Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/67

 and at last. We die piecemeal; some part of us is always dying; it is only what is left that dies at last. As for our "amours passés," where are they indeed? Jacques Laurent and the Prince Karol may be fancied, in echo, to exclaim.

In saying that George Sand lacks truth the critic more particularly means that she lacks exactitude—lacks the method of truth. Of a certain general truthfulness she is full to overflowing; we feel that to her mind nothing human is alien. I should say of her not that she knew human nature, but that she felt it. At all events she loved it and enjoyed it. She was contemplative; but she was not, in the deepest sense, observant. She was a very high order of sentimentalist, but she was not a moralist. She perceived a thousand things, but she rarely in strictness judged; so that although her books have a great deal of wisdom, they have not what is called weight. With the physical world she was as familiar as with the human, and she knew it perhaps better. She would probably at any time have said that she cared much more for botany, mineralogy, and astronomy than for sociology. "Nature," as we call it—landscape, trees, and flowers, rocks, and streams. and clouds—plays a larger part irn he novels than in any others, and in none are they described with such a grand, general felicity. If Turner had written his landscapes rather than painted them, he might have written like George Sand. If she was less truthful in dealing with men and women, says M. Taine, it is because she had too high an ideal for them; she could not bear not to represent them as better than they are. She delights in the representation of virtue, and if we sometimes feel that she has not really measured the heights on which she places her characters, that so to place them has cost little to her understanding, we are nevertheless struck with the nobleness of her imagination. M. Taine calls her an idealist; I should say, somewhat more narrowly, that she was an optimist. An optimist "lined," as the French say, with a romancer, is not the making of a moralist. George Sand's optimism, her idealism, are very beautiful, and the source of that impression of largeness, luminosity, and liberality which she makes upon us. But I suspect that something even better in a novelist is that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a single coat of rose color seem an act of violence.

 

 ZIZI, THE LITTLE DETECTIVE.

CHAPTER I.

had the Paris world, or more particularly the world in the neighborhood of Montrouge, ceased talking of the frightful murder that had been committed in that quarter on July 28, when another, more frightful if possible, took place in the Quartier Montmartre.

In the first instance an old man had been murdered in his bed, his valet left for dead in an adjoining room, and the apartment searched so thoroughly that a considerable sum of money which the old man had, as he thought, successfully hidden, was found, and the murderer decamped without leaving the slightest clue whereby to trace him.

The search for this villain had not ceased when, on the night of August 13, Mme. Viardot, a widow and a wealthy householder, was killed in her dressing-room. She had evidently been sleeping on a couch in that room on account of the extreme heat of the weather, and the sum of fifty thousand francs, which she had that day