Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

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A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.

SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES

In zest, movement, and airy charm, in glittering style, precise characterization, and compressed vividness, the French short-story is unsurpassed. German writers have excelled in the fantastic and legendary tale; Russians, in both mysticism and in unrestrained naturalism; British, in those subtle moral distinctions which reveal character under crucial stress; Americans, more or less in all these phases; but no nation has ever developed a school of story-tellers who say so much in so few words, and, withal, say it so artistically and pungently as do the French.

There is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a French short-story. The latter implies a national genre, and indeed this implication is sustained by an examination of French shorter fiction.

We are justified in asserting the existence of a national type of short-story in France, or in any other land, when its special literary product reflects in theme the typical spirit of the nation, when its attitude toward life is characteristic, when its literary style is decidedly marked by national idioms, and when local color—by which I mean an individual flavor of characters and[Pg 4] locality—is marked enough to be recognized as a literary trait. Tested by each of these four standards—which I have ventured to set up rather arbitrarily—the short-story in France is the French short-story.

A single example may serve to illustrate the application of these tests. Here, let us imagine, are two short-stories written in French and by Frenchmen. The one deals with a baseball game, played in Hawaii. Its argot is that of the “diamond,” and its attitude is that of the frenzied “fan.” The tone and the Hawaiian background will furnish local-color enough. The second story has for its theme a tragic family schism caused by the struggle over clericalism in France. The attitude of the characters is typical of the contesting parties, the language is richly idiomatic, and the local-color convincing. Of course it would require no wisdom to determine which was the French short-story and which merely the short-story in French.

Now, when the great mass of short-stories written in France meet two or more of these tests, we have a national type of short-story, and I believe that the ten stories grouped in these two little books sufficiently illustrate the French national spirit to warrant our accepting them as types.

At first thought it might appear that the same might be asserted of any nation where short-stories are produced—Italy, for example. But the facts would not bear out any such statement. True, some Italian writers are sufficiently imbued with their language and nationality, and yet sufficiently modern, to produce little fictions which are typically Italian and typically short-stories, but they are too few to constitute a school. The novel, poetry and the drama have thus far claimed the best efforts of Italian literary folk.

In these pages the word short-story is used somewhat broadly, yet with an eye to the technical distinctions between it and similar forms of short narrative.

Since the earliest story-writing of which we have record in the tales of the Egyptian papyri (4000 B. C.?), there have been short fictional narratives in many lands, some of which meet almost every requirement of the short-story form as we now know it. But that every such approach to the short-story was sporadic rather than from intention to conform to a recognized standard is certain because in each case there was shown no progress toward a repetition of the form, but, instead, a reversion to the types common to all short fiction—the straightforward, unplotted[Pg 6] chain of incidents which we call the tale; the light delineation of some mood, character, or fixed situation, likewise without real plot, which we name the sketch; the condensed outline of what might well be expanded into a long story, which we term the scenario; and the brief recital of some incident with a point, known as the anecdote.

With occasional accidental exceptions, as just noted, all the Egyptian tales, Greek and Roman stories, sacred narratives, mediæval tales, legends, and wonder-stories, and modern short fictions down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, were of these four types.

The short-story as a conscious genre was developed in America and in France about the same time, with the weight of opinion favoring Poe as its “inventor.”

In 1830 Balzac began a brilliant series of novelettes, almost short-stories, which lack only compression and unity of impression to stamp him and not Poe as the first consistent and conscious producer of the new form. As it is, these remarkable stories are so near to technical perfection (as short-stories, for there can be little adverse criticism upon them as fiction), that he must share with two Americans the distinction of producing little stories which must have helped Poe materially to see the new form in clear constructive[Pg 7] vision—I mean Irving and Hawthorne. Prior to 1835—the date of “Berenice,” Poe’s first technically perfect short-story—both Irving and Hawthorne had produced short fictions incomparably in advance of any consistently frequent short narrative work theretofore. Irving’s style was kin to Addison’s essay-stories in the Spectator, and even in those altogether admirable tale-short-stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the influence of the essay form is quite evident. Hawthorne’s stories were chiefly symbolical tales, up to 1835,[1] or expanded anecdotes done to create a single effect upon the mind. In this they rival the singularly potent unity of Poe’s best work. But shortly Hawthorne turned more and more aside from the short-story to the long symbolical romance, in which he stands without a peer in any land.

Then arose in France—for other countries require no further comment here—a series of notable story-writers, of supreme distinction in all that goes to make the short-story the most popular literary type: compressed delineation [Pg 8]of a single crucial situation, highly centralized leading character, swift characterization, deft handling of crisis, climax, and dénouement, and, throughout, masterful work in local color.

The short-story nomenclature among the French is not clearly translatable, for three reasons—we have no precise English equivalents, critics do not entirely agree upon what equivalents are nearest to the French terms, and, best reason of all, the French short-stories have this in common with all others: their forms often overlap, and so bear marks of touching more than one type. And when I have said this I have said nothing to their discredit; only the Procrustean purist first builds a bed and then stretches or cuts every story-guest to fit! I cannot say this in voice loud enough: to set up a standard of what is a true short-story is no more to decry those short fictive narratives which do not meet the form than it would be to brand the lyric as imperfect because it does not fulfill the requirements of the epic.

But, to be specific, the three terms which we constantly meet in French fiction are roman, nouvelle, and conte. The roman may be dismissed as a general term standing largely for what we in English variously denominate the (long) romance, the novel, and the (long) tale. The nouvelle most[Pg 9] nearly approaches our English short-story, but it also stands for the novelette, or very short novel, or even the expanded short-story. The conte is really a generic word for a short fictional narrative or any story that is short, like the tale, the anecdote, and the fictional sketch, without meaning specifically the short-story to whose characteristics of compression, unity of impression, and crisis, climax and dénouement of plot, I have just referred.

So I repeat: in these studies the term short-story must be given some latitude of interpretation.

