of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen.”  Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of “Le Sonneur de Saint Paul,” who “was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere”—­and who was playfully accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas—­Gautier says that he “planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . .  He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in the floor for him to disappear through.”

The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of inspiration are not far to seek.  The romantic movement in France was belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in England and Germany.  It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or Chrestien de Troyes.  Again, in no country had the divorce between fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous product of the national genius.  It was not altogether easy for Bishop Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Buerger in 1770 to do the same thing for the German ballads.  In France it would have been impossible before the Bourbon restoration of 1815.  In England and in Germany, moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch with the people.  In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and the habit of composing ballads lasted later.  The only French writers of the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German “Maehrchen” were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his famous fairy tales, including “Blue Beard,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding-Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Puss in Boots”; and the Countess d’Aulnoy (died 1720), whose “Yellow Dwarf” and “White Cat” belong to the same department of nursery tales.[24]

A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which the new-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, and personal habits.  Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct and subdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours and rich stuffs.  They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvet lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place of the