reader’s curiosity by indelicate and obscure allusions, to spice these with the scandals of the day, all this seemed to be the fad.
This touching story, moral, pure, refreshing after the nausea, full of lively and moving incidents, entirely free from the licentious love of the nineteenth-century novel, depicting the true and noble friendship of two boys in whose destiny we immediately become interested, must interest the young student. It is possible for him to feel and live with them, to enjoy a personal pride in their successes, and many of their experiences could appeal to memories of their own past.
It is due as much to this beautiful and refreshing story, and to the few other wholesome and readable books of the period, as to the fierce, powerful, and vigorous onslaughts of the cutting pen of a Brunetière that this tendency to the coarsest degeneracy was checked. Such credit has never been given to this story of Malot.
The influence and effect were seen at once; first, in the immense sales, an evidence that the French people were eager for such a reaction against the generally unwholesome literature of the period; second, in the recognition of the French Academy by conferring upon the author the much-sought-for Montyon prize of 50,000 francs.
M. Hector Malot is now over seventy years of age. He was born in 1830 at Bouille, near Havre. His father was a lawyer and sent his son to Rouen to study
