MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, pin. 'Mademoiselle de Maupin,) a novel writ ten by Theophile Gautier when he was only 24 years of age (1835), expresses the most salient features of romanticism. In the somewhat long preface is found the, to the interpretation of highly imaginative work. Gautier cries out against the shammed respectability of that pe riod and condemns the prudish stand of literary critics who according to him are merely hypo crites actuated by envy. Violently opposed to classical traditions and ideas, Gautier, who had been trained as a painter, keeps in this work the painter's vision, and emphasizes primarily form and color, while defending art for art's sake. Digressions on the supreme value of beauty are found frequently throughout the pages. and the vivid imagination of the author is fruitful to the point of exaggeration. The heroine, brought up according to tradition, rebels against it, and, disguised as a man, like the Amazons of old, resolves to study life at first hand. After many unusual adventures she
becomes for one day the long-sought ideal of a romantic poet who had searched in vain until then for the °woman') of his dreams and who found her only to lose her immediately. As a novel the work is crude both in subject matter and in development, showing that it comes from a young man whose passions were not yet calm. It is, however, essentially artistic; the style is full of color and abounds in beautiful descrip tions and lyric passages. While the novel did succeed in amazing placid citizens and is still classed as dangerous reading, it must not be considered as a study of any type of French character, but as a flight of imagination, a de scriptive fantasy artistically worked out by a talented writer of the Romantic school.