INTRODUCTION

Octave Feuillet {1821-1890) was bom at St. Lô in Normandy, but carly went to live in Paris. For a while he served as assistant to Dumas, was a favorite at the court of Napoléon JLll, and in 1862 was dected to the French Academy. Beginning hiscareer as a. Romanticist, and sometimes called a << dissident Romanticist/^ he bek)ng6d to the idealistic school of French lîterature. The romanesque, which is the taste for the extraor- •dinary^ was his particular iield. The romanesque character, impatient of enduring the ills of life and discontented with its ordifiary ways, believes that hs^iness consists in the extraordinary, the exceptional, the difficult, and thus seeks af ter délicate and perilous situations. The romanesque soûl flnds a certain refinement in poverty ; his religion is a matter of form and fashion, and his highest principle of action is hoaor.

As a romanesque, Feuillet is the worthy successor of the authors of the romances of love and adventure of the seventeenth ceatury. His heroes are of noble birth, of old and pure French stock, and move about in refîned society. They may become s^diers, investigators, artists, and engage in manly sports, especîally in those of horsemanship and the chase. Of this noble and élégant society Feuillet is the novelist par excellence. In his later aristocratie or society novels there is observable a mild t3rpe of realism, but it is hard to make his realism harmonize with his idealism, in which there is always something artificial. While it is true that the novels of Feuillet are not properly

^^ • studies in realism but are Works of invention, his heroes often being artificial and conventional, yet he freed himself from the

w bondage of art for art's sake, and, like Tennyson, he employed his art for humanity's sake. His novels are " novels with a purpose"^ in them he morahzes fredy, even sacrificing at times the

02 iu