text:  There is a novel just now appearing in one of the most widely-circulated of the Parisian papers so grotesquely overdone that if it had been meant for a caricature of the worst parts of our own hulk-and-gallows authors it would have been very much admired; but meant to be serious powerful harrowing and all the rest of it it is a most curious exhibition of a nation's taste and a writer's audacity