John Anthony Chaptal, the great natural-
historian, chemist, and statesman. Like our
own Sir Humphry Davy, this man was only
not the first poet of his country, because he
chose to be her first utilitarian philosopher.
He lived, in fact, in two worlds: one consisting
of the most plain matters of fact, and the
other ideal and imaginative,—an Atlantis
or Utopia, which he peopled with kings
and personages of his own creation. One
day, when the friends were communicative
and confidential, the vanity of literature
overthrew the barriers by which the statesman,
peer of France, and former minister for
trade and manufacture, had entrenched his
dignity, and he said, " With this hand I
wrote Le Vaillant's travels; I invented all
his adventures. In some portions of the
story I was assisted by a friend; but, in
fact and substance, I am Le Vaillant,
the slaughterer of the giraffe, and lover of
Narina." The story of the modern
Frankenstein was antedated in the person of M.
Chaptal. The monster he created,
overwhelmed him. Le Vaillant became a real
existence, and the veritable Simon Pure sank
rapidly into oblivion. Many mistakes he
confessed to. He acknowleged the impossibility
of the existence of Narina. He was
ludicrously inexact in his description of the
motions of the cameleopard. All succeeding
travellers had tried in vain to find evidence
of his career; but, with the sole exception of
one who discovered an old woman who said
she remembered him living in her kraal,
there was no trace of his ever having been
in Africa. Lichtenstein, a German explorer,
began to smell a rat in eighteen hundred
and nine, and has the following remarkable
passage: " When Le Vaillant asserts
that he has seen the giraffe trot, he
spares me any further trouble in proving
that this animal never presented itself alive
before him."

Then, who does not remember the ferocious
colonies of the Houswanas: their courage,
their size, and the influence they exercised
over all the surrounding tribes ? Who
were these tremendous warriors, these
assegayed Romans, founding a long-enduring
dominion by self-control and stoic perseverance ?
They were our friends of the Egyptian
Hall, London, the base Bosjesmen or
Bushmen— the lowest type of human nature
—but recommended to Chaptal by the vague
uncertainty of the name which was current
among the Dutch colonists of the Cape, the
wild heroes of the forest, the Men of the Bush.
Who, then, was Le Vaillant ? He is mentioned
in the Biographic Universelle, " was
born in seventeen hundred and fifty-three,
and died in eighteen hundred and twenty-
four; a quiet, retired, unsocial man, devoting
his whole time to the preparation of his travels
and the publication of his essays on the
Natural History of Birds." The whole of this
biography ia taken from the prefaces and
introductions to the various editions of the travels.
Nobody ever saw him. The ingenuity with
which a local habitation and a name are given
to this purely imaginary individual is worthy
of De Foe or Gulliver. He is born, not in any
town or district of France where a baptismal
register might be appealed to, but at
Paramaribo in Dutch Guyana; there he devotes
himself to study and the exploration of wood
and fell. In seventeen hundred and sixty-
three he comes with his parents to France,
but not to Paris or any traceable position,
but to the wild parts of Lorraine and the
Vosges. Here he shuns society, and gives
himself up entirely to the chace. He comes
by chance to the capital in seventeen hundred
and seventy-seven, and sees the royal cabinet of
natural history; and the fire, long dormant,
breaks forth. He will travel into the native
land of those strange and captivating animals,
and see them in their natural freedom; and
at a time when England and France are at war,
when no record of his voyage could be possible
in the log- books of either country, he embarks
in a Dutch vessel at the Texel, and reaches
the Cape in safety; but, the ship which
brought him is sunk, burnt, or otherwise
destroyed by an English fleet; and alone out
of all the crew— sole visitor—with no one to
prove his identity or deny his statements,
behold Le Vaillant, penniless, shirtless, bookless,
at full liberty to invent as many adventures
as he likes. There is no one to say him nay.
He is the Robinson Crusoe of the desert, and
finds his man Friday in Claas, his tame goat
in Kees, and transcends all the imaginings of
the mariner of York in the creation of the
matchless Narina. Looking at the book with
this light thrown upon it, it is an admirable
natural history romance. He comes home,
but still his impersonation is sustained. He
lives—the world forgetting, by the world
forgot—at La None, near Sezanne. Is there a
tomb there to his memory ? Did he leave a
will? Is he in no old list of citizens ? Two-
and-thirty years are not so long a time as to
have expunged the memory of so distinguished
an author. Many must be alive who knew
him, who spoke to him about his books,
People of sixty were eight-and-twenty when
he died. Did Thiers know him? or Guizot?
or Michelet ? or Lamartine? " Deed, no,"
concludes Mr. M'Ritchie; "and the reason's
very plain, the man never existed, body or
soul; and was naething but the idolon or
external image o' Maister Chaptal." Whereupon
the lips closed with a clash, and Le
Vaillant disappeared for ever from the rolls
of human kind.

THE SOULAGES COLLECTION.

ONE would like to see Monsieur Jules
Soulages. One would like to know whether
he wears spectacles; whether his hair is
white, or his head bald; in short, what sort
of a man he may be, to devote his wealth and