Trilbyana The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel

Excerpt

"Trilby: a Novel"

By George du Maurier. With Illustrations by the Author. Harper & Brothers.

When "Trilby" began to appear as a serial in Harper's Monthly, January 1894, Mr. Henry James prophesied that it would prove to be a glorification of "the long leg and the twentieth year." The prophecy was soon verified. At the outset, indeed, it seemed as if the glorification were to be, not so much of the long leg, as of the large and shapely foot. The whole story rested for a while on one of Trilby's feet. We say one, for it was only one of them—the left one—that Little Billee immortalized by drawing on the wall of the studio in the Place St. Anatole des Arts; but they were equally perfect. As the young woman who had the happiness of standing on this foot proclaims, kicking off one of the big slippers in which she is introduced to us, "It's the handsomest foot in all Paris: there's only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is"—and off goes the other slipper. The sketch of it that proves Little Billee already a master of his art is not shown till near the end of the book; and neither this nor Mr. du Maurier's own portrait of the pieds nus on page 21 fully realizes one's notion of the thing's unapproached perfection.

As we have said, the whole story rests for a while on one of these handsome feet; but the novelist manages at last to free his neck from the thraldom of the "slim, straight, rosy heel, clean-cut and smooth as the back of a razor," and proceeds to gratify our curiosity to know something about the strange being who poked about the studios in the Quartier Latin in the early fifties, bare-headed, and wearing a big, military coat with epaulets, which she could throw off when she posed for the ensemble as easily as she could kick off the loose slippers when only her foot was desired as a model. It will be seen that Trilby was not a woman of any social standing. Her father was an educated Irishman, her mother (his wife) a pretty barmaid. They both were dead, and she herself was a professional model.

Two things about her were equally marvellous: one was her foot, the other her voice—an organ of surprising power, range and sweetness. No less extraordinary, perhaps, was the trick that nature had played upon her, by coupling so glorious a voice with an ear that could not distinguish one note from another—could scarcely tell a bass from a treble, and permitted her to sing so badly that her hearers either stopped their ears, laughed in her face, or bolted from the room. The American song "Ben Bolt" was the one she liked the best to sing, and sang the worst. There was something else about her, almost as strange as her beautiful feet, her magnificent voice and her defective (or altogether lacking) ear for music; and that was the purity of her character. She had had affairs with half a dozen men in the studios, without really knowing that it wasn't the right thing to do. But her heart remained spotless (so Mr. du Maurier assures us); and it is a most unfortunate thing that Little Billee's mother comes tearing over to Paris, leaving the peaceful dales and dairies of Devonshire behind her, in her mad haste to break the engagement which Trilby has at last made with the young English painter, after having repeatedly refused to do so, notwithstanding her great love for him....