Where you see no good,
silence is the best. Though this penitence comes too late,
it may be well, at least, to give it expression.
The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of
France. Fat Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola,
the Goncourts, and the infinitely greater Flaubert; and,
while similar in ugliness, still surpasses them in native
power. The old author, breaking with an ECLAT DE VOIX, out
of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking
impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at
all, it would be worth doing as well as he has done it; for
the pleasure we take in the author's skill repays us, or at
least reconciles us to the baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg
(LA GROSSE MARGOT) is typical of much; it is a piece of
experience that has nowhere else been rendered into
literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's
plainness mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the
business. I shall quote here a verse of an old students'
song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling
ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he
did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is
thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:-
Nunc plango florem
AEtatis tenerae
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
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