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MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. The ____ rules of a programming language tell you which statements are legal, or accepted by the
programming language.
a. semantic c. syntax
b. logical d. grammatical
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 34

2. Which of the following is a reserved word in C++?

a. char c. CHAR
b. Char d. character
ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 36

3. Which of the following is a legal identifier?

a. program! c. 1program
b. program_1 d. program 1
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 36

4. ____ is a valid int value.

a. 46,259 c. 462.59
b. 46259 d. -32.00
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 39-40

5. ____ is a valid char value.

a. -129 c. 128
b. ‘A’ d. 129
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 40

6. An example of a floating point data type is ____.

a. int c. double
b. char d. short
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 41

7. The memory allocated for a float value is ____ bytes.

a. two c. eight
b. four d. sixteen
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 42

8. The value of the expression 33/10, assuming both values are integral data types, is ____.
a. 0.3 c. 3.0
b. 3 d. 3.3
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 43-44

9. The value of the expression 17 % 7 is ____.

a. 1 c. 3
b. 2 d. 4
 ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 43-44

10. The expression static_cast<int>(9.9) evaluates to ____.

a. 9 c. 9.9
b. 10 d. 9.0
ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 51

11. The expression static_cast<int>(6.9) + static_cast<int>(7.9) evaluates to ____.

a. 13 c. 14.8
b. 14 d. 15
ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 51

12. The length of the string "computer science" is ____.

a. 14 c. 16
b. 15 d. 18
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 54

13. In a C++ program, one and two are double variables and input values are 10.5 and 30.6.
After the statement cin >> one >> two; executes, ____.
a. one = 10.5, two = 10.5 c. one = 30.6, two = 30.6
b. one = 10.5, two = 30.6 d. one = 11, two = 31
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 64

14. Suppose that count is an int variable and count = 1. After the statement count++;
executes, the value of count is ____.
a. 1 c. 3
b. 2 d. 4
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 70

15. Suppose that alpha and beta are int variables. The statement alpha = --beta; is equivalent
to the statement(s) ____.
a. alpha = 1 - beta;
b. alpha = beta - 1;
c. beta = beta - 1;
alpha = beta;
d. alpha = beta;
beta = beta - 1;
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 70-71

16. Suppose that alpha and beta are int variables. The statement alpha = beta--; is equivalent
to the statement(s) ____.
a. alpha = 1 - beta;
b. alpha = beta - 1;
c. beta = beta - 1;
alpha = beta;
d. alpha = beta;
beta = beta - 1;
ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 70-71
17. Suppose that alpha and beta are int variables. The statement alpha = beta++; is equivalent
to the statement(s) ____.
a. alpha = 1 + beta;
b. alpha = alpha + beta;
c. alpha = beta;
beta = beta + 1;
d. beta = beta + 1;
alpha = beta;
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 70-71

18. Suppose that alpha and beta are int variables. The statement alpha = ++beta; is equivalent
to the statement(s) ____.
a. beta = beta + 1;
alpha = beta;
b. alpha = beta;
beta = beta + 1;
c. alpha = alpha + beta;
d. alpha = beta + 1;
ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 70-71

19. Choose the output of the following C++ statement:

cout << "Sunny " << '\n' << "Day " << endl;
a. Sunny \nDay
b. Sunny \nDay endl
c. Sunny
Day
d. Sunny \n
Day
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 73

20. Which of the following is the newline character?

a. \r c. \l
b. \n d. \b
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 73

21. Consider the following code.

// Insertion Point 1

using namespace std;

const float PI = 3.14;

int main()
{
//Insertion Point 2

float r = 2.0;
float area;
area = PI * r * r;

cout << "Area = " << area <<endl;

 return 0;
}
// Insertion Point 3

In this code, where does the include statement belong?

a. Insertion Point 1 c. Insertion Point 3
b. Insertion Point 2 d. Anywhere in the program
ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 80

22. ____ are executable statements that inform the user what to do.
a. Variables c. Named constants
b. Prompt lines d. Expressions
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 91

23. The declaration int a, b, c; is equivalent to which of the following?

a. inta , b, c; c. int abc;
b. int a,b,c; d. int a b c;
ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 92

24. Suppose that alpha and beta are int variables and alpha = 5 and beta = 10. After
the statement alpha *= beta; executes, ____.
a. alpha = 5 c. alpha = 50
b. alpha = 10 d. alpha = 50.0
ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 94

25. Suppose that sum and num are int variables and sum = 5 and num = 10. After the
statement sum += num executes, ____.
a. sum = 0 c. sum = 10
b. sum = 5 d. sum = 15
ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 95

COMPLETION

1. ____________________ is the process of planning and creating a program.

ANS:
Programming
programming

PTS: 1 REF: 28

2. A(n) ____________________ is a memory location whose contents can be changed.

ANS: variable

PTS: 1 REF: 33

3. A(n) ____________________ is a collection of statements, and when it is activated, or executed, it

accomplishes something.
 ANS:
subprogram
sub program
sub-program
function
modlue

PTS: 1 REF: 34

4. ____________________ functions are those that have already been written and are provided as part of
the system.

ANS:
Predefined
predefined
Standard
standard

PTS: 1 REF: 34

5. ____________________ rules determine the meaning of instructions.

ANS:
Semantic
semantic

PTS: 1 REF: 34

6. ____________________ can be used to identify the authors of the program, give the date when the
program is written or modified, give a brief explanation of the program, and explain the meaning of
key statements in a program.