The French short-story of the last eighty years is not only typically Gallic but characteristic of the period. Just as there are four tests of nationality in fiction so there are four forces which contribute to its periodicity: The influence of the soil, the heritage of the preceding period, the special characteristics of the period itself, and the influence of surrounding nations. All these result in what may be called the Spirit of the Period, concerning which a word must be said presently.

The primacy of the French as conteurs is doubtless due quite as much to the rich and colorful provincial life which surrounds the capital as to their priority as tellers of short tales. It has been[Pg 10] said that Paris is France. Nothing could be less true. Here is a nation which presents the unique paradox of being at once and supremely homogeneous and heterogeneous. The life of each province is part of its soil, colored by the soil—or by the ever-present sea. Yet France has a spirit of nationality equalled by no other nation. While what is now the German Empire was still an unrelated number of minor peoples or an integral part of some vaster state, France was a unified or at least a closely federated kingdom. While Britain was changing under its successive tides of invasion, what was essentially France was sending out its national culture world-wide—it over-climbed the Pyrenees, it spread into the Low Countries, in the west it conquered the Swiss tongue, it permeated the Rhenish provinces, it implanted Norman life in Britain. Thus grew the French national spirit.

Yet the provinces held tenaciously to their own picturesque types, spoke their more than a hundred patois, wore their folk costumes, sang their native songs, danced their own dances—unchanging through the centuries. And nowhere more than in the French short-story may we see depicted the peculiar French provincial traits. The folk of Champagne and Picardy are shrewd, subtle, ardent, and born conteurs—witness the[Pg 11] stories of Juliette Lamber. Those of Berry are stolid and solid, as pictured by Madame Nahant. The Gascons are vivacious, daring, and cunning, as set forth by Emil Pouvillon. The people of Languedoc are simple, strong and violent, as described by Georges Baume. The happy, excitable sun-children of Provence, reveling among their olive groves and vineyards, have been portrayed by Alphonse Daudet; the picturesque Provençal sailors and fisherfolk live again in the stories of Auguste Marin; while Paul Arène has done loving service not only for Provence but for Maine as well. Maupassant has given us notable portraits of the Norman—bold, tricky, ambitious, economical, and of superb physique as befits the sons of sturdy men-at-arms. Loti’s stories are redolent of the salty spume of rough, melancholy, religious Brittany. And so, in the same recognition of rich material, Theuriet paints Lorraine, Erckmann and Chatrian the Rhine province of Alsace, Fabre the Cévennes, Anatole le Braz the Breton coast, Mérimée Corsica, Maupassant Auverne, and Balzac Touraine. What a wonderful color box has the French story-painter always open to his brush! Truly the soil and the sea have marked this period of the short-story as well as the novel.

The inheritance of the preceding period—that[Pg 12] of the Revolution, the First Empire, and the First Restoration—was rich in war pictures, dramatic episodes of intrigue, and a never-so-remarkable display of contrasts in human passion and changing conditions. The French short-story is therefore full of these national conditions.

The period itself, 1830-1912, witnessed kaleidoscopic social and governmental changes—the Second Restoration, the Bourgeois Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the Third Republic, to say nothing of numberless minor attempts at change. All these filled the story-teller’s pack with rich national materials. Especially are the problems of socialism, militarism and clericalism in evidence.

Finally, the influence of surrounding peoples has been felt not only in the content but in the form of the French short-story.

All these forces, and others less ponderable, have fused into what I may term the nineteenth century French spirit, as illustrated and measurably interpreted by the French short-story.

Three sub-tones of this French symphony, to use a trope, are emotional nature, passion for military glory, and religious sentiment. Emotional endowment the French, in common with other Latin races, possess—a fact which calls for[Pg 13] no comment. The military spirit, chastened by the experiences of the Franco-Prussian War, has been decreasingly in evidence during the last four decades, yet indications are not wanting that the fire burns none the less vitally because smothered by practicalities. The war-theme constantly recurs in the short-story, and “glory” is still dear to every Frenchman. As for the third element, religion, the evidence is more contradictory. France has always felt a deep undercurrent of religious feeling. Her public worship has perpetuated this ideal in churches many and noble, as well as in a pomp of ceremonial peculiarly suited to an artistic Latin people. But I should seek for the surest proof of the religious spirit not so much in these signs as in the life of the provinces, the influence of the church there, and their constant manifestations of religious faith. The clerical crisis was not confined to the great cities, so that the last twenty years has shown marked changes in public sentiment, but there are potent signs of a reaction toward free religious life, for France will be church-loving. The typical abbé lives in her fiction as beautifully as does the soldier.

And so I have ventured to name emotion, war, and religion as three significant sub-tones of French life. But there are five other phases of the[Pg 14] French spirit which show out in the short-story, though they do not seem to me so fundamental. Of these now a few words.

We find, first, volatile sentiment, as shown in quick changes of attitude, sudden concentrations, extremes of gayety and depression, lively speech, and a general habit of regarding a tempest in a teapot as a serious crisis, with now and then a surprising way of smiling away a real tragedy. There is much of the child-nature here, and therefore the loving, the lovable, and the sweet.

Love of hearth is another French characteristic, the mistresses and assignations, true and fictive, to the contrary notwithstanding. The typical homes of any nation are found less in its cities than in its smaller centers; and so it is in France, for the bulk of high-grade fiction is pretty certain to be a safe index of public feeling.

A third characteristic is the unique attitude of the French toward womanhood. The mother, in France, is honored above belief; the wife somewhat less so; the young girl knows nothing, and is therefore merely amusing; the woman of easy morals occupies a large place because she must be reckoned with as a recognized factor. The whole attitude of France toward its womanhood is compounded of sentiment, lightness, and cynicism. Less independent than the American[Pg 15] woman, less free than the English, less domestic than the German, the French woman is more a being to charm man than a companion for him. And so runs the current of the short-story, side by side with the sweep of life.

A fourth trait in the French short-story is a minute, detached observation, tinged with cynicism—the inevitable result of realism. It is for this reason that so many French short-stories seem unsympathetic. Scientific observation—really, a German trait—is likely to be cold when applied to tumults of the soul! And the writer who as a moral vivisectionist relentlessly applies the scalpel runs the risk of becoming blasé, not to say cruel. He is more concerned with the truth of facts than with extracting the truth from facts.

