Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/76

Rh the "Capitaine Fracasse" seem to have been an affair of the senses, of personal experience, of observation and contact as illusory as those of a peculiarly vivid dream. The novel presents the adventures of a company of strolling players of Louis XIII.'s time,—their vicissitudes collective and individual, their miseries and gayeties, their loves and squabbles, and their final apportionment of worldly comfort—very much in that symmetrical fashion in which they have so often stood forth to receive it at the fall of the curtain. It is a fairy-tale of Bohemia, a triumph of the picaresque. In this case, by a special extension of his power, the author has made the dramatic interest as lively as the pictorial, and lodged good human hearts beneath the wonderfully-painted rusty doublets and tarnished satins of his maskers. The great charm of the book is a sort of combined geniality of feeling and colouring, which leaves one in doubt whether the author is the most joyous of painters or the cleverest of poets. It is a masterpiece of good-humour—a good-humour sustained by the artist's indefatigable relish for his theme. In artistic "bits," of course, the book abounds; it is a delightful gallery of portraits. The models, with their paint and pomatum, their broken plumes and threadbare velvet, their false finery and their real