It is the same with everything else which one might propose to call “American.”  M. Bourget thinks he has found the American Coquette.  If he had really found her he would also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the same ways and impulses.  I think this because I have seen our coquette; I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels, and seen her twin in foreign novels.  I wish M. Bourget had seen ours.  He thought he saw her.  And so he applied his System to her.  She was a Species.  So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her, and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which he calls “types,” and labeled them in his usual scientific way with “formulas” —­brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink, sometimes, they are so sudden and vivid.  As a rule they are pretty far-fetched, but that is not an important matter; they surprise, they compel admiration, and I notice by some of the comments which his efforts have called forth that they deceive the unwary.  Here are a few of the coquette variants which he has grouped and labeled: 

     The collector. 
     The EQUILIBREE. 
     The professional Beauty. 
     The bluffer. 
     The girl-boy.

If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has seen them and spoken with them.  But he did not stop there; he went further and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior, and also light-throwing samples of their speeches.  He entered those things in his note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and delivers them to the world with a candor and simplicity which show that he believed them genuine.  They throw altogether too much light.  They reveal to the native the origin of his find.  I suppose he knows how he came to make that novel and captivating discovery, by this time.  If he does not, any American can tell him—­any American to whom he will show his anecdotes.  It was “put up” on him, as we say.  It was a jest—­to be plain, it was a series of frauds.  To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, witless and contemptible.  The players of it have their reward, such as it is; they have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are not ladies.  M. Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely discovered a type of practical joker.  One may say the type of practical joker, for these people are exactly alike all over the world.  Their equipment is always the same:  a vulgar mind, a puerile wit, a cruel disposition as a rule, and always the spirit of treachery.

In his Chapter IV.  M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted to the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry little frauds.  One is not moved to laugh.  There is nothing funny in the situation; it is only pathetic.  The stranger gave those people his confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.