A final characteristic is artistry. To do a short-story with fineness, deftness, perfection of detail, and beauty of finish; to cut an intaglio, so to say, to paint a miniature, to inlay a jewel—that is the Frenchman’s conception of the artistic in brief fiction, and in that he is unsurpassed.

Here, then, are some qualities of the French spirit as evidenced in the short-story of the period—qualities fundamental and in the phase, but patent, as it seems to me, in a large proportion of the entire short-story product.

Viewing the subject generally, as one must in attempting a survey of so varied a field as the last eighty years in French fiction, there are several periods fairly well-defined in the movement of the short-story. As a differentiated type the short-story appeared at a time when classical ideals of form had broken down and moral ideals also had quite fallen. For three decades, precise, logical prose had been as cheerfully scouted as were old-fashioned swaddling-clothes of personal virtue. For a period equally long, “Freedom” had been the sweet word every one uttered with unction. Rousseau had laid his blade to the root of the existing order; Chateaubriand had broken loose from the fetters of old literary forms; Madame de Staël had coined the word “romanticism” with a new image and a superscription enchanting to the mind agitated by the sudden opening of the unknown; the success of French arms abroad had let in a flood of new ideas—the reign of romance was undisputed. Color, movement, dreams, enthusiasm—all these prose began to borrow from poetry. Charles Emmaniel Nodier—a classicist in form, but a romanticist in spirit—began his florid tales, while Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset applied their poetic skill to the telling of prose stories.

But the romantic movement began to wane in[Pg 17] the early forties, not, however, before reaching a brilliant high-tide in the work of the elder Dumas. Even Gautier would sometimes scoff in his supremely clever style at the extravagances of the period. But the chief force in this breakdown of the romantic school was Honoré de Balzac, whose brilliant short-story work, chiefly done from 1830 to 1832, laid the foundations of a new school of shorter fiction in France, as the de Goncourts and Stendhal had already done for longer fiction—for Balzac was less an originator than a developer of the psychological novel. However, in fiction long and short, his moderate realism stands to-day as the most important example of his school. Prosper Mérimée became a realist only after having begun as a romanticist; Alphonse Daudet never fully came under the sway of realistic principles; and Ludovic Halévy generally chose a romantic theme even when treating it realistically, so that we must turn to Balzac as the representative of his class.

In Gustave Flaubert, a stylist of the most finished order, but latterly a severe classicist, we find an example of the slight classical reaction which followed the reign of realism. A similar romantic reaction is seen in the short tales of the collaborators, Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain, as well as of François Coppée. Here[Pg 18] the joint influence of the German Hoffmann and the American Poe is plainly evident.

But these reactionary movements were neither powerful nor for long. The disillusionment and cynicism of French life was bound to find expression in its fiction, and the more sincere and fearless the writer the more direct would be his methods. Naturalism became the final expression of realism, for naturalism is realism plus pessimism. Naturalism proposes not only to see things as they are and report things as they are seen, but it is a pessimist who sees and reports. Result—gloom, mire, and jagged stories, unkissed by a single star of hope! Émile Zola is the chief-priest, and Eugene Sue the industrious acolyte at the altar of this despairing cult.

No people, however, could long enjoy an orgy of depression, and signs of moderation soon appeared. Guy de Maupassant, with all his abnormality, and Paul Bourget with all his pessimism, now and then touched the joyous side, and by and by a braver, more wholesome tone sounded in the French short-story—a tone of eclecticism, both of method and of philosophy. Surrounded by a social order emancipated from many past ills and having the promise of greater equity, quieted by the more or less permanent settlement of at least two of its most vexed questions,[Pg 19] the France of to-day is encouraging a group of brilliant writers—Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Gustave Droz, Jules Lemaître, Jules Claretie, Renè Bazin, Jean Richepin, Marcel Prévost, and Paul Margueritte—who, though mostly no longer young, represent a youthful France in that they are emancipated from school and type and write as the story makes its call to their own natures. Sometimes one method, sometimes another, rises to dominance, but the choice of the most available is after all the current practice.

Of the future no man may tell, but backed by the rich traditions of literary France, the air of artistry all about, the growth of a more unselfish socialized life, and the promise of stable national conditions, we may well look for the most satisfying results in the French short-story of tomorrow.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An inquiry into the development of the short-story in Russia at about this period has been reserved for the third volume of the series, which is devoted to short fiction of that land.

There never has been a satisfactory definition of poetry, though all ambitious literary appraisers, from Aristotle down to Bernard Shaw, have essayed the task. But if to be able to institute apt and beautiful comparisons; to phrase in musical language thoughts of power, beauty, and feeling; to discern the ideal clothed in the real; to interpret the inner meanings of life—if this ability marks the poetic gift, then François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a poet—a poet in prose as well as in verse.

Very early in life the young Parisian—he was born in Paris, January 12, 1842—began to write verses which showed marks of distinction, and he was only twenty-four when Le Reliquaire, his first poetic volume, appeared. Two years later, Poèmes Modernes and La Grève des Forgerons were issued, establishing his place among modern poets of his land. And when, in 1869, at the age of twenty-seven, he produced Le Passant, a group of exquisite comedies in verse, he became a celebrity.

It was inevitable that a literary dweller in the French capital, reared among the traditions of a stage whose productions are classic, and a poet[Pg 22] who by both nature and environment breathed in the air of art, should turn to the drama after having won to the forefront in lyric and narrative expression. Successively he produced Deux Douleurs, Fais ce que dois, Les Bijoux de la Délivrance, Madame de Maintenon, and Le Luthier de Crémorne—the last-named an especially pleasing drama, full of that human feeling which marks Coppée in all his writings. Four volumes contain his dramatic work, all of it good, much of it brilliant.

