Few greater contrasts can be found in fiction than the subject of Flabuert’s first book and the subject of his second. Five years after Madame Bovary appeared Salammbô. From the dullest and flattest modernness the author had shifted to remote antiquity—to the nation of which less is known than of any other civilised nation, of which has to us the strangest and most unfamiliar characteristics and history. Salammbô is a Carthaginian story, the history of Hannibal’s sister. Before writing it, Falubert visited Carthage, and saw that of the ancient city there was nothing to be seen. He sought out with laborious erudition all the scattered fragments of historical information that yet exist respecting the city of Dido and Sophonisba, and discovered that there was little to be learnt. All his scanty information he has woven into the narrative, supplementing it with the results of his vivid imagination and his endless patience. The merits of the book were violently contested, and on the whole its reception was scarcely favourable. I have already indicted what seems to me to have been one at least of the causes of dissatisfaction. It had been impressed on the public that M. Flaubert was improper, and the expected impropriety was not sufficiently discoverable; indeed a good deal had been cut out. From this came disappointment, which, if not respectable, was, perhaps, according to the ways of this world, only to be expected. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that the barbaric scenery and the shadowy characters were not relished. It was said by an acrid critic that Salammbô might or might not be Carthaginian, but that she was not human; and though the retort, that if it had been otherwise the critic would have said that she might be human but was not Carthaginian, was witty, it was hardly valid. Lastly it must be admitted that the indulgence in repulsive detail, which is one of the author’s undoubted faults, is here rather painfully marked. The book is full of blood and torture, and perhaps, this is justifiable enough by what we know of Carthage and Carthaginian institutions. But the way in which the leprosy of the suffete Hanno pursues us through it is surely gratuitous.

The story opens at the close of the first Punic war. The mercenaries have already begun to clamour for their pay, and the Senate, half to appease them, half to spite the absence Hamilcar Barca, have appointed his gardens as the scene of a great banquet to the army. Wine leads to riot, and the gardens are ravaged by the drunken throng, who, however, refrain from injuring the house or insulting Salmmbô. The soldiers are cajoled into leaving Carthage, but faith is not kept with them, and they at last break out into open mutiny under their historical leaders Spendius and Matho—the latter a Libyan, who has conceived a mad passion for the heroine. The mercenaries besiege Carthage, and it occurs to Spendius, a freethinking half-case of Magna Gaæcia, to attempt to carry off the mantle of the goddess Taint, the sacred Zaimph, the talisman of Carthage. He and Matho penetrate into the city by an aqueduct and achieve their object—the narrative of the capture of the Zaimph being a miracle of description. But Matho cannot bring himself to leave the city without trying the effect of his prize on Salammbô, who is known to be a frantic devotee of the goddess, and he nearly falls into the hands of his enemies in consequence. Then the mercenaries retire to Utica, and the suffete Hanno is sent to chastise them. He is at first successful, but is finally defeated with horrible carnage, and just at this crisis Hamilcar comes home. After a violent debate in the senate full powers are given him, but the forces at his disposal are too small, and he can effect hardly anything against the mercenaries. Salammbô is therefore stirred up by her father-confessor (to give old things new names) to attempt the recovery of the Zaimph. This, after a mysterious incantation scene with a tame python, she endeavours to do, and she succeeds by her blandishments in carrying it off from Matho’s tent. But the effect is not miraculous. The mercenaries still prosper, and the popular fanaticism shifts from the mildler goddess Tanit to the terrible Moloch. One of the auto-da-fés common at Carthage is resolved on, and Hannibal himself only escapes the fire by his father’s artifice. The citizens gather courage, the Numidian prince, Narr’ Havas, who has hitherto supported the mutineers, deserts them for love of Salammbô, and Carthage at last triumphs, her rebellious soldiery perishing almost to a man by a horrible mixture of force and treachery. Matho alone is reserved for the sport of the capital, and dies at Salammô’s feet after running the gauntlet of hideous torture through the streets. Almost instantly she herself dies, as she pledges the genius of Carthage, “for that she had touched the mantle of Tanit.”

I do not know a more difficult book to judge than Salammbô. At the first reading—at least this was my own experience when about the time of its publication I first read it—its absence of human interest, its profusion of hideous details, its barbaric and unreal world, where the figures seem half shadows, and the scenery and properties leave a confused impression of gold and blood, of gorgeousness and horror, on the mind, it is difficult to avoid experiencing that nervous impression of which its author speaks. But