ANS:
Comments
comments

PTS: 1 REF: 34

7. The smallest individual unit of a program written in any language is called a(n)
____________________.

ANS: token

PTS: 1 REF: 35

8. In a C++ program, ____________________ are used to separate special symbols, reserved words, and
identifiers.

ANS:
whitespaces
whitespace
white spaces
white space
 PTS: 1 REF: 37

9. The ____________________ type is C++ ’s method for allowing programmers to create their own
simple data types.

ANS: enumeration

PTS: 1 REF: 38

10. The memory space for a(n) ____________________ data value is 64 bytes.

ANS: long long

PTS: 1 REF: 39

11. The maximum number of significant digits is called the ____________________.

ANS: precision

PTS: 1 REF: 42

12. When a value of one data type is automatically changed to another data type, a(n)
____________________ type coercion is said to have occurred.

ANS: implicit

PTS: 1 REF: 51

13. A(n) ____________________ is a sequence of zero or more characters.

ANS: string

PTS: 1 REF: 53

14. In C++, you can use a(n) ____________________ to instruct a program to mark those memory
locations in which data is fixed throughout program execution.

ANS:
named constant
constant

PTS: 1 REF: 55

15. A data type is called ____________________ if the variable or named constant of that type can store
only one value at a time.

ANS: simple

PTS: 1 REF: 57
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 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and

Hawthorne's life.
from his biographers, was as gentle as the man
himself. We read of quiet days of work in a study
from whose windows he could watch the sunlight through the willow
boughs; of days on the river with Thoreau in a canoe which that
angular reformer had built with his own hands; of meetings with
Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure intellectual gleam
diffused about his person like the garment of a shining one'; of
evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight
bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries of
dream that were next day to come alive upon the paper. These
people, who were to make the intellectual life of America, were not
American in the peace of their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest
of all countries, wrote 'in a clear, brown, twilight atmosphere.' He
was a lover of secondhand things, and so clothed things with his
imagination that all he touched was green with ivy. No contemporary
or even historical romances have about them such ancient
tenderness and legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think
that he was born within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was
very weary, and should recline its vast head on the first convenient
pillow and take an age-long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand
other things to do, but it was not until he had seen Europe that
Hawthorne recognised the fact.
His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet
His notebooks.
life and its excitements, the stirring adventures of
an artist in search of perfection. He 'had settled
down by the wayside of life like a man under an enchantment.' None
but the artist can know how happy such enchantment is. He notices
the flashing soles of a boy's bare feet running past him in the wood,
and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried leaves round in a circle, not very
violently.' He writes one day, 'The tops of the chestnut trees have a
whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in bloom'; two days later,
unsatisfied, he makes another attempt to fit his words to his
impression:—'The tops of the chestnut trees are peculiarly rich, as if
a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else,
"Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One of his biographers,
himself no mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's must have been a
dull existence, if in it such trifles were worthy of note. But the
frequency of such notes, interspersed by innumerable sketches for
stories, is not a sign of the poverty of Hawthorne's life but of its
opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with dim things not easily
expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might supply some
phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the ghost of
an idea.
His friends were as far removed from the ordinary
The material of
his work.
as himself. He was never 'bustled in the world of
workaday.' Even his spell of life as surveyor in the
Customs was such that his description of it reads not unlike Charles
Lamb's recollections of the old clerks in the South-Sea House. The
Customs House was a place of sleep and cobwebs, and the people in
it, mostly retired sea-captains, 'partook of the genius of the place.'
'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal, 'il suffit de l'étudier soi-
même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les pratiquer.' Hawthorne
had never kept company with men; his nature and his circumstances
made him learn man from his own heart. He was never hampered as
a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have made him a
novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little opportunity of
studying them, nor with passions, for they had not greatly troubled
him, but with conscience. He plays upon the strings of conscience,
and, dusty as the instrument may be, his playing wakes an echo.
Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not
have tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music
is so novel and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him
intolerable if he had been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres
with a laugh they would have given no response. If he had waked
them with a careless discord they would have broken. We can bear it
because he is Hawthorne; we listen to him because he is in earnest.
All, in such matters, depends upon the attitude of the artist. War, for
example, is a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing in Dumas, and
an ordinary thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett. We take to
ourselves something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to us
unless we hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.
I remember a little picture by Goya representing a
Goya's 'Monk and
Witch'.
monk and a witch. The woman, with white staring
eyeballs, wide nostrils, fallen jaw, shrinks back
against the monk in puling terror; and he, crazed utterly, his eyes
fixed on nothingness, shrieks with gaping mouth some horrid
incantation that drowns the gasping breathing of the witch. Theirs is
no physical fear of fire or sword or scourge: they have sinned, and
seen the face of God. Before me are a set of reproductions of
Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of the burgess
in the road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot, viciously
sticks a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the altar
candles in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a
guitar. But the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a
careless grace after meat. It is there with propriety but without
conviction. Death is a full stop, not a comma. What is it to me that
the burgess may have cheated, the abbot be a hypocrite, the knight
a roysterer, and the nun a wanton? Death is close at hand to put a
stop to the doings of them all. I do not know what was the sin of the
monk or the witch, and yet the mere memory of their spiritual terror
moves me more than the pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not
of this world.
Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in
The background
of Hawthorne's
which Death is no mere end of a blind alley, but a
tales. dividing of the ways. Those dim people he found in
his own soul are important to us by their chances of
salvation or damnation. Their feet
 'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung
Over the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]

The background to their actions is not happiness and misery,

questions of this world only, but righteousness and mortal sin. The
fortunes of Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity. When
Ethan Brand flings himself into the furnace, what one of Hawthorne's
readers ever thought he died there?
Even this dignity of grave belief, combined with the charm of the
writer, would not excuse unskilful playing. But Hawthorne is as
dexterous on his chosen instrument as Poe on his, and as
consciously an artist as Stevenson, who indeed, in Markheim, plays,
no more skilfully than he, Hawthorne's peculiar tune. In the preface
to The House of the Seven Gables there is a paragraph that, though
long, it is not impertinent to quote. It shows how carefully he had
thought out the possibilities, and how scrupulously he had defined
the limits, of his chosen art.

