I
must confess, though it may sink me very low in some eyes, that I have
never been able to fully appreciate the attractions of crime and
criminals, fictitious or real. Certain pleasant and profitable things,
no doubt, retain their pleasure and their profit, to some extent, when
they are done in the manner which is technically called criminal; but
they seem to me to acquire no additional interest by being so. As the
criminal of fact is, in the vast majority of cases, an exceedingly
commonplace and dull person, the criminal of fiction seems to me only,
or usually, to escape these curses by being absolutely improbable and
unreal. But I know this is a terrible heresy.
Henri de Marsay is a much more ambitious and a much more interesting
figure. In him are combined the attractions of criminality, beauty,
brains, success, and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known and
delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen--and Balzac might
fairly be classed among them--have always regarded the English dandy
with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it
will be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But
there is a tradition that this young Don Juan--not such a good fellow
as Byron's, nor such a _grand seigneur_ as Moliere's--was partly
intended to represent Charles de Remusat, who is best known to this
generation by very sober and serious philosophical works, and by his
part in his mother's correspondence. I do not know that there ever
were any imputation on M.
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