Feuillet de Conches, v., p.267. "N'est-il pas bien gentil, mon enfant?" Mémoires Particuliers, p. 235.
Embodying extravagant adventures, they must be classed nevertheless in the category of the sentimental novel to which the writings of Sand and Feuillet belong. Cherbuliez is always an interesting story-teller and an ingenious artificer of plot, but his psychology is conventional and his descriptive passages superficial though clever.
Adepts like Octave Feuillet, with his Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, and Victor Cherbuliez, with his Comte Kostia, endeavoured to perpetuate idealism or at least to recreate it in other forms. And then there were independents, like Flaubert who, with Madame Bovary, passed realism by on his way to naturalism.
Feuillet did not venture to do more than to make his Juliet experience temptation from a medical lover, who is a contrast to her magistrate husband. Although doctors come off rather badly in The Dangerous Age, the book owes much to them and to medical science. Much; perhaps too much.
The influence of these two writers affected the entire body of those who succeeded them with very few exceptions. Among these are Jules Sandeau, whose novels are distinguished by minute character-drawing in tones of a sombre hue. Saintine, the author of "Picciola," Mme. Octave Feuillet has attained great popularity in romances of fashionable life.
Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of naturalism. Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done?
The Marquise de Brinvilliers had been executed for poisoning several of her own relations in the reign of Louis XIV. Madame de Campan, ch. xvii.; Chambrier, ii., p. 12. He said to La Marck, "Aucun homme seul ne sera capable de ramener les Français an bon sens, le temps seul peut rétablir l'ordre dans les esprits," etc., etc. Mirabeau et La Marck, i., p. 147. Feuillet de Conches, i., p, 376.
I had six months before sent him the first two parts of my 'Eloisa' to have his opinion upon them. He had not yet read the work over. We read a part of it together. He found this 'feuillet', that was his term, by which he meant loaded with words and redundancies. I myself had already perceived it; but it was the babbling of the fever: I have never been able to correct it.
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