Romance and 'When a writer calls his work a Romance it need

Novel. hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a
certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to
assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form
of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not
merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course
of man's experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it
must subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far
as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has
fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a
great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he
thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as
to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the
shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a
very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially
 to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and
evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance
of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said,
however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this
caution.'

There is a hint here of the provincial pedant; 'dishes offered to the

public' are a little out of date; but the principles are sound.
Hawthorne could not give clear outlines to the results of his
'burrowings in our common nature' unless he set them in an
atmospherical medium that made such outlines possible for things so
vague and so mysterious. Romance left him free to do so. He could
make a world to fit them, a patterned world, coloured to suggest
New England, Italy, or Nowhere. He was never forced to shock us by
introducing them into quite ordinary life. He never loses command
over his 'atmospherical medium,' and never weakens the importance
of his characters by letting them escape from the dominion of
morals. And yet his stories are not 'impaled on texts.' Moral feeling
makes them alive, but it is treated like the Marvellous—'mingled as a
slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour.' No artist had ever such
tricky balances to keep. No artist keeps his balance more
successfully.
His artistry is as subtle in the details as in the
Devices of
craftsmanship.
design. It is hard to examine his stories unmoved.
But, if we quiet our consciences, and still the
throbbing of our hearts, and force ourselves to read them paragraph
by paragraph with scientific calm, we find there are few tales from
which we can learn more delicate devices of craftsmanship in
making afraid, and in giving reality to intangible and mysterious
things. Before such skill the most prosaic reader surrenders his
reason and shudders with the rest.
Notice, for example, in Rappacini's Daughter, Hawthorne's way of
making credible the marvellous. He states the miracle quite simply,
and by asking 'Was it really so?' lays, without making his intention
obvious, a double emphasis on every point. On every point he
throws a doubt, and stamps belief into the mind. When Giovanni
wonders if Beatrice is like the flowers in that rich garden of death, in
breath and body poisonous, 'to be touched only with a glove, nor to
be approached without a mask,' Hawthorne suggests that he had
grown morbid. We know at once that he had not. A beautiful insect
flutters about her and dies at her feet. 'Now here it could not be but
that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him.' We know that they did
not. As Beatrice goes into the house, Giovanni fancies that the
flowers he had given her were already withering in her grasp. 'It was
an idle thought,' says Hawthorne, 'there could be no possibility of
distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a
distance.' We see the dead petals fall like leaves in autumn as she
steps across the threshold.
And then notice, in The Scarlet Letter, his use of simple actions
made significant by their contexts. When Hester Prynne has thrown
aside, as if for ever, the searing symbol of her outlawry, her child
refuses to recognise her, until she picks it miserably up, and pains
her bosom once again with the embroidered scarlet character. 'Now
thou art my mother, indeed!' cries the child, 'and I am thy little
Pearl!' And when Hester tells her that one day the minister will share
a fireside with them, and hold her on his knees, and teach her many
things, and love her dearly—'And will he always keep his hand over
his heart?' the child inquires. It is quite natural in her to notice a
peculiar habit, and to cling to a familiar piece of ornament; but her
words and actions assume the dignity of portents when we know
what they meant to that poor woman and that conscience-stricken
man.
The imagination needs straws to make its bricks,
The power of
details.
and Hawthorne is careful never to set it the
impossible task. He knows how to squeeze all the
emotion in his material into one small fragment of pictorial
suggestion that can be confidently left to produce its effect in
concert with the reader's mind. Remember how Goodman Brown, at
setting out, looked back and saw 'the head of Faith still peeping after
him with a melancholy air in spite of her pink ribbons.' A trifle,
apparently, but one that is not to be wasted. After his talk with the
devil, he thought he heard his wife's voice above him in the air, as
an unseen multitude of saints and sinners were encouraging her to
that awful meeting in the forest. '"Faith!" he shouted in a voice of
agony and desperation, and the echoes of the forest mocked him,
crying "Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all
through the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet
piercing the night when the unhappy wretch held his breath for a
response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder
murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud
swept away, leaving the dear and silent sky above Goodman Brown.
But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on
the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink
ribbon.'—A pink ribbon, a merry little thing that we can see and
touch, is made a sudden, awful summary of horror and despair.
He makes nature throb with his own mood, and by imperceptible
art weights the simplest words with the emotion of his tale. How are
the very tones of madness caught as the young man flourishes the
devil's stick and strides along the forest path. '"Ha! ha! ha!" roared
Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which
will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come
witch, come wizard, come Indian powpow, come devil himself and
here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear
you."' That paragraph is the work of a master.
And yet, artist as he was, Hawthorne lived too near
The character of
his work.
provincialism to show no signs of its influence in his
outlook and his work. He could not enjoy statues
without clothes. He was able to commit the enormity of typifying a
search for the absolute beautiful by the making of a tiny toy butterfly
that flapped its wings just like a real one. Nor did he ever reach that
conception of his art, of all art, that sets prettiness in niches round
rather than upon the altar of the temple. He valued perhaps too
highly the simple flowerlike embroidery that is characteristic of his
work. When, while he was in the Custom House, this power of facile
prettiness deserted him for a season, he produced nothing, and
feared that all his power was gone, for it was not in him to conjure
without a wand. He thought afterwards that he might have written
something with the pedestrian fidelity of the novel; but that was the
one thing he could never do. A man who is accustomed to see his
pages glimmer with opalescent colour, and to feel the touch of elfin
fingers on his brow, is oddly disconcerted in those moments when
the little people must be brushed aside like midges, and the
glimmering veil be torn by the elbows of a ruder reality. Such men
are not so common that we can complain of the défauts de leurs
qualités. And indeed, in his more solemn stories, instinct with the
spiritual terror of Goya's miniature, the grace that never leaves him
adds to the effect. A rapier seems never more cruel than in a hand
elaborately gloved. What kind of man is that, we ask, who, balancing
souls between Heaven and Hell, can never quite forget his friendship
with the fairies?
MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL
STORY-TELLING
 MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-
TELLING
There is a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper
Mérimée's
attitude towards
Mérimée. Their author is like a man who throws
writing. balls at the cocoa-nuts in the fair—to bring them
down, and not for the pleasure of throwing. His
writing was something quite outside himself, undertaken for the
satisfaction of feeling himself able to do it. He was in the habit of
setting himself tasks. 'I will blacken some paper,' he writes, 'in 1829,'
and he keeps his word. He was not an author, in the modern
professional sense, but a man, one of whose activities was
authorship. There is a real difference between writers of these
classes, the amateurs existing outside their work, the professionals
breathing only through it. Gautier, full-blooded, brutal, splendid
creature, is almost invisible but in his books. Mérimée,
irreproachably dressed, stands beside his, looking in another
direction. I am reminded of the sporting gentlemen of Hazlitt's day
who now and again would step into the ring and show that they too
had a pretty way with the gloves. Late in his life, when one of his
juvenile theatrical pieces was to be played for the first time, Mérimée
went to the performance, and heard a hostile noise in the house. 'Is
it me they are hissing?' he asked, 'I am going to hiss with the rest.' I
think of Congreve asking Voltaire to consider him as a plain
gentleman, not as an author.
 PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

