CITOYENNE JACQUELINE.*
THE conception of condensing the Great French Revolution into a novel concerning an individual woman's lot must seem at first sight almost as bold as that of condensing the lightning into a conductor of individual messages, or compelling the ocean to carry a single boat wherever its owners will. There is a large- ness in the machinery which seems too great for the individual purpose to which it is applied, and perhaps the artistic enterprise is really bolder than the scientific, for if you undertake to paint "a woman's lot in the Great French Revolution," there is always the same difficulty that the figure-painter has in dealing with a too magnificent landscape as his background,—the fear lest either the individual figures be lost in the grandeur of the scene, or the grand features of the scene be dwarfed or distorted in order to give sufficient prominence to the individual figures. Miss Tytler has felt this difficulty, and there are perhaps here and there in this beautiful and finished story chapters in which the his- toric picture of the events of the time is a little too extended. But on the whole she has surmounted it with great success,—the rather that she specially excels in that grouping and colouring of country and city pictures which in a great degree supersedes the necessity of little resume:4 of events by letting the course of events indicate itself in the gossip of humble persons. At all events the interest of the individual tale is never absorbed in the interest of the great tragedy, and again, we are never in danger of forgetting that that tragedy was made up of thousands and thousands of similar individual trials, as the sea itself is but an aggregate of waves.
Not only is the tale one of deep interest, and of great pictorial power in reference to the scenery and the society-it depicts, but it is long since we have read any in which the sketches of character —all for the most part slight—are more delicately outlined or sus- tained with more uniform skill. Miss Tytler is fair to every class, and has given us good instead of bad specimens of almost all the classes engaged in the Great Revolution without concealing the radical weakness and selfishness which undermined their strength. The sketch of the Baron and Baronne de Faye, of their full-dress manners and highly preserved etiquettes in the dull little Tour de Faye, Monsieur going every evening between five and six to kiss Madame's hand and play cards with her and her daughter till supper was served, and of the genuinely high-bred courage, the gallantry of heart that still lingered under this stiff moral brocade in both the Baron and his wife, is graphic, and at least like truth, if, from want of any intimate knowledge of the old French noblesse, we cannot properly assert that it is true. The young lady and heroine, Jacqueline, Demoiselle de Faye, is, as young ladies and heroines are apt to be, less definite, and perhaps Miss Tytler's least successful character. But even in her the youthful enthusiasm for the nation, the true disinterestedness and nobility of mind be- fore she abandons her own class, and again, the technical nobility • Citoyenne Jacqueline; a Woman's Lot in the Great French Revolution. By Sarah Tt1e, S role. 1,,ndon: Stratum. of caste which asserts itself in her after her marriage with her father's steward, the registrar of Faye,—are finely drawn, and the contrast between her real refinement and the artificial refinement of the brilliant Madame de Croi, who carries off her lover from her, is thoroughly artistic. Madame de Croi is a girl little older than herself, also of noble family, who had married a rich old bourgeois for his money (afterwards confiscated), and was left a widow while yet in her teens. She has culture and brilliancy, but has none of the noble ideas which just redeemed some few among the higher aristocracy of old France. One of the best touches in the book is that soliloquy in which the Baroness de Faye contrasts the artificial brilliancy of Madame de Croi with the nobility of her
own daughter's nature, much as she affects to despise its deeper and more enthusiastic side :—
" There was one person, and only one, present who formed a more correct estimate than her circle of the conflicting claims of Jacqueline and Petronille. It was not Babette; for although she loved her young mistress dearly, and ground her strong white teeth at this issue, she too regarded Madame de Crol as by far the finer woman—very nearly as fine as the lady in the caravan from Alsace. Was it wonderful that the judge who decided in Jacqueline's favour—not out of partiality, but in good faith—was Madame de Faye? Monsieur the Baron might have his doubts, bewildered and dazzled as men are liable to be ; Madame had none. What does the woman fear for ?' she began her reflections deliberately, apostrophizing Madame de Luna°. 'Her own paltry spark of a life? It does not merit the trouble of being blown out, any more than that of her reader, Mademoiselle Troche. They will soon go out of themselves, poor women! if the people will only have patience. She might have more to think of. What ! a daughter born a Lussac, by marriage a Croi, and with a taint that is cousin-german to vulgarity ! Nevertheless it is so. My Jacqueline is an awkward, unformed child, who may be anything yet. The worst is, she will believe in the whole world and embroil herself with it, like a saint in the middle ages. But in that there is not a shade of vulgarity. Petronille de Croi is like a financier's daughter : she seeks to shine, she struggles to rule. Ah! how low that is ! She is a liar, in look and act, in assuming the tournure and costume of the old regime. We others governed because we could not help it. We ruled without effort or design. We scorned to conceal our worst sins. We were grand dames to the last. For you, my Chevalier, I can follow your game. Petronille de Crofs dot will main- tain you in exile now that Jacqueline de Faye's domain is destined beyond remedy to confiscation. Good. Petronille's heart is also favourable to you, for you will prove a better chevalier than the Marquis to conduct her to England, and thus prevent hazard and ennui. She may marry you. Ah! well, I forgive you, my cousin. Every man must have care for himself, and the very Chapter of the Knights of Malta is dissolved. I forgive you for everything but being actually light-headed for this Petronille's smile and favour. Chut ! I hear the creaking of the joints of the young woman's mind. But men have thick heads and dull brains. They cannot always tell the pewter from the silver, or see that peacocks are not birds of paradise. They have a shade of :rnlgarity themselves. We are otherwise.'" There seems to us real genius in this passage. The aristocracy of self- reliant serenity looking down on the glitter of mere clever