As a novelist, Coppée left no mark upon his times—he was so easily surpassed in this field by his contemporaries. But as a writer of little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant group which includes those immortals of the short-story—Maupassant, Daudet, Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier, Loti, Halévy, Theuriet, and France.

From the work of all these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished. The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and by that same token an infinitely harder one. Daudet, child of Provence though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire. Balzac chose his “cases” from classes high and low, but rarely failed to uncover with his sharp scalpel some malignant social growth. Gautier was rougher,[Pg 23] coarser, and less sympathetic, though at times we may discern in him the sudden swelling tear and tremulous lip which now and again reveal the tenderness latent in brusk men. Halévy was more idyllic and pastoral. Mérimée of all this wonderful company—to whose society other notables also come with insistent and well-sustained claims for admission—was the nearest to Coppée in the type of his work. Both knew intimately and with tender feeling the life of lowly folk—Coppée finding ever in his Paris the themes, the scenes, the types for his stories, while Mérimée’s pen was never so magic as when the romantic Corsican airs breathed about his brow. Both these master craftsmen produced a prose infused with the imagery, grace, and charm of poesy; both were masters of a style nervous, firm, condensed, and vivid.

In 1878, after having been for some years employed in the Senate Library, Coppée was appointed Guardian of the Archives of the Comédie Française. It was then that he began to produce that remarkable series of some fifty short fictions by which he is best known to us. One year after the publication of his first volume of stories, Contes en Prose (1882), he was distinguished by election to the Academy, and in 1885 he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

His other collections of stories are Vingt Contes Nouveaux (1883), Contes et Recits en Prose (1885), Contes Rapides (1888), Contes Tout Simples (1894), and Contes pour les Jours de Fête (1903).

In considering Coppée’s fictional work, it seems worth while to point out its varied types, and at the same time note the meaning of several short fictional forms which will be referred to frequently in this volume and in succeeding volumes of the series.

His favorite type seems to have been the tale—which is not the plotted short-story, nor yet the sketch, but rather a straightforward narration with little or no plot, and usually depending for its interest upon a longer or shorter chain of incidents. The French word conte sufficiently describes the tale, because conte means really just story, and thus the generic term includes all the shorter fictional forms. To most English readers, the term short-story means merely a story that is short, but modern usage limits the word—the compound word, to be precise—to a somewhat specialized type.

The typical short-story eludes precise definition, because it is an elastic, living thing—often the more interesting for its very disregard of an exact technical form. Certain things, however, the real short-story does possess: a single central[Pg 25] dominant incident, a single preëminent character or pair of characters, a complication (not necessarily at all involved) the resolution or untying or dénouement of that complication, and a treatment so compressed and unified as to produce a singleness of impression. Here, naturally, is much latitude, but above all the short-story must focus a white light upon one spot, upon a crucial instance, to use Mrs. Wharton’s admirable expression, and must not diffuse that light over a whole life, a series of loosely related happenings, or a general condition of affairs.

But the fictional sketch presents nothing of the organization seen in the typical short-story. It is a fragment, a detached though perhaps a complete impression, a bit of character caught in passing, a rapidly outlined picture, but not depending upon a complication and its unfolding for its interest.

Like the sketch, the tale is more easily defined than the short-story. Whether long or short, the tale—as I have just pointed out—is always the simple narration of an incident, or a succession of incidents, without regard to plot-complication and its consequent dénouement. The story of a thrilling lion-hunt, the recovery of a lost child, the adventures of a hero under strange skies, or the patient loyalty of an old servitor, might any one of[Pg 26] them be its theme—that and nothing more.

How much a fictional masterpiece suffers in translation none knows so well as he who enjoys its beauties in the original. How much more then must it lose when one attempts to rehearse its story in brief synopsis. Yet we may come to some understanding of Coppée’s typical variety by such an examination of three of his short pieces, besides “The Substitute,” which is given in full in translation.

“At Table” is one of the author’s characteristic sketches. It is about twenty-five hundred words long. Fourteen are at table, the guests of “madame la comtesse”—“four young women in full toilette, and ten men belonging to the aristocracy of blood or of merit.” With that pictorial gift which is the literary sketch-artist’s first possession, we are shown the whole scene—“jewels, decorations of honor or of nobility, the atmosphere of good living in the high hall,” the glittering table, the noiseless service, the expanding social spirit as the collation advances, the “snapping of bright words,” and everything that made the dinner “charming as well as sumptuous.”

“Now, at that same table, at the lower end, in the most modest place, a man still young ... a man of reverie and imagination ... sat[Pg 27] silent.” “He was plunged in a bath of optimism; it seemed good to him that there should be, sometimes and somewhere in the weary world, beings almost happy.” “But when the Dreamer had before him on his plate a portion of the monstrous turbot, the light odor of the sea evoked in his mind a picture of the Breton fisher folk, by grace of whose dangers this delectation came to the feasters.”

Thus his fancy wanders on, vividly rebuilding the varied scenes peopled by those whose labors, painful often and ill-requited, made possible the revelry that night. The contrast stands out, white against black, and leads at last to this mixed conclusion: Softly and stubbornly he repeats to himself as he looks once again at the guests as, replete, they arise from table:

“Yes; they are within their rights. But do they know, do they comprehend, that their luxury is made from many miseries? Do they think of it sometimes? Do they think of it as often as they should? Do they think of it?”

Rarely does Coppée approach so closely to making a preachment; but we need only to follow his gentle reflections—so far removed from haranguing, from bitterness—to feel the utter sincerity of this heart that so passionately loved “the people.”

“Two Clowns” is a sketch of a different type—less aggressively moral, its conclusion more subtly enforced, and possessing more of the narrative quality of the tale. It is a dual sketch—a sketch of contrasts.

We are standing before the tent of some strolling acrobats. To lure the bystanders to the performance a clown receives the rain of pretended buffets from the hands of the ring-master—quite in the manner we all know. Now an aged crone among the onlookers is seen to be weeping. On being questioned she wails out the story that she has recognized in this wretched clown her only son. Having robbed his master, he had been sent away to sea, the father had died, and now after having heard nothing of the scapegrace for years she discovers in the buffeted clown her only child. But suddenly the old woman realizes that she is telling the intimate sorrows of her heart to the gaping crowd, and with gesture abrupt and imperious she pushes aside her listeners and disappears in the night.

