AND THE HUSBAND; THE WOMAN OF A CERTAIN AGE, &c. EDITED BY MRS. GORE. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1841. 273. PREFACE. THE following stories are derived from one of the most popular, and decidedly the most original, of modern French novelists, who, as a faithful delineator of the manners of the day, may be pronounced as true to nature as Miss Austen herself; if, indeed, it be permissible to compare that admirable fac-similist of the calm and colourless serenity of the homes of England, with the philosophical satirist of a state of society unhinged by revolutions, and characterised by demoralization wearing the smoothest and most tempting surface Like to the apples of the Dead Sea's shore, All ashes to the taste! The stories thus offered to the public might have been aptly named "The French painted by themselves." Had such a picture of their domestic habits been put forth by a foreign hand, they would perhaps have impugned its authenticity; but the high estimation assigned to their author throughout France, attests that his delineations of Parisian and provincial life are equally to be relied on. In the first of these stories, the country life of a provincial neighbourhood is curiously pourtrayed. The baronial family, in its obscure château, stands forth life-like and vigorous from the canvas. The story is true and terrible, the moral powerfully inculcated. In the closing scenes, the reader will probably be reminded of one of our most beautiful of modern English poems, Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. "The Woman of a Certain Age," is a tale of Parisian life,-as full of truth as of polished and deliberate corruption. Let it be observed, however, in extenuation, that the frankness of immorality, whether of circumstance or principle, so often charged against modern French novels, is the result of their being addressed to a totally different order of society from that which engendered the works of Scott, Edgeworth, or Austen! |