effort, and saying to itself, with French vivacity, " Chat I I hear the creak- ing of the joints of the young woman's mind I" is a touch worthy of any novelist however great. But if Miss Tytler is thoroughly fair to the greater qualities even of the effete aristocracy wiped out by the Revolution, she is more than fair to the qualities of the class which superseded, and deserved to supersede, them in the rural districts. In the innkeeper of Faye and her son, La Sarte and Michel, we have a fine picture of the noblest qualities which are needed to form the nucleus of a healthy and simple society, without any sort of idealism or Arcadian extravagance. La Sarte, with all her depth of faith and pride of simplicity, is no angel, and can- not easily bear to renounce the influence she has exercised as a wealthy innkeeper in a poor village, nor can she bend to offer voluntarily any sympathy to the Demoiselle de Faye in the sacri- fices which the latter takes upon herself when she enters a sphere beneath her own, and becomes her daughter-in-law. The picture of La Sarte ignoring all the confusion which her un- practised and unhappy daughter-in-law introduces into the vil- lage inn by her ignorance and negligence, rather than volunteer her help and sympathy, much as she loves to counsel and reprove those who spontaneously come to her for advice, is as well conceived as is her proud injunction to her favourite son, the Girondist deputy for Faye, to put a stop to the bloodshed of the Convention, when he and his party had in fact fallen from power and were just about to suffer for their comparative moderation. The sketch, slight though it be, of the intrinsic nobility and conse- quent serenity in these plebeians of the Sart family, of the far deeper root which this moral nobility has in them than any which the hereditary rank of Monsieur and Madame de Faye could strike into the thin soil of the old aristocratic ideas, combined as it is with a very graphic picture of the peculiar, and so to say frosted, charm, which a long hereditary serenity and the com- paratively artificial sentiment of noblesse oblige' give to the manners of Monsieur and Madame, is subtle and very effec- tive. Nor is the sketch of the kindly bourgeois family at Paris, the rich mercer Durand and his people, so far inferior in true nobility even to the statelier peasantry owing to a certain want of fixity of status and simplicity of position, less striking. The pompous and good-natured father, with his pompous republican ferocity, his shopkeeper's thrift, shopkeeper's vanity, and personal kindliness ; the pretty daughter, Felicite, who is not exactly a flirt, but so much dislikes to give pain that she cannot throw off either of two men who love her, and does her best to satisfy both ; the neglected and eccentric little romp Olympe, with her girlish passion for her sister's lover and the diablerie which great talents and high spirits kept down by repressive neglect is almost sure to inspire in young French girls, are all outlined with a masterly hand.
All these sketches are fine, and not less so are the general and still slighter sketches of revolutionary life in the provinces and in Paris. The various village characters of the hamlet of Faye are
especially happy, and even to the worst of all, the village butcher Sylvain, with his deep melancholy eyes and insatiable thirst for the
bloodiest gratifications of revolutionary ferocity, the author does not deny that touch of human nature which renders him conceiv- able as a man as well as as a demon. We must give one specimen of Miss Tytler's village conversations. The Revolution is at its dark- est, and the hamlet of Faye, its church gutted and closed, worship and mass forbidden, and tenth days substituted for the Sunday, does not find itself happier for the reign of Beason :—
"Next day an old woman, with her distaff in the bosom of her gown, went along spinning, and driving her red cow before her, from the banks of the Mousse, where, by dint of great assiduity, it had managed to get a few wisps or blades. She looked up, and began to wag her head gravely, as she approached the churchyard gate. It was closed, but clearly not for the preservation of property. The crosses wore pulled up and broken into fragments, like the woodwork of the little church close by, and neither white ribands nor immortelles rested on the grave of virgin Sr patriarch. Over the gate was painted, in big, staring, white letters, 'Death is an everlasting sleep.' Here was the explanation of the shut door. The old woman was very old, and brown, and shrivelled. To all appearance it could not be long ere she slept her everlasting sleep. The idea, however, seemed to fill her with lively dissatisfaction. A second and younger woman, noticing the first, walked down the street and joined her. The two stood still at the locked gate, while the red cow went discreetly on to quench its thirst at the fountain trough.—' A fine thing now,' said the older woman, after me and my old man have lived together these forty years, to tell us that when our time comes we are to fall asleep and not even dream of each other,—bah!'—`And my little son Alex,' replied the younger, who was drawn for the army, and has marched to the ends of the earth, and who may be shot passing through some hedge and die in a ditch—they will toll me he will have gone to sleep and will have no awaking. I need not care to go to sleep, for I shall have no awaking either ; and I suppose they would say I need
not pray, because God is also asleep Death ! if that were the ease what would the common people do?'—' For that matter, what would the great people do ?'—' Ah ! the great people have had their day, and now it is their night ; the holy saints help them ! I bear them no spite, poor seals! But, my faith ! if they call this liberty, when they do not give its the liberty of another world, I would like better to want their
liberty, I would The salt tax and roadmaking were not half so bad, not even purgatory and the dread of hell itself.'—' No indeed! They still left us heaven, and the good God, and. our Lord and Saviour, the Virgin and the Saints, to interpose for us. One never knew where a blessing might not come from. But this sleep, it crashes no like lead.'—'La Jullienne takes on worst of all for her baby. They say she will go mad if something is not done.'—` Go! she was always a lunatic, La Jullienne. What is her baby, which lay in her bosom for only a year, to my man, who has driven the cow there—the prodigal beast !—with me, and helped to milk her too, and dug, and thrashed, and ate, and drank, and prayed with me for nearly half a century?'—' Or to my little son, who kept the vintage so well, and was affianced to the good Jeanneton, the best girl in Faye. Oh! well, it is hard ; but for mother Jullienne,—fy ! do not speak of her in comparison.'