The second scene is in the Chamber of Deputies, at a sensational sitting. An orator mounts the tribune to denounce some proposed spoliation of the people. With all the arts of the demagogue—wonderfully delineated—he begins his string of ready-made phrases. He postures, he mouths,[Pg 29] he prophesies, he looses the dogs of war, “he even risks a bit of poetry, flourishes old metaphors which were worn-out in the time of Cicero,” and amidst mingled bravos and grumbles “soars like a goose,” and ends.

As we leave the Chamber we see an elderly woman of the bourgeoisie. It is the mother of the political mountebank—she is radiant and content.

“The Sabots of Little Wolff” is a typical tale, done in the manner of a legend. Never was the spirit of childhood—human and divine—more exquisitely set forth than in this wonderfully wrought story. How can it be told in other, or fewer, words than those simple and eloquent sentences of François Coppée!

“Once upon a time—it was so long ago that the whole world has forgotten the date—in a city in the north of Europe—whose name is so difficult to pronounce that no one remembers it—once upon a time there was a little boy of seven, named Wolff. He was an orphan in charge of an old aunt who was hard and avaricious, who embraced him only on New Year’s Day, and who breathed a sigh of regret every time she gave him a porringer of soup.

“But the poor little fellow was naturally so good that he loved the old woman all the same, though she frightened him greatly, and he could[Pg 30] never without trembling see the huge wart, ornamented with four gray hairs, which she had on the end of her nose.”

On Christmas eve the schoolmaster took all his pupils to the midnight mass. The winter was cold, so the lads came warmly wrapped and shod—all except little Wolff, who shivered in thin garments, and heavy wooden shoes, or sabots. “His thoughtless comrades made a thousand jests over his sad looks and his peasant’s dress,” and boasted of the wonderful times in store for them on Christmas Day. Little Wolff knew very well that his miserly aunt would send him supperless to bed, yet he innocently hoped that the Christ-child would not forget him on the morrow.

On the way out little Wolff noticed sitting in a niche under the porch a sleeping child—not a beggar child, for he was covered by a robe of white linen. But notwithstanding the cold his feet were bare—and near him lay the tools of a carpenter’s apprentice. None of the well-clad scholars heeded the child, “but little Wolff, coming last out of church, stopped, full of compassion, before the beautiful sleeping infant,” took off his right shoe, and laid it beside the child, “so the Christ-child could put something therein to comfort him in his misery.”

At home his aunt scolded him well for having given away his shoe, and scornfully she placed the other sabot in the chimney, predicting that he would find in it next morning only a rod for a whipping. And with a couple of slaps the wicked woman drove the child to bed.

But on Christmas morning little Wolff beheld in artless ecstasy both his little sabots overflowing with countless good things, so that the whole chimney was full of them. But the outcries on the street outside told them that the other children of the school had each gotten only a rod!

Finally, in “The Substitute” we have the typical short-story. Though the plot is simple, it is well balanced and marches forward with never a digression nor a false step. The characters live, the setting is adequate, and the treatment is without artificiality. The rise of Leturc from the purlieus of Paris to the moral grandeur which leads him to his final imprisonment is simple, unaffected and natural. There is not a trace of the theatric in the whole story, not a suggestion of false sentiment, not anything that mars its beauty, its symmetry, and its power.

In the midst of so much that is sordid and gross in modern fiction, how refreshing it is to read the pages of a master who could be truthful without[Pg 32] wallowing, moral without sermonizing, humorous without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a sympathetic lover of mankind!

“I am called Jean François Leturc, and for six months now I’ve been with the man who sings between two lanterns on the Place de la Bastille, while he scrapes on a string of catgut. I repeat the chorus with him, and then I cry out, 'Get the collection of new songs, ten centimes, two sous!’ He was always drunk and beat me; that’s why the police found me the other night, in the tumble-down buildings. Before that, I used to be with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a laundress; she called herself Adèle. At one time a gentleman had given her an establishment, on the ground-floor, at Montmartre. She was a good worker and loved me well. She made money because she had the clientele of the café waiters, and those people use lots of linen. Sundays, she would put me to bed early to go to the ball; but week days, she sent me to the Brothers’ school,[Pg 34] where I learned to read. Well, at last the sergent-de-ville whose beat was up our street began always stopping before her window to talk to her—a fine fellow, with the Crimean medal. They got married, and all went wrong. He didn’t take to me, and set mamma against me. Every one boxed my ears; and it was then that, to get away from home, I spent whole days on the Place Clichy, where I got to know the mountebanks. My step-father lost his place, mamma her customers; she went to the wash-house to support her man. It was there she got consumption—from the steam of the lye. She died at Lariboisière. She was a good woman. Since that time I’ve lived with the brush-seller and the catgut-scraper. Are you going to put me in prison?”

He talked this way openly, cynically, like a man. He was a ragged little rascal, as tall as a boot, with his forehead hidden under a strange mop of yellow hair.

Not very intelligent, lazy, above all maladroit with his hands, he was able to learn there only a poor trade—the reseating of chairs. Yet he was obedient, of a nature passive and taciturn, and he did not seem to have been too profoundly corrupted[Pg 35] in that school of vice. But when, having come to his seventeenth year, he was set free again on the streets of Paris, he found there, for his misfortune, his prison comrades, all dreadful rascals exercising their low callings. Some were trainers of dogs for catching rats in the sewers; some shined shoes on ball nights in the Passage de l’Opéra; some were amateur wrestlers, who let themselves be thrown by the Hercules of the side-shows; some fished from rafts out in the river, in the full sunlight. He tried all these things a little, and a few months after he had left the house of correction he was arrested anew for a petty theft: a pair of old shoes lifted from out an open shop-window. Result: a year of prison at Sainte-Pélagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.

