Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/744

7 20 P R E P R I purely for love) at Chantilly, and it was his custom to walk much in the woods there. What is agreed is that he was struck with apoplexy during one of these walks, on 23d November 1 763, and was found senseless. The legend adds the hideous particular that he was not dead, and that a clumsy village surgeon, heedlessly beginning what he sup posed to be a post-mortem examination, at once recalled his patient to life and killed him. Even without this detail there is sufficient romantic interest (without other stories, some of them demonstrably fictitious, such as that he was accidentally the cause of his father s death) about this life of a man who is at the same time uniformly represented as an indefatigable student and one of a quiet and easy going temperament. Prevost s three chief romances, the Memoircs, Cleveland, and the Djycn de Killerine, are not unremarkable, because they hold a kind of middle place between the incident-romance of Le Sage and Defoe and the sentiment -romance of Marivaux and Richardson ; but they all have the defect of intolerable length and of an indefinite fluency. Manon Lescaut, his one masterpiece, and one of the greatest novels of the century, is in both these respects so different that it might seem impossible that the same man should have written it. It is very short, it is entirely free from improbable incident, it is penetrated by the truest and the most cunningly managed feeling, and almost every one of its characters is a triumph of that analytic portraiture which is the secret of the modern novel. The chevalier des Grieux, the hero, is probably the most perfect example of the carrying out of the sentiment " All for love and the world well lost " that exists in fiction (it is curious that Prevost translated Dryden s play of the name), at least where the circum stances are those of ordinary and probable life. Tiberge, his friend, is hardly inferior in the difficult part of mentor and reasonable man. Lescaut, the heroine s brother, has vigorous touches as a bully and Bohemian ; but the triumph of the book is Manon herself. Animated by a real affection for her lover, and false to him only because her incurable love of splendour, comfort, and luxury prevents her from welcoming privation with him or for him, though in effect she prefers him to all others, perfectly natural and even amiable in her degradation, and yet showing the moral of that degradation more .vividly than a hundred characters drawn with a less compla cent pencil could have done, Manon is one of the most remarkable heroines in all fiction. She had no literary ancestress ; she seems to have sprung entirely from the imagination, or perhaps the sympathetic observation, of the wandering scholar who drew her. Only the Princesse de Cleves can challenge comparison with her before or near to her own date, and in Manon Lescaut the plot is much more complete and interesting, the sentiments less artificial, and the whole story nearer to actual life than in Madame de la Fayette s masterpiece. It is not easy to name a novel on the same scale which is more directly and naturally affecting at a first reading, and which on subsequent study approves itself more thoroughly as a work of art, than Manon Lescaut. There is no complete edition of Prevost s works. (Euvres Choisies were pub lished in 1783, and again in 1806. Of Matwn Lescaut the editions are very numerous. PREVOST-PARADOL, LUCIEN ANATOLE (1829-1870), a writer whose career, except in its unhappy end, was typical of the importance of journalism in France, was born at Paris on the 8th of August 1829. His mother was an actress ; little is said of his father. He was educated at the College Bourbon, showed great brilliancy and precocity, and entered the Ecole Normale. In 1855 he was appointed professor of French literature at Aix. He held the post, however, barely a year, resigning it to take up the pen of a leader-writer on the Journal des Debats. He also wrote in the Courrier du Dimancke, and for a very short time in the Presse. Even before his appointment at Aix he had produced a book, Revue de VHistoire Universelle (1854), and he continued to publish at short invervals, his chief work being a collection of essays on politics and literature, which appeared between 1859 and I860, and some Essais sur les Moralities Fran^ais (1864). He was, however, rather a journalist than a writer of books, and was one of the chief opponents of the empire on the side of moderate liberalism. He underwent the usual and popular diffi culties of a journalist under that regime, and was once imprisoned. In 1865, at the extraordinarily early age of thirty-five, he was elected an Academician. He was twice a candidate for election to the Chamber, but failed each time. Three years later he visited England and was publicly entertained at Edinburgh, an entertainment which was the occasion of some rather undignified and very foolish contrasts drawn in the English press between the position of journalists in the two countries. The accession of Emile Ollivier to power was fatal to Prevost-Paradol. There is no reason for doubting that, in common with some of the best men in France, he believed in the possibility of a liberal empire, and he accepted the appointment of envoy to the United States. This was the signal for the most unmeasured attacks on him from the republican party. He had scarcely installed himself in his post before the outbreak of war between France and Prussia occurred. Either an exaggerated feeling of patriotism, or the dis appointment of his hopes in the combined wisdom of M. Ollivier and the emperor, or (as his enemies said) remorse at having betrayed his party for nothing, or more probably the action of startling news on an excitable temperament and a mind weakened and irritated by the personal in vectives to which he had been subject, threw his intellect and will out of gear. He committed suicide at New York on 20th July 1870. Prevost-Paradol was not in any sense a strong man, and, except for his tragic end, his name is not very likely to live either in literature or politics. His style was light and facile, but at the same time flimsy, and his thoughts were rarely profound. But he had for a time " 1 esprit de tout le moncle " in France, and the personal system of journalism forced him into unnatural prominence and productiveness. PRIAM. See TROY. PRIAPUS, the Greek god of teeming flock and fruit ful field. He was unknown to the earliest Greek poets Homer and Hesiod, but in later times his worship pre vailed on the fertile coasts of Asia Minor. Lampsacus on the Hellespont, nestling in its vineyards, claimed to be his birthplace. According to the people of Lampsacus he was the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. Having the misfortune, as a child, to be plain -looking, Priapus was abandoned by his heartless parents, but a gentle shepherd who chanced to pass that way found and reared the help less babe like his own son. As the youthful god grew to manhood he repaid his benefactor by making the flocks and herds to bring forth and multiply. So the simple shepherds worshipped him and brought him offerings of the fatlings of their flocks, lambs and goats and heifers, and even, it is said, donkeys. As the god and guardian of gardens, vineyards, and orchards he received sacrifices- of fruits and vegetables, and images of him were set up in gardens to frighten birds and thieves. Bees too were his especial care, and he had power to disarm the evil eye. Fishermen prayed to him for an abundant harvest of the sea, and sailors in their sore distress called on him, and he answered and saved them. On many a wave-beaten bluff his image stood and his altar smoked, decked Avith flowers the earliest of the year, when winter storms were over and summer seas allured the mariner to launch his bark again. In the rites of Dionysus homage was paid to the rural god with mirth and laughter. From Greece he passed to Italy, and continued in his new home to discharge his old functions of garden-god and scarecrow. PRIBRAM or PRZIBRAM, a prosperous mining town of Bohemia, is situated about 32 miles S.W. of Prague. The lead-mines in the vicinity have been worked for several centuries and are especially important on account of the large quantity of silver extracted from the ore. In average years this amounts to 70,000 Ib, representing a money value of nearly 300,000. The mines belong to the Government and employ about 5000 persons. One of the shafts, 3350

feet deep, is among the deepest in the world. Besides