the crowd of writers of the convulsive school, as deserving peculiar attention, Balzac and Janin.

Balzac is a French Hoffmann, a master of the fantastic and the horrible, dealing however with a more daring phantasmagoria than the German, not losing himself or turning the brain of his readers by a labyrinth of mazy images, born of the mingled fumes of French tobacco and the nervous excitement of dissipation, but bringing his fantastic world into direct bearing upon the actual, making it, in fact, only an embodied and palpable representation of the good and evil principles which divide the mixed nature of man. His "Peau de Chagrin " is a philosophical romance, of which the moral, if it has one, seems to be embodied in one sentence of the work, "Tuer les sentimens pour vivre vieux, ou mourir jeune en acceptant le martyre de passions, voilà notre sort." His hero Raphael has chosen the latter alternative. A talisman has been confided to him which gratifies every wish, but every wish, according to its magnitude, cuts off a portion of existence as the talisman shrivels, the span of life contracts with it. Yet he rushes on through a delirious round of passions and pleasures, agonized in the midst of all by the consciousness that his fate is approaching, that he is accelerating it, yet unable to resist; till at last he dies the miserable victim of his own unbridled passion. The reader is drawn as by a whirlwind through the chapters of the work, as through a series of chambers; some odor-breathing, sun-illumined, bright with lovely forms floating in voluptuous dance; some giving vent to the roar of intoxication, and ribaldry, and licentiousness; some vast empty halls, in which the lamps are dying out, the music gone, the goblets overturned, echoing only to the groan of solitary remorse; some, through whose half-opened and jealously unclosing doors, we catch momentary glimpses of domestic happiness; a long vista leading to a burial-vault, over which no angel of consolation or pity keeps watch, but only a spirit of impious mockery or comfortless despair. Many other tales in his "Romans Philosophiques abound in the same fascination, as we may call it, for it is analogous to the influence of the rattle-snake. Such is the "Elixir de Longue Vie," a tale of parricide, so extremely forcible that it can hardly be read without a shuddering belief of its probability; and the "Enfant Maudit," a picture of a being left to the brutalizing influence of savage nature, and sinking by degrees to a level with the inanimate world, with which alone his mind has been conversant. His later work, "Contes Bruns, par une tête à l'envers,' in which he has been assisted by Rabou and Philarète Chasles, more resembles the "Diable Amoureux" of Cazotte, or Washington Irving's Dance of the Furniture in the old Flemish inn.

These are only a series of frightful grotesques, dancing before the eyes of the spectator, like

The fancied lights, that flitting pass

Over shut eyes at midnight, when
Fever begins upon the brain.

But here, even though in a less striking degree than in the "Romans Philosophiques," the talent of Balzac is evident.

Janin we should be inclined to place next to him: in many points they resemble each other closely. In both there is the same wild vigor of conception, the same rapid brilliancy of execution, the same hardihood of speculation. But Balzac seems to us to study his details better, and to give more consistency and unity to his conceptions. Janin's first work, "L'Âne Mort et la Femme Guillotinée," puzzled the town. Whether it were a parody on Victor Hugo's raw-head and bloody-bones scenes in " Bug Jargal" and "Hans of Iceland," or a bona fide attempt to beat him at his own weapons, no one seemed to know. If it were a parody, it certainly did not produce the usual effect of one, namely, laughter. On the contrary, it fulfilled most literally the condition which the author, in his preface, avowed he had in view in writing it, that it should be a work which the reader should throw down a dozen times in disgust, and yet should feel himself forced, as by a spell, to take it up again and finish its horrors. The "Confession," which followed, was a picture of mental agony and remorse in a mind having a natural tendency to insanity, a brief but overpowering production, like Hugo's "Dernier Jour d'un Condamné." More lately Janin has tried his hand on a more elaborate and regular work, the story of "Barnave, a Tale of the Revolution"; but though this production is at once more natural and more varied than its predecessors, it has not attracted the same attention. It treats too plainly the crimes of the revolution and the motives of its actors, and manifests too strong a sympathy with the suffering party, to be exactly to the taste of the Mouvement. If Janin wishes to be popular, he must betake himself again to the Lazar-house and the Place de Grève.