He lived, astonished, among this group of prisoners, all very young and negligently clad, who talked in loud voices and carried their heads in such a solemn way. They used to meet in the cell of the eldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already locked up for a long time and apparently settled at Sainte-Pélagie: a large cell it was, papered with colored caricatures, and from whose windows one could see all Paris—its roofs, its clock-towers, and its domes, and, far off, the distant line of the hills, blue and vague against the[Pg 36] sky. There were upon the walls several shelves filled with books, and all the old apparatus of a salle d’armes—broken masks, rusty foils, leather jackets, and gloves that were losing their stuffing. It was there that the “politicians” dined together, adding to the inevitable “soup and beef” some fruit, cheese, and half-pints of wine that Jean François went out to buy in a can—tumultuous repasts, interrupted by violent disputes, where they sang in chorus at the dessert the Carmangole and Ça ira.[2] They took on, however, an air of dignity on days when they made place for a newcomer, who was at first gravely treated as “citizen,” but who was the next day tutoyed,[3] and called by his nickname. They used big words there—Corporation, Solidarity, and phrases all quite unintelligible to Jean François, such as this, for example, which he once heard uttered imperiously by a frightful little hunchback who scribbled on paper all night long:

“It is settled. The cabinet is to be thus composed: Raymond in the Department of Education, Martial in the Interior, and I in Foreign Affairs.”

Having served his time, he wandered again about Paris, under the surveillance of the police, [Pg 37]in the fashion of beetles that cruel children keep flying at the end of a string. He had become one of those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, arrests and releases, turn and turn about, a little like those platonic fishermen who, so as not to empty the pond, throw back into the water the fish just out of the net. Without his suspecting that so much honor was done to his wretched personality, he had a special docket in the mysterious archives of la rue de Jérusalem,[4] his name and surnames were written in a large back-hand on the gray paper of the cover, and the notes and reports, carefully classified, gave him these graded appellations: “the man named Leturc,” “the prisoner Leturc,” and at last “the convicted Leturc.”

He stayed two years out of prison, dining à la Californie,[5] sleeping in lodging-houses, and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking part with his fellows in endless games of pitch-penny on the boulevards near the city gates. He wore a greasy cap on the back of his head, carpet slippers, and a short white blouse. When he had five sous, he had his hair curled. He danced at Constant’s at Montparnasse; bought for two sous the jack-of-hearts or the ace-of-spades, which were used as [Pg 38]return checks, to resell them for four sous at the door of Bobino; opened carriage-doors as occasion offered; led about sorry nags at the horse-market. Of all the bad luck—in the conscription he drew a good number.[6] Who knows whether the atmosphere of honor which is breathed in a regiment, whether military discipline, might not have saved him? Caught in a haul of the police-net with the young vagabonds who used to rob the drunkards asleep in the streets, he denied very energetically having taken part in their expeditions. It was perhaps true. But his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent up for three years to Poissy. There he had to make rough toys, had himself tattooed on the chest, and learned thieves’ slang and the penal code. A new liberation, a new plunge into the Parisian sewer, but very short this time, for at the end of hardly six weeks he was again compromised in a theft by night, aggravated by violent entry,[7] a doubtful case in which he played an obscure rôle, half dupe and half fence.[8] On the whole, his complicity seemed evident, and he was condemned to five years’ hard labor. His sorrow in [Pg 39]this adventure was, chiefly, to be separated from an old dog which he had picked up on a heap of rubbish and cured of the mange. This beast loved him.

Toulon, the ball on his ankle, the work in the harbor, the blows from the staves, the wooden shoes without straw,[9] the soup of black beans dating from Trafalgar, no money for tobacco, and the horrible sleep on the filthy camp-bed of the galley slave, that is what he knew for five torrid summers and five winters blown upon by the Mistral.[10] He came out from there stunned, and was sent under surveillance to Vernon, where he worked for some time on the river; then, an incorrigible vagabond, he broke exile and returned again to Paris.

He had his savings, fifty-six francs—that is to say, time enough to reflect. During his long absence, his old and horrible comrades had been dispersed. He was well hidden, and slept in a loft at an old woman’s, to whom he had represented himself as a sailor weary of the sea, having lost his papers in a recent shipwreck, and who wished to essay another trade. His tanned face, his calloused hands, and a few [Pg 40]nautical terms he let fall one time or another, made this story sufficiently probable.

One day when he had risked a saunter along the streets, and when the chance of his walk had brought him to Montmartre, where he had been born, an unexpected memory arrested him before the door of the Brothers’ school in which he had learned to read. Since it was very warm, the door was open, and with a single glance the passing incorrigible could recognize the peaceful school-room. Nothing was changed: neither the bright light shining in through the large windows, nor the crucifix over the desk, nor the rows of seats furnished with leaden inkstands, nor the table of weights and measures, nor the map on which pins stuck in still pointed out the operations of some ancient war. Heedlessly and without reflecting, Jean François read on the blackboard these words of the Gospel, which a well-trained hand had traced as an example of penmanship:

It was doubtless the hour for recreation, for the Brother professor had left his chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he seemed to be telling a[Pg 41] story to all the gamins who surrounded him, attentive and raising their eyes. What an innocent and gay countenance was that of the beardless young man, in long black robe, with white necktie, with coarse, ugly shoes, and with badly cut brown hair pushed up at the back. All those pallid faces of children of the populace which were looking at him seemed less childlike than his, above all when, charmed with a candid, priestly pleasantry he had made, he broke out with a good and frank peal of laughter, which showed his teeth sound and regular—laughter so contagious that all the scholars broke out noisily in their turn. And it was simple and sweet, this group in the joyous sunlight that made their clear eyes and their blonde hair shine.

Jean François looked at the scene some time in silence, and, for the first time, in that savage nature all instinct and appetite, there awoke a mysterious and tender emotion. His heart, that rude, hardened heart, which neither the cudgel of the galley master nor the weight of the watchman’s heavy whip falling on his shoulders was able to stir, beat almost to bursting. Before this spectacle, in which he saw again his childhood, his eyes closed sadly, and, restraining a violent gesture, a prey to the torture of regret, he walked away with great strides.