Writing was only one of the interests of Mérimée's life; only one of
the innumerable tasks he set himself. He learnt half a dozen
languages without being a mere linguist. He travelled in half a dozen
countries without being a traveller. He was extremely erudite, but
never a bookish scholar. He fulfilled with enthusiasm his duties as
Inspector of Ancient Monuments without lapsing into a dusty-handed
antiquary. He saw much of the fashionable life of Paris without being
a man of the world. He was a courtier without being nothing but a
courtier, and could accomplish a state mission without turning into a
diplomatist. He studied 'la théologie, la tactique, la poliorcétique,
l'architecture, l'épigraphie, la numismatique, la magie et la cuisine,'
without being solely a theologian, a tactician, a specialist in sieges,
an architect, a decipherer of inscriptions, a coin collector, a wizard,
or an undiluted cook. No more was he a writer, as Dumas, Hazlitt,
Hawthorne, and Keats were writers. On no shore did he burn his
boats. His character was as various as his activities. He was
sensualist and sentimentalist, dandy and Bohemian. Evenings begun
in the salon of Mme. de Boigne or at the Hôtel Castellane were, his
biographer tells us, finished behind the scenes at the Opera. He
wrote delightful love-letters, but whole series of his letters to his
friends are unfitted for print by consistent indecency. He read his
tales to his Empress, and told them in the gipsy tongue by the
camp-fires of Andalusian muleteers. His experiments in literature
were analogous to his experiments in cooking. Both were
expressions of an intense curiosity about life and the methods of life,
and a thirst for personal practical efficiency in them all. Never had
man more facets in which to see the world. It is important in this
essay, that considers only one of them, not to forget that there were
others.
It is indeed not easy to see more than one facet of
The imaginary
author of his
a man's personality at once, and difficult not to
tales. assume that this one facet is the whole. The curés
of the old churches in France who saw Mérimée
busied in protecting the ancient buildings from ruin and restoration
would have been amazed by the witty dandy of the dinners in the
Café de la Rotonde, or by the author of Colomba. Each one of such a
man's expressions suggests a complete portrait, but only the
composite picture tells the truth. It is difficult not to reason from his
work and build up an imaginary author—a discreet, slightly ironical
person, who smiles only with the corners of his mouth, never laughs,
never weeps, modestly disclaims any very personal connection with
his tales, and is careful to seem as little moved as may be by the
terrible or mysterious things he sets before us. This imaginary polite
person, who represented Mérimée in conversation as well as in
books, is not Mérimée, but, just now, as I see him quietly smiling in
the air before me, I know who he is. He is the conventional
raconteur, whose manner every Englishman assumes in the telling of
anecdote or ghost story.
Perhaps each nation has its own. Perhaps each
Printed and
spoken stories.
nation adopts an attitude for anecdote peculiar to
its own genius. The French at any rate is very
different from the English. The Frenchman will gesticulate in his tale,
suit the expression of his face to its emotions, and try, ingratiatingly,
to win our indulgence for his story, that becomes, as he tells it, part
of himself. The Englishman, more tenacious of his dignity, less willing
to hazard it for an effect, throws all responsibility upon the thing
itself. In England, the distinction between printed story-telling and
story-telling by word of mouth is more marked than elsewhere. The
object of both is to interest and move us, but, while the literary artist
makes no bones about it, and takes every advantage possible, giving
the setting of his tale, its colour scheme, its scent, its atmosphere,
the plain Englishman shrinks from all assumption of craftsmanship,
sets out his facts bare, rough like uncut stones, and repudiates by a
purposely disordered language, perhaps by a few words of slang,
any desire of competition with the professional.[9] And we, the
audience, allow ourselves to be moved more readily by an amateur
than by a man who avows his intention of moving us. The avowed
intention provokes a kind of hostility; it is a declaration of war, an
open announcement of a plan to usurp the throne of our own mind,
and to order the sensations we like to think we can control. We are
more lenient with the amateur; we wish to save his face; politeness
and good-fellowship are traitors in our citadel, and we conspire with
the enemy to compass our own yielding.
Mérimée gives his tales no more background than
Mérimée's
adoption of the
an Englishman could put without immodesty into an
after-dinner conversation. He does not decorate
conventions of them with words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by
anecdote.
rhythm or any other of the subtler uses of language.
He does not laugh at his jokes, nor, in moments of pathos, show any
mist in his eyes. The only openly personal touches in his stories are
those sentences of irony as poignant as those of another great
conversationalist, whose Modest Proposal for the eating of little
children is scarcely more cruel than Mateo Falcone. His style is
without felicities. It has none of the Oriental pomp of Gautier's
prose, none of the torrential eloquence of Hugo's; but its limitations
are its virtues. Pomp is the ruin of a plain fact as of a plain man, and
rhetoric rolls facts along too fast to do anything but smooth them.
This style, that seems to disclaim any pretension to be a style at all,
leaves facts unencumbered, with their corners unpolished. It
emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that he is not a story-
teller, and so helps to betray us into his power. But I cannot
understand those critics who find it a style of clear glass that shows
us facts through no personality whatever. Always, in reading a
Mérimée, I have an impression of listening to a man who has seen
the world, and was young once upon a time, who loves Brantôme,
and who in another century would have been a friend of Anthony
Hamilton, and perhaps have written or had a minor part in memoirs
like those of the Count Grammont. And this man is the imaginary
mouthpiece of English anecdote, the mask handed from speaker to
speaker at an English dinner-table.
Mérimée himself had something of the appearance
Mérimée's
anglomanie.
of an Englishman; everything except the smile,
according to Taine. No Frenchman can write of him
without referring to his anglomanie. His mother had English
relatives, and Hazlitt, Holcroft, and Hazlitt's worshipped Northcote
were among his father's friends. He was not baptized in the Catholic
religion. He seems to have grown up in an atmosphere not unlike
that of many English intellectual families, and very early made
friends across the Channel for himself. This Englishness perhaps
partly accounts for the peculiar attitude he took as a story-teller, and
also made possible that curious reconciliation between the virtues of
rival schools that the attitude demanded; made possible, that is to
say, the apparent paradox of a man whose subjects were Romantic,
whose style was almost Classical, and whose stories were yet a
prophecy of the Realists. It is not a French characteristic to
recognise virtues in more than one type at once, and to combine
them. 'Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi.' The French invented that saying.
They do not recognise compromises, but are exclusive in their
judgments, and regulate their opinions by general rules. A Romantic
hates all Classicists, a Realist finds his worst term of opprobrium in
the word Romantic. An Englishman, on the other hand, does not
think of regulating his affections or actions by a theory. If he has
principles, he locks them up with his black clothes for use on special
occasions. He keeps a sturdy affection for Oliver Cromwell, without
letting his love for the Commonwealth abate in the least his loyalty
to the King. Mérimée seems extraordinarily English in being able to
own Romantic ideals, without using Romantic method.
The conversational story-telling depends for its
The contrast
between his
success, not on the wit or charm of the talker, but
manner and his on the plots of his stories. No more exigent test of
material. the intrinsic power of a tale can be applied than
this, of telling it badly in conversation. A good story
will sometimes gain by the naked recital of its facts; a bad one is
immediately betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are those that
resemble the women of whom Lyly wrote:—'Take from them their
periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their
boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least
part of hir selfe.' How many times, in repeating to a friend the story
of a book, you have become suddenly aware it was an empty,
worthless thing that, in clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to
wear, had made you its dupe for a moment. Mérimée was compelled
by his method to tell good stories or none. His material, to be
sufficiently strong to stand without support, to be built with rigid
economy, and to make its effects out of its construction, to be told
as if with a desire of making no impression, and to make an
impression all the stronger for such telling, could not be of a light or
delicate nature. His events had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He
had to choose stories in which something happened. There is death
in almost every one of his tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast
between his work and that of the Romantics. The large gesture, the
simple violent passions are his as well as theirs, because he needed
them, but, while they matched their subjects in their temperaments,
and wrote of hot blood with pulsing veins, everything in Mérimée's
stories is vivid and passionate except the author. The atmosphere of
his tales is not warm or moist, but extraordinarily rarified. In that
clear air his colours seem almost white. If they were not so brilliant
we should not perceive them at all. Even his women are chosen for
the attitude. The women a man loves are usually reflected in his
work. But Mérimée's women are the women of Romance, dying for
love or for hate, ready at any moment to throw their emotions into
dramatic action, while the women he loved were capricious,
whimsical, tender seldom, outrées never. The writer needed
picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved women who
never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to give him
an Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them.
The art of Mérimée's tales is one of expository
An art of
construction.
construction. He was compelled by his self-denials
to be as conscious an artist as Poe. He is like a good
chess-player who surrenders many pieces, and is forced to make
most wonderful play with the few that remain. His effects are got
from the material of his tales, not superimposed on the vital stuff
like the front of a Venetian palace on the plain wall. He takes his
dramatic material, and sets it before us in his undecorated style, so
that no morsel of its vitality is wasted, smothering no wild gesture in
elaborate drapery, but cutting it out so nakedly that every quivering
sinew can be seen. His art has been compared to drawing, but it is
more like sculpture. His stories are so cleanly carved out of existence
that they are 'without deception.' We can examine them from above
and from below, in a dozen different lights. There is no point of view
from which the artist begs us to refrain. Behind a drawing there is a
bare sheet. Behind a story of Mérimée's there is the other side.
 His art is more like painting in those few tales of
Pointillism in
facts.
the marvellous that are his ghost stories, as the
others are his anecdotes. Mérimée had the
archæologist's hatred of the mysterious, and the artist's delight in
creating it. He reconciled the two by producing mysterious effects by
statements of the utmost clarity, the very clarity of the statements
throwing the reader off his guard so that he does not perceive the
purposeful skill with which they are chosen and put together. There
is a school of painting in France, whose followers call themselves
Pointillists; they get their effects by laying spots of simple colours
side by side, each one separate, each one though in the right
position with regard to other spots of other colours placed in its
neighbourhood. At a sufficient distance they merge luminously into
the less simple colours of the picture. Mérimée's treatment of the
marvellous was not unlike this. The vague mystery of La Vénus d'Ille
is not reflected by any vagueness or mystery in the telling of the
tale. It is impossible to point to the single sentence, the single
paragraph that makes the mystery mysterious. You cannot find them
because they do not exist. Instead, there are a hundred morsels of
fact. Not one of them is incredible; not one is without a reasonable
explanation if an explanation is necessary. And yet all these
concrete, simple facts combine imperceptibly in producing the
extraordinary supernatural feeling of the tale. Compare this negative
manner of treating a miracle with the frank, positive fairy-tale of
Gautier's Arria Marcella. The effects of both tales are perfectly
achieved, but Arria Marcella belongs to written story-telling. We
believe in her because Gautier wishes us to believe, and uses every
means of colour and rhythm and sensual suggestion to compel his
readers to subject their imaginations to his own. The Venus belongs
to story-telling by word of mouth. Hers is a ghost story whose
shudder we covet, and experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite of
the half-incredulous story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so
cunningly put together.
But to write analytically of such stories is to write with compass and
rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It is impossible to express
 the excellence of a bridge except by showing how
Strength or
charm.
perfectly its curves represent the principles of its
design, and to talk like an architect of the method of
its building. And that is so very inadequate. It is easy to write of
warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is nothing harder in the
world than to write of the icy strength that is shown not in action
but in construction. And although there is a real charm about the
shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is shown
in his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's
stories. The difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel
Hawthorne's is that between the little Grecian lady in baked clay,
who stands upon my mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of
curved body and neck and delicate arm the thorn that pricked her
tiny foot some thousand years ago, and the copy of an Egyptian
god, standing upright, one straight leg advanced, his jackal head set
square upon his shoulders, his arms stiff at his sides, his legs like
pillars, so strong in the restraint of every line that to look at him is a
bracing of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no
delicacy, and he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in
his own economy of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power
that any added tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy.
FLAUBERT
 FLAUBERT
'I am the last of the fathers of the church,' said Flaubert, and on this
text his niece remarks that 'with his long chestnut coat, and little
black silk skull-cap, he had something the air of one of the Port-
Royal solitaries.' The metaphor is accurately chosen. Flaubert lived in
an atmosphere of monastic devotion to his art, and the solitaries of
Port-Royal were not more constant than he to their intellectual
preoccupations. A man of excessive openness to sensation, he fled it
and was fascinated by it. He would take ever so little of the world
and torture himself with its examination because it hurt him to look
at it. Life, and especially that life whose sensitiveness was so slight
as, in comparison with his own, to have no existence, brought him
continual pain. 'La bêtise entre mes pores.' Stupidity touching him
anywhere made him shrink like a snail touched with a feather. He
had recoquillements, shrinkings up, when with his dearest friends,
and it was pain to him to be recalled to ordinary existence. He
escaped from modernity in dreams of the Orient, but was continually
drawn back by memory of the unhappiness that was waiting for him,
to the contemplation of those ordinary people whose slightest act,
as he imagined it, struck such a grating discord with himself. An
exuberant life like Gautier's was impossible to such a man. He could
not be so gregarious a recluse as Balzac. He had to fashion a
peculiar retreat, a room with two windows, from one of which he
could see the stars, and from the other watch and listen to the
people whom he hated and found so efficient as the instruments of
his self torture. He found the seclusion he desired in a most absolute
devotion to the art of literature, which was in his hands the art of
making beauty out of pain. Pain, self-inflicted, was at the starting-
point of all his works, and in most of them went with him step by
step throughout.
 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