The time would fail us were we to attempt to say any thing of the monstrosities of Eugène Sue,* with his tales of pirates and planters, negroes with hearts blacker than their faces, and serpents that strangle heroines on their wedding-night; of Raymond's dashing but gloomy sketches of the Life of Paris in the "Maçon, ," "Les Intimes," "Contes de l'Atelier "; of Rey Dusseuil's "Samuel Bernard," and "La Fin du Monde "; of Drouineau's "Manuscrit Vert"; or the many other names which the course of

* "Plik et Plok," and "Atar Gull."

the last few years has added to the ever-changing roll of popularity. We must turn at once to "Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-Un." The nature of the subject, the morals and manners of Paris, -exclude, of course, much of that exaggeration which in works of pure fiction we have mentioned as the most remarkable feature of French literature at the present moment. And, perhaps, it is owing to this check upon the natural tendencies of many of the authors, that there is, on the whole, in this work so much that is common-place, second-rate, inferior to the usual standard of periodical essay-writing both in France and among ourselves. The average of the compositions of the "Hundred-and-One," does not rise above, if it even equals, the general ability of the essays in Jouy's "Hermites," while the inferior ones are a thousand degrees beneath those of that graceful, and, on the whole, amusing series. Considering that the work is a labor of love, that the highest names in France are to be found in the list of collaborateurs, it is, in fact, surprising how little is contained in the three volumes already published, which is less likely to be quoted, or less known three months hence.

The article, entitled "La Conciergerie," by Philarète Chasles, bears the sombre inspiration of reality; "C quorum pars magna fui" speaks in every line of this striking and touching picture of imprisonment. Its author, arrested when a mere boy in 1815, almost without a shadow of suspicion, thrown among the lowest horde of Parisian ruffians in the police, is afterwards transferred to the dreary prison of the Conciergerie, the den which had witnessed so many of the horrors of the Revolution, but which has been swept away by a more modern building.

"The carriage stopt before the Palais de Justice. Here then was the Conciergerie. Near the vast staircase which leads up to the Palais de Justice you discovered in a corner, on the right, sunk under ground, concealed by a double railing, crushed as it were by the building which rose above it, the subterranean vault of which I speak. The weight of the superincumbent building pressed on it, as society presses on the prisoner, be he innocent or guilty. Was it a prison, a sewer, or a cellar? No one could have said, so completely was its entrance, so small, so low, so narrow, so black, buried in the shadow projected from the surrounding buildings. At the gate stood a centinel; in front a lamp was burning, which enlightened with a bloody glare this funereal avenue. Now all is changed; but in 1815 the oldest of French prisons resembled the oubliettes of feudal times. I entered, preceded and followed by a gendarme.

"My first thought was of death and of the tomb. Afterwards, however, (let me confess my sins of boyish pride,) this flagrant iniquity gave me courage, and I found that the men who could

lower themselves so far as to tremble at my infancy, and to thrust me into their dungeons, elevated me to the precocious dignity of a man and a martyr. The consciousness of the pure and simple occupations in the midst of which the adjutant of police had surprised me, the consciousness of my innocence, the disgust with which this foolish and wanton barbarity inspired me; perhaps, the strange pleasure of tasting at so early a period of life its most poignant and bitter sensations, strangely supported me; I felt as if I could rise to the level of any suffering, any cruelty; I threw down the glove of defiance to the world. Alas, it has taken it up! "I was registered. The word is degrading, terrible, like a chain which is placed upon you, a weight attached to you, a physical burden; by this compact of strength against weakness, you belong to the prison: you are the thing, the puppet, the furniture of the keeper. You descend from the condition of man to that of an insensible and brute being, classed, ticketed, like a faggot torn from the forest and laid up in its order to be burnt, in the storehouse of its proprietor.