“If it were not too late, after all?” he murmured. “If I could once more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out my sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap, and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,—I have never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”

He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it, and three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom he labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on the scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his soup at the cheap eating-house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster,[Pg 43] but content with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.

It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his stick over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound reserved, disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien, himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course, satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room, fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre[Pg 44] and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages enough to buy some land in his own province.

Jean François and Savinien scarcely left each other. On days of rest they took long walks in the environs of Paris and dined in the open air in one of those little country inns where there are plenty of mushrooms in the sauces and innocent enigmas on the bottoms of the plates. There Jean François made his friend tell him all those things of which those born in the cities are ignorant. He learned the names of the trees, the flowers, the plants; the seasons for the different harvests; he listened avidly to the thousand details of a farmer’s labors: the autumn’s sowing, the winter’s work, the splendid fêtes of harvest-home and vintage, and the flails beating the ground, and the noise of the mills by the borders of the streams, and the tired horses led to the trough, and the morning hunting in the mists, and, above all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-branches, shortened by tales of wonder. He discovered in himself a spring of imagination hitherto unsuspected, finding a singular delight in the mere recital of these things, so gentle, calm, and monotonous.

One anxiety troubled him, however, that Savinien should not come to know his past.[Pg 45] Sometimes there escaped him a shady word of thieves’ slang, an ignoble gesture, vestiges of his horrible former existence; and then he felt the pain of a man whose old wounds reopen, more especially as he thought he saw then in Savinien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the pleasures which Paris offers even to the poorest, questioned him about the mysteries of the great city, Jean François feigned ignorance and turned the conversation; but he had now conceived a vague inquietude for the future of his friend.

This was not without foundation, and Savinien could not long remain the naïve rustic he had been on his arrival in Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always were repugnant to him, he was profoundly troubled by other desires full of danger for the inexperience of his twenty years. When the spring came, he began to seek solitude, and at first he wandered before the gayly lighted entrances to the dancing-halls, through which he saw the girls going in couples, without bonnets—and with their arms around each other’s waists, whispering low. Then, one evening, when the lilacs shed their perfume, and when the appeal of the quadrille was more entrancing, he crossed the threshold, and after that Jean François saw him change little by little in[Pg 46] manners and in visage. Savinien became more frivolous, more extravagant; often he borrowed from his friend his miserable savings, which he forgot to repay. Jean François, feeling himself abandoned, was both indulgent and jealous; he suffered and kept silent. He did not think he had the right to reproach; but his penetrating friendship had cruel and insurmountable presentiments.

One evening when he was climbing the stairs of his lodging, absorbed in his preoccupations, he heard in the room he was about to enter a dialogue of irritated voices, and he recognized one as that of the old man from Auvergne, who lodged with him and Savinien. An old habit of suspicion made him pause on the landing, and he listened to learn the cause of the trouble.

“Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant. This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house, and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find it, no one can[Pg 47] accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or I will call the police. Make haste!”

“All right,” said the voice of the householder; “we’ll search with Maria. So much the worse if you find nothing, and if the masons get angry. It is you who have forced me to it.”

Jean François felt his heart fill with fear. He recalled the poverty and the petty borrowings of Savinien, the sombre manner he had borne the last few days. Yet he could not believe in any theft. He heard the panting of the man from Auvergne in the ardor of his search, and he clenched his fists against his breast as if to repress the beatings of his heart.

“There they are!” suddenly screamed the victorious miser. “There they are, my louis, my dear treasure! And in the Sunday waistcoat of[Pg 48] that little hypocrite from Limoges. Look, landlord! they are just as I told you. There’s the Napoleon, and the man with the queue, and the Philippe I had dented with my teeth. Look at the mark. Ah, the little rascal with his saintly look! I should more likely have suspected the other. Ah, the villain! He will have to go to the galleys!”

At this moment Jean François heard the well-known step of Savinien, who was slowly mounting the stairs.

“He is going to his betrayal,” thought he. “Three flights. I have time!”

And, pushing open the door, he entered, pale as death, into the room where he saw the landlord and the stupefied servant in a corner, and the man from Auvergne on his knees amid the disordered clothes, lovingly kissing his gold pieces.

“Enough of this,” he said in a thick voice. “It is I who have taken the money and who have put it in my comrade’s trunk. But that is too disgusting. I am a thief and not a Judas. Go hunt for the police. I’ll not try to save myself. Only, I must say a word in private to Savinien, who is here.”

The little man from Limoges had, in fact, just arrived, and, seeing his crime discovered, and[Pg 49] believing himself lost, he stood still, his eyes fixed, his arms drooping.

Jean François seized him violently about the neck as though to embrace him; he pressed his mouth to Savinien’s ear and said to him in a voice low and supplicating:

“Leave me alone with him. I shall not go away, I tell you. Shut us up, if you wish, but leave us alone.”

Savinien, broken with anguish, had seated himself on a bed, and dropped his eyes without comprehending.

“Listen,” said Jean François, who approached to take his hands. “I understand you have stolen three gold pieces to buy some trifle for a girl. That would have cost six months of prison for you. But one does not get out of that except to go back again, and you would have become a pillar of the police tribunals and the courts of assizes. I know all about them. I have done seven years in the Reform School, one year at Sainte-Pélagie, three years at Poissy, and five years at Toulon. Now, have no fear. All is arranged. I have taken this affair on my shoulders.”

“Unhappy fellow!” cried Savinien; but hope was already coming back to his cowardly heart.

“When the elder brother is serving under the colors, the younger does not go,” Jean François went on. “I’m your substitute, that’s all. You love me a little, do you not? I am paid. Do not be a baby. Do not refuse. They would have caught me one of these days, for I have broken my exile. And then, you see, that life out there will be less hard for me than for you; I know it, and shall not complain if I do not render you this service in vain and if you swear to me that you will not do it again. Savinien, I have loved you well, and your friendship has made me very happy, for it is thanks to my knowing you that I have kept honest and straight, as I might always have been, perhaps, if I had had, like you, a father to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach me my prayers. My only regret was that I was useless to you and that I was deceiving you about my past. To-day I lay aside the mask in saving you. It is all right. Come, good-by! Do not weep; and embrace me, for already I hear the big boots on the stairs. They are returning with the police; and we must not seem to know each other so well before these fellows.”