An analysis of the pain that Flaubert suffered in

Flaubert and the
bourgeois.
examining Philistines, that white light of suffering
which throws up so clearly the bourgeois figures on
which he let it play, supplies the key not only to the matter of much
of his work, but to its manner, and particularly to that wonderful
prose of his, whose scrupulosity has been and is so frequently
misunderstood. Flaubert was not pained by a bourgeois because he
felt differently from himself. He was pained by a bourgeois because
a bourgeois did not know that he felt differently from himself,
because a bourgeois never knew how he felt at all. Whole wolves
hate a lame one. It has never been stated with what inveterate
hatred a lame one regards whole wolves. And Flaubert was less
fitted for life than an ordinary man. He was given to know when he
was honest or dishonest to himself. In so far was he, on their own
ground, weaker than those others, who never know whether they
tell the truth or a lie. He was born as it were with no skin over his
heart. He had no need to make guesses at his feelings. What more
terrible nightmare could be imagined for such a man than to hear
men and women, educated, as the bourgeois are, into a horrible
facility of speech, using the language of knowledge and emotion,
unchecked by any doubts as to their possible inaccuracy. In all
bourgeois life, where language and action have larger scales than
are necessary, there is a discrepancy between expression and the
thing for which expression is sought. For Flaubert, sensitive to this
discrepancy as the ordinary man is not, it was a perpetual pain. And
just as a man who has a nerve exposed in one of his teeth, touches
it again and again, in spite of himself, for the exquisite twinge that
reminds him it is there, so Flaubert in more than one half of his
books is occupied in hurting himself by the delicate and infinitely
varied search for this particular discord.
Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his
Flaubert's prose.
inhuman trueness of feeling. He realised that
flexible as language is, there are almost insuperable
difficulties in the way of any one who wishes to put an idea
accurately into words. He went to the bottom of all writing and
announced that literature is founded on the word; and that unless
you have the right word you have the wrong literature. He was a
little puzzled at the survival of the mighty improvisations of older
times, although he loved them; but there was no doubt in his mind
that his own way was not 'a primrose path to the everlasting bonfire'
of bad books. Whatever he wrote, he would have it in words chosen
one by one, scrupulously matched in scent, colour, and atmosphere
to the ideas or emotions he wished to express. His whole creed was
to tell the truth. What exactly did he feel? These were the letters
that were always flaming before him. It is vivid discomfort to a
labourer to be cross-questioned, and forced to find words for his
unrealised meanings. With increased facility of speech we grow
callous, and, compromising with our words, write approximations to
the thoughts that, not having accurately described, we can scarcely
be said to possess. Flaubert, in disgust at such inexactitudes, forced
on his own highly educated brain the discomfort of the cross-
questioned labourer. Knowing the truth, he would say it or nothing,
and rejected phrase after phrase in his search for precision. It was
gain and loss to him; gain in texture, loss in scope. 'What a scope
Balzac had,' he cried, and then: 'What a writer he would have been
if only he had been able to write.' The work of such men is loosely
knit in comparison with his, because built in a less resisting material.
'Oui,' says Gautier—

'Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle

D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.'

Flaubert's attitude made prose a medium as hard, as challenging as

these.
It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their excellence
so dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for it is the
expression of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of the feel
of an idea that makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult.
Montaigne, for example, sitting peaceably in his tower, asking
himself with lively interest what were his opinions, was not at all like
the almost terrible figure of Flaubert, striding to and fro in his
chamber, wringing phrases from his nerves, asking passionately,
ferociously, what he meant, and almost throttling himself for an
accurate answer. Is it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece?
 Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was
Romanticism and
realism.
the friend of Gautier, and the director in his art of
Guy de Maupassant, who wrote with one hand
Madame Bovary and with the other Salammbo, who put in the same
book St. Julien l'Hospitalier and Un Cœur Simple, is, on a far grander
scale than Mérimée, an illustration as well as a reason of the
development of romanticism into realism. Flaubert's passionate care
for the truth, would, if he had lived before the Romantic movement,
have confined itself to the elaboration of a very scrupulous prose.
But after the discovery of local colour, after the surprising discovery
of the variety that exists in things, as great as the variety that exists
in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply itself not
only to the writing but also to those external things that had
suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make
the sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them
true to the life they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to
De Maupassant as they passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe
that horse in one sentence so as to distinguish him from every other
horse in the world, and I shall begin to believe that you have
possibilities as a writer.' This demand for accurate portraiture turned
the romantic realism of Balzac's Comédie Humaine into the other
realism of Madame Bovary. Balzac had his models,
Madame Bovary.
yes, as hints in the back of his head, but he made
his characters alive with his own energy and his
own brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too alive to be
true. But Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished to be true
to life in his matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate, ordinary,
foolish, weak, little provincial wife, has no atmosphere about her but
her own. She has not been inoculated with the blood of Flaubert, as
all the veins of all the characters of Balzac have been scorched with
fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.' When Flaubert wrote that
everything in the book was outside himself, he was saying no more
than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her life as he was
towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older writers,
like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people talk as men
and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even the
characters of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as nearly
as their creators are themselves able to express it. Flaubert is
infinitely more scrupulous. The Bovary never says what she thinks.
Flaubert knew well enough what she was thinking, but sought out
exactly those phrases and sentences beneath which she would have
hidden her thought, those horrible bourgeois inaccuracies that it was
torture for him to hear.
A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too
intellectual for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a
moment to remember the Flaubert who was loved by those who
spent their days with him; the uncle who taught her letters to his
little niece, and who would, as she says, have done anything
imaginable to enliven her when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest
pleasures was the amusement of those about him,' although he
never saw a woman without thinking of her skeleton, a child without
remembering that it would one day be old, or a cradle without
finding in it the promise of a grave. He was one of the men who love
their friends the dearer for their dislike of mankind in general. He
never shaved without laughing at 'the intrinsic absurdity of human
life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it with steadfast purpose,
'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the plough.'
The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds;
novels of the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories,
and two other books that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole.
Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale are
Salammbo.
the novels of the bourgeoisie, novels with an
entirely new quality of vision, due to the sustained
contrast between his own articulate habit of mind and the
unconsciously inarticulate minds of his characters; these are the
books commonly described as his contributions to Realism by men
too ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to these two books
there is Salammbo, an Oriental and ancient romance, a reposeful
dream for him, in which move characters whose feelings and
expressions are no more blurred than his own. All these books offer
more delight at each re-reading, although the last, considered as an
example of narrative, is almost a failure. The Romantics too often
miss the trees for the wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy
to miss the wood for the trees. But his trees are of such interest and
beauty that we are ready to examine them singly. In writing
Madame Bovary, his subject was close within his reach. Madame was
too near to allow him to cover her up with a library of knowledge
about his own times. But in Salammbo he was so anxious to be true
to the life that he did not know, that he read until he knew too
much. The book is made of perfect sentences, perfect descriptions,
while the story itself is buried beneath a dust-heap of antiquity.
Cartloads after cartloads of gorgeous things are emptied on the top
of each other, until the whole is a glittering mass with here and there
some splendid detail shining so brilliantly among the rest that we
would like to remove it for a museum. The mass stirs: there are
movements within it; but they are too heavily laden to shake
themselves free and become visible and intelligible.
No such criticism can be urged against the three
Trois Contes.
short stories, the Trois Contes, in which Flaubert
proves himself not only one of the greatest writers
of all time, but also one of the greatest story-tellers. This little book
is a fit pendant to the novels, since it represents both the Flaubert of
Madame Bovary and the Flaubert of Salammbo. Un Cœur Simple,
the first of the three, is the story of a servant woman and her parrot,
a subject that de Maupassant might have chosen. So completely is it
weaned from himself, that no one would suspect that Flaubert wrote
it after his mother's death, for the pleasure, in describing the
provincial household, of remembering his own childhood. It and the
two stories, St. Julien l'Hospitalier and Hérodias, which are purely
romantic in subject and treatment, and more scrupulous in
technique than the finest of Gautier, are among the most beautiful
tales that the nineteenth century produced. All three answer the
supreme test of a dozen readings as admirably as those old
improvisations from whose spirit they are so utterly alien.
 That is the sum of Flaubert's work in pure
La Tentation de
Saint Antoine and
narrative. There are beside it two books, one a
Bouvard et Tentation de Saint Antoine, that he spent his whole
Pécuchet. life in bringing to perfection, and the other, Bouvard
et Pécuchet, that he left unfinished at his death.
They are among the most wonderful philosophic books of the world.
In an Oriental dream, a dialogue form with stage directions so
explicit and descriptive as to do the work of narrative, and in a story
whose form might have been dictated by Voltaire, whose material
was the same as that used in the novels, he expressed man in the
presence of Religion, and man in the presence of Knowledge. The
legend of St. Anthony is treated by the Flaubert who loved the East,
the story of Bouvard and Pécuchet by the Flaubert who tortured
himself with observation of the bourgeois. St. Anthony is tempted of
love and of all the religions; at last, not triumphing, but shaken and
very weary, he kneels again, and Flaubert leaves him. Bouvard and
Pécuchet, the two clerks given by the accident of a legacy the
aloofness and the opportunity for development that was Anthony's,
are tempted of love and of all the knowledges; at last made very
miserable they return to their desks; that is where Flaubert would
have left them if he had lived. To discuss the settings of these two
great expositions is to ask the question that was asked by a disciple
at the end of Voltaire's Dream of Plato. 'And then, I suppose, you
awoke?' It is only permissible after recognising the grandeur of the
underlying idea.
There have been two men with such a conception
The statue of Le
Penseur.
of thought. Rodin carved what Flaubert had written.
The statue of Le Penseur, that stands in front of the
Panthéon in Paris, is the statue of a man tormented like St. Anthony,
baffled like Bouvard and Pécuchet. This statue does not represent
man's dream of the power of thought, of the dominion of thought.
That head is no clear mechanism, faultless and frictionless; that
attitude is not one of placid contemplation. The head is in torture,
the whole body grips itself in the agony of articulation. The statue is
not that of a thinker, but of the thinker; man before the Universe,
man unable to wrest the words out of himself. Flaubert had such a
vision as that when he wrote the Tentation and Bouvard et Pécuchet.
He hated mankind because they could not share it with him. They
did not know as he knew, or see as he saw, but knelt or worked, and
were happy. This one stupendous conception of the true relation
between man and thought is that on which all Flaubert's work is
founded. Expressed in these two books, it is implied in all the others
(even in Salammbo, which is almost an attempt to escape from it). It
is not a message; it does not say anything; it is as dumb as Rodin's
statue; it simply is—like Paradise Lost or the Mona Lisa or a religion.
'I am the last of the Fathers of the Church.'