"The lantern at the gate cast but a dim and feeble light upon surrounding objects. I caught a glimpse of the rags of a robber seated on the same bench with myself, also waiting his registration. A man in a brown dress laid hold of me by the hand. We climbed up stairs, we crossed galleries; the wind blew moist and cold through these dismal passages; my eyes, unaccustomed to this new world, discerned nothing but red stars, as it were, burning here and there; they were the lamps attached to the wall.

"I am sorry, young man,' said my guide, that such are our orders; but you are au secret.'

"What does that mean?'

"It is a cell which you are not allowed to leave, and where you are allowed to see no one.'

"We had descended several stories: a long passage with chinks admitting air and light spread before us; several wickets opened to allow us to pass, and fell again. The third door in the passage was that of my prison; a massive door of iron, covered with bolts, of which there is a great profusion in that quarter.

"There,' said the jailor, after raising his enormous bars of iron, and making the key grate three times in the lock. The cell was about eight feet long, five broad, and twelve high; involved in the thickest darkness; the wall on the one side dripping with lime water, on the other a wooden partition, the floor paved like a cellar; in the farther end, about ten feet above the floor, an opening of about three feet in height and one in breadth, through which a fragment of the sky might be discernible; within an iron barrier obstructing this mockery of a window, and without a screen of wood which prevented all prospect within. In one corner on the left, fronting the door, some bundles of straw littered the ground: beneath the window a pitcher near the door another filled with water, and a wooden bowl. I trembled, partly with cold, partly

with fear. This was the condemned cell, a prison in all its horrors, and I, its victim, was not even suspected.

"Though the authors of melo-dramas have abused this means of producing effect, I am tempted to believe in the commiseration of jailors. They see in fact so few deserving of pity, that when chance does present them with the prospect, these souls so habituated to the sufferings of others, tired of this obduracy, indulge with eagerness in the pleasure of compassion, the rare relaxation of charity. Jaques took pity on me and served me well. His wooden figure seemed to soften and relax when I spoke to him; he was kind to me, he would linger five minutes to talk to me in my cell. This man, in his brown coat and with his girdle loaded with keys, had more pity in his heart than the inquisitor, the man of the world, who dined in town, wore breeches of black silk, and gossiped with the ladies.

"His menace had been accomplished. This was the 'Cul de bassefosse,' with which his wounded self-love had threatened me. I knew not what phantasmagoria was passing about me; nor how, arrested in the house of a printer, conducted to the police, interrogated by its agent, transferred to the Conciergerie, I underwent the fate which Desrues and Mandrin had already endured. In all this series of cruelties I see nothing but a mournful scene of magic. At the present day I can understand but too well this concatenation of sufferings; I understand it only to execrate it, not through vengeance or resentment, but as a man, as a citizen, as a being penetrated with profound rancour, to borrow the expressive phrase of our ancestors, against those insults to humanity, the use of which the police permits with impunity, in the midst of a society which calls itself legal, and would fain call itself free.

"There I remained. A loaf was brought me, a prison loaf, so black, so bitter, so disgusting to smell and taste, even hunger revolted from it.

"Would you prefer La Pistole?' asked the jailor. I dried my tears. I inquired of him what the word meant. For a hundred franks a month, he told me, I might have a bed, white bread, food, a table, and a chair. I was only uneasy about my family. I asked Jacques if I might communicate with them.

"I will send some one,' said he, 'to your mother, to tell her how you are; but you are not permitted to write or to receive letters.'

"I gave Jaques to understand that my father would not fail to pay the allowance, and to recompense him for any kindnesses he might be inclined to show me. I begged of him to tell my parents that my health was good, and that I was very comfortable. He went away; and at night, when his usual rounds, the closing of the gates, and the usual duties of the prison, brought him back to my cell, he told me that my mother had remained a long time in the parlour, and had begged of him to bring me some fruits. Maternal sorrow had produced its effect on the heart of Jaques; he brought