La Sane used to say, every one's trial was the worst trial to that man or woman.'—' La Sarte knows; she is a wise woman. I esteem La Sarte ; I wish her good luck of her stay in Paris with her son, the famous deputy. But La Sarte did not live with her man for forty-seven years. Father Sart died when the famous deputy was a baby himself, I remember. The honest man departed on the file of St. Hilaire. Oaf ! I forget there is no St. Hiliare ; there is nothing but the sun yonder, and he goes to bed in his turn. They hold up that sleep as if it were a blessing. I don't want to sleep unless I am to awake again. Though I do have the rheumatism, I can bear it ; for there are many things beau- tiful here, if only folk did not tell us lies.' 'But look you, there comes Mother Jullienne, whose son was only a little child:—The old gad- ding slattern of the hamlet was a sorry sight. Not only were her arms empty of the meagre child, but they were tossing distractedly about her head, from which she had torn her cap, together with handfuls of her grizzled hair. The bones were staring at each other above her hollow cheeks, and her ferret eyes were glazed and wild.—' Why does that great beast Jullien not take up my child and give him consecrated burial ?' she raged, in a hoarse voice.—' But Jullien is so swollen he cannot dig. I will rather scratch away the earth with my nails.' —` Softly, softly, La Jullienne, the child rests under the shadow of the church. There is no better grave in France now,' said Mother Beaujen.— ` And he was but a little thing,' added the other woman, grudgingly preoccupied with her own trial ; 'he had not worked for you, nor even spoken to you.'—' Silence ! or I strike you,' screeched Mother Jtdlienne. What do you know of it, wife of Hue the younger—you whose Alex was idle many a time, and was turned back from his confirmation for killing quails when he should have been ringing the bells ? Or you,
Mother Beaujen, whose old Simon is like a crab apple, and you and he spit at each other like cats ? Ah ! I have seen you, Mother Beaujeu, yoked side by side with an ox, and even an old grey ass, and your man driving you. No wonder you bray ! You two would be well at ease to have your plagues sleeping for ever, and so would the whole world, for that. But my innocent little child, what do I know but that if he had lived ho might have been a great farmer, buying up the lands, like Maitre Michel ? And now that he is dead, to be told that he will never wake up again,—.I tell you it makes me mad.'" The whole novel is rather a sketch than a painting, its outlines delicately touched, the stir and tempest in the air and sky faith- fully rendered, the hope and the despair gleaming like stormy sun- light or forked lightning over the individual characters, expression never wanting, but no single nature sounded even to such depths as fiction, in skilful hands like Miss Tytler's, might safely go. Still every stroke in the sketch is refined, and almost every stroke tells. It is a story that not only interests us in the perusal, but that interests us still more in turning over the leaves a second and a third time, to catch the touches which we had missed in the first interest of the tale. There is vivacity as well as perfect clearness in the style, pathos that speaks through the sense of beauty, and therefore shows no strain or effort in its sentiment, and a depth of insight into all forms of enthusiasm, even when distorted into the foulest cruelty, which renders the picture of those almost incredible times not only more distinct, but less incredible and less poignantly painful than they are wont to seem. The French Revolution is apt to look to modern readers more like a chapter out of the Apocalypse than out of human history. And Mr. Carlyle, by his wonderful gorgeousness of colouring and cloudiness of outline, has rather strengthened than weakened the impression. The pictures of this story, while they give even a keener sense of the unrighteousneas and lust which were at the source of the Revolution, seem to justify it to history better than all Mr. Carlyle's opulence of pictorial insight, by showing how its fires tempered the true steel in all classes of natures, patrician or plebeian, high or low.
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