It has been called a most clever, fascinating story, full of genuine pathos, of graceful and delicate descriptions; a popular book for all classes. But what its significance is as a literary work of art and as a literary-moral-reform instrument has never been clearly stated.
French literature, at the time when this story was first published, 1878, was passing through the most critical and dangerous period in the century. Most of the great literary artists of the time, Mérimée, George Sand, Flaubert, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Augier, Taine, etc., had either ceased writing or had produced their epoch-making works. Two elements or tendencies in literature, that heretofore had been legitimate and acceptable, were rapidly falling into what M. Brunetière so aptly called la phosphorescence de la pourriture. The first of these was a pessimistic or unwholesome expression of antipathy to and contempt for humanity, noticeable first in Chateaubriand, but developing into a loathsome nausea in Baudelaire; of an eager and voluntary sensuality, of a mere physical pleasure, with Maupassant and Huysmans; of an intellectual pessimism, unbelief, and physiological analysis of passion, with Paul Bourget; of what may be called a descriptive pessimism, a mere display of the brutal ferocity of human nature, of the vileness and brutality of man and life, of gloom and despair, with Emile Zola.
The second tendency was what may be called an excessive leaning toward the purely ornate; that is, an absolute respect for form; the first requisite of a work
