novels only at railway stations. Our little paper volumes do not look well amidst the smart refinement or gloomy splendour of the rooms which tasteful women have learned to furnish harmoniously. They are complete pictures, to which may be added only women and flowers. One single yellow cover strikes a false note. Yellow has been adopted by all the publishers, who consider that it shows up in the booksellers' windows. But it simply screams in a discreet interior where everything is quiet and restful. Five or six years ago an attempt was made to remedy this, by making flowered covers of scraps of chasubles, which made Gyp's dialogues and M. Paul Bourget's novels look like missals and books of hours. But dressed like bishops and choristers these beloved books were no more recognizable. They seemed too heavy and magnificent to be read by the fireside. Little by little these ecclesiastical ornaments were dropped, and the yellow chemise reappeared.

Could not our publishers dress our novels in elegant and sober boards? It is the custom in England, where works of imagination are sold in greater numbers than in France. It was attempted here by the late regretted Jules Hetzel, who was a worthy man with a fertile brain: he lost money by it. That was in the usual order of things. But might not his innovation profit another? That also is in the usual order of things.

The Librairie Quantin has tried some charming, quiet covers; not exactly paper covers, nor precisely boards, they are light, and suit the furniture. I have on my table a very pretty book by M. Octave Uzanne, Les zigzags d'un curieux, which is thus clad in morocco-grained paper, dark blue and

artistically gilded. This style would be suitable for the novels published by Calmann Lévy, Charpentier, or Ollendorff. I must say that the symbolists and decadents best understand the dressing of a book. They clothe their verses and prose in a kind of fish or crocodile skin, with golden lettering; the result is perfect elegance.

After all, perhaps all this does not matter so much as I suspect. What does surprise me is that there are no dealers in the wealthy part of the town to offer literary novelties. It is an industry worth creating, and I think a good man of business would do well at it.

But we have wandered far from the Odéon, and I have never explained the meaning of " the stack." I will tell you, for the unbelievers must be instructed, and the Gentiles evangelized. On days of a big issue, when a publisher, for example, is offering L'Immortel, Mensonges, or Pêcheur d'Islande, the booksellers, and especially those in the galleries of the Odéon, are not content to exhibit, in a prominent position, two or three copies of the book of the day; they build stacks of twelve, twentyfour, thirty-six; proud monuments, sublime pillars, which proclaim the glory of the author. That is "the stack"! You must be a Southerner, or a celebrity, to obtain it. It means fame and fortune. The Greeks would have called it the Column of Gold. It lifts to the skies the names of Alphonse Daudet, Paul Bourget, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Pierre Loti. I have seen young authors with disordered hair fall weeping at the feet of Marpon, who refused them "the stack." Alas, they implored and wept in vain!

2

As I told you, there were no stacks that day in the galleries of the Odéon. But in the window reserved for typographical masterpieces there was to be seen a pretty little edition of Le manteau de Joseph Olénine, by the Vicomte de Vogüé of the Académie Française. It is a fantastic tale which may be compared with the incomparable Lokis. I can say nothing better, as Charlemagne remarked when he gave his son to the beautiful Aude. In M. de Vogüé's tale, as in that of Mérimée, there is a Polish princess of a subtle and heady perfume. And when M. Joseph Olénine inhales with intoxication a sable pelisse, he is not so foolish as he may appear. For the Countess -ska has impregnated this fur with a deadly odour. M. Joseph Olénine receives at last the reward of his deep and sincere fetishism. One night, at the château of Countess-ska, whose guest he is, while embracing as usual his beloved pelisse, he finds therein, by the greatest chance, a quivering woman, whose warm breath plays upon his face. A less gallant man would have thought to recognize the Countess. But by some slight indications M. Joseph Olénine is persuaded that the nocturnal visitor is a ghost, a lady long dead, who returns to live in this world for lack of having found a better employment for her faculties in the next. M. Joseph Olénine, rightly thinking that he should maintain a discreet silence, even in the matter of a lady from beyond the tomb, did not reveal his good fortune to Countska. Pleased, perhaps, by his silence, the ghost often returned.

Under the learned arcades of the Odéon, amid the rare novelties of the week, I found an "astral

S

tale" by M. Jules Lermina, A brûler. Therein one finds a man who leaves his body at will. Precisely is the same idea expressed in an episode of M. Joséphin Péladan's book, La victoire du mari, of which I have already spoken. We are once more among the Magians: once more we hear resound the mysterious linga - sharra, a powerful formula, by the aid of which Magians quit the body. Papus affirms that M. Jules Lermina's story conforms to the facts of esoteric science, and M. Papus is a great Magian: M. Joséphin Péladan says so. Besides, M. Jules Lermina excels in telling extraordinary tales. He has given us two volumes of Histoires incroyables, which I recommend to all who love the strange and singular, but like the marvellous to be founded on science and observation. That is M. Jules Lermina's great merit. He starts from a positive groundwork to leap from prodigy to prodigy.

Jules Lermina, Joséphin Péladan, Léon Hennique, Gilbert-Augustin Thierry, Guy de Maupassant in his Horla, are all, indeed, tempted by the occult. Our contemporary literature oscillates between a brutal naturalism and an exalted mysticism. We have lost faith, and still wish to believe. We are overwhelmed by the depressing majesty of physical laws. We seek after mystery. We summon all the magic of the East; we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into psychical research, the last refuge of the marvellous, which astronomy, chemistry, and physiology have driven from their domain. We are either in the mud or in the clouds. There is no middle way. That is what we have deduced from an hour of book-hunting under the galleries of the Odéon.

ÉDOUARD ROD*

HEN, a year ago, almost to a day, M. Edmond Scherer was analysing Le sens de la vie in Le Temps, he never foresaw the melancholy tale which has followed it to-day, and I fancy that Les trois cœurs would have caused him some surprise had he lived long enough to become acquainted with them. In Le sens de la vie M. Edouard Rod left his hero married and the father of a family. M. Scherer thought in all good faith that that was the end of the matter. It is true that the author had not finished, but the eminent critic concluded, on his behalf, that to get married and be a father is pretty well the whole art of Life: that if it is impossible for us to discover any meaning in what is called Life, it is expedient to wish what the gods wish, without knowing what they do wish, or even if they wish at all, and as it is a question of living, what matters is not why but how.

M. Edmond Scherer was a wise man, but not sufficiently mistrustful of the slyness of poets. He never penetrated M. Edouard Rod's secret design, which was to show us, in agreement with Ecclesiastes, that all is but vanity, and this is the design which appears in Les trois cœurs. For here is

*Les trois cœurs-par Édouard Rod, I vol. in -18.