A NOTE ON DE MAUPASSANT
De Maupassant for seven years submitted all he wrote to
Flaubert's criticism. If we add to the preceding essay some
sentences from Flaubert's correspondence, it will be easy to
imagine the lines that criticism must have taken, and interesting
to compare them with the resulting craftsman.
'I love above all the nervous phrase, substantial, clear, with
strong muscles and browned skin. I love masculine phrases not
feminine.
'What dull stupidity it is always to praise the lie, and to say that
poetry lives on illusion: as if disillusion were not a hundred
times more poetic.
'Find out what is really your nature, and be in harmony with it.
Sibi constat said Horace. All is there.
'Work, above all think, condense your thought; you know that
beautiful fragments are worthless; unity, unity is everything.
'The author in his work ought to be like God in the Universe,
present everywhere and visible nowhere.
'Fine subjects make mediocre works.'
 These sentences might well be taken as de Maupassant's
inspiration. De Maupassant, a man of powerful mind, with
Flaubert's example before him, makes each of his tales a
rounded unity, and a thing outside himself, and yet a thing that
no one else could have written. He shunned fine subjects. His
stories are like sections of life prepared for examination, and in
looking at them we are flattered into thinking that we have
clearer eyes than usual. He chooses some quite ordinary
incident, and by working up selected details of it, turns it into a
story as exciting to the curiosity as a detective puzzle. He allows
no abstract feminine-phrased discourses on the psychology of
his characters: he does not take advantage of their confessions.
Their psychology is manifested in things said and in things
done. The works, as in life, are hidden in the fourth dimension,
where we cannot see them.
La Rendezvous, a tiny story of seven pages, will illustrate his
methods. The chosen incident is that of a woman going to see
her lover, meeting some one else on the way, and going off with
him instead. That is all. Let us see how de Maupassant works it
out. Here is his first paragraph:
'Her hat on her head, her cloak on her back, a black veil across
her face, another in her pocket, which she would put on over
the first as soon as she was in the guilty cab, she was tapping
the point of her boot with the end of her umbrella, and stayed
sitting in her room, unable to make up her mind to go out to
keep the appointment.'
The whole of her indecision is expressed before it is explained.
Then there is a paragraph that lets us know that she had been
keeping the appointment regularly for two years, and we
sympathise with her a little. A description of her room follows,
made by mention of a clock ticking the seconds, a half-read
book on a rosewood desk, and a perfume. The clock strikes and
she goes out, lying to the servant. We watch her, loitering on
the way, telling herself that the Vicomte awaiting her would be
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