He pressed Savinien hurriedly to his breast,[Pg 51] and then he pushed him away as the door opened wide.

It was the landlord and the man from Auvergne, who were bringing the police. Jean François started forward to the landing and held out his hands for the handcuffs and said, laughing:

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Revolutionary songs of '93.

[3] Tu—Thou—used only in familiar address.

[4] Police headquarters.

[5] “The California” is a cheap eating-house in Paris.

[6] In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give exemption.

[7] Literally, climbing and breaking in.

[8] A receiver of stolen goods.

[9] Stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.

[10] A northwest wind on the Mediterranean.

The inflexible realist in fiction can be faithful only to what he sees; and what he sees is inevitably colored by the lens of his real self. For the literary observer of life there is no way of falsifying the reports which his senses, physical and moral, make to his own brain. If he wishes, he may make alterations in transcribing for his readers, but in so doing he confesses to himself a departure from truth as he sees it.

Pure realism, then, demands of its apostle both a faithful observation of life and a faithful statement of what he sees. True, the realist uses his artist’s privilege of selecting those facts of life which seem best suited to picturing his characters in their natures, their persons, and their careers, for he knows that many irrelevant, confusing, and contradictory things happen in the everyday lives of everyday men. So in point of practice his realism is not so uncompromising as his theories sound when baldly stated.

How near any great artist’s transcriptions of life approach to absolute truth will always be a question, both because we none of us know what is final truth, and because realists, each seeing life through his own nature, will disagree among[Pg 54] themselves just as widely as their temperaments, their predispositions, and their experiences vary. Thus we are left to the common sense for our standards, and to this common sense we may with some confidence appeal for a judgment.

Guy de Maupassant was a realist. “The writer’s eye,” he says in Sur l’Eau, “is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything; like a pickpocket’s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures, intentions, everything that goes on in his presence—the slightest look, the least act, the merest trifle.”

But Maupassant was more than a realist—he was an artist, a realistic artist, frank and wise enough to conform his theories to his own efficient literary practice. He saw as a realist, selected as an artist, and then was uncompromising in his literary presentation.

Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three always summed up five—his temperament would not allow for the unseen, imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny the superstitious[Pg 55] solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However, Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been.

Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes, and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was incomplete, morbid, and unnatural.

Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love, with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,—days, nights, rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of woman; for all[Pg 56] these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my eyes and my heart.”

But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have already intimated that he was biased—as similarly we all are biased—by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice; rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal, the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the spiritual—for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.

Persistently refusing to give to the public any record of his life, he dwelt, as it were, behind closed doors. No soul, he held, could enter into the life of another soul, so he had no real intimates, and those who called him friend and knew the frank charm of his manner discussed with him mainly impersonal themes. Thus in spite of importunities he gave no encouragement to that impertinent curiosity which avidly seizes upon[Pg 57] the details of an author’s private life and flaunts it to a gaping public. We, then, are concerned with Maupassant’s temperament and personal career only in so far as they color his work.

Born in Normandy in 1850, he passed his youth in that charming section where he has laid the scenes of many of his provincial narratives. The picturesque Norman characters, the narrow-browed country life, the colorful phases of town, market, and church, appear with intaglio clearness in a thousand wonderfully-wrought settings. The sordid and ungracious bourgeoisie with whom he came most in contact predominate in these stories, just as his strenuous days as an oarsman live again in his aquatic tales, and his life as a minor clerk in the government and his experiences as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War are used for material in other stories. It was his later life in the Capital that gave him his knowledge of society life, and of the underworld peopled by courtesan and roué.

The gifted Flaubert, as everyone knows, left a profound impress upon his young nephew, Maupassant, who served under him a literary apprenticeship at once rigid and productive. It was Flaubert who taught the man of thirty to seek for the one inevitably fitting word, made him tear up early poems, plays, and stories,[Pg 58] taught him to suppress relentlessly all his unformed work, until, full panoplied, he sprang into being as a brilliant maker of artistic fictions.

His later years—he died by his own hand in 1893 at the age of forty-three—were darkened by the approaching madness which he so terribly pictures in “The Horla.” In Bel Ami he writes:

“There comes a day, you know, when no matter what you are looking at, you see Death lurking behind it.... As for me, for the last fifteen years I have felt the torment of it, as if I were carrying a gnawing beast. I have felt it dragging me down, little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house that is crumbling away.... Each step I take brings me nearer to it, every moment that passes, every breath I draw, hurries on its odious work.... Breathing, sleeping, eating, drinking, working, dreaming,—everything we do is simply dying by inches.... Now I see it so near that I often stretch out my arm to thrust it back!”

But under the shadow of this terrible phantasm as he was, latterly his cold, unsympathetic scrutiny of men and things had warmed somewhat, and his latest writings—his productive period covers only about ten intensely active years—show more gentleness, more sympathy with[Pg 59] struggling humanity. But never did he really depart from the morbid and cynical view of life, and the horror of death as the final breakdown of all things desirable, which showed so plainly in most of his fictions.

If we see but little of Guy de Maupassant’s life in his writings, it is to them we must turn to discover his temperament and his philosophy—glimpses of which we have already had.

Absolutely French, almost a typical Latin, Maupassant was not unemotional; he merely refused to allow his emotions to color the characters he delineated. He was himself a passionate pleasure-seeker, determined to extract the last drop of satisfaction from life, but he erred in thinking that one may at the same time drain the cup of mental joys and that of physical pleasures. What wonder that this vampire, in love with the blood of life, should suck final poison whence he had thought to draw only pulsing bliss. His very repressions supplied power for each fresh explosion of private excess—yet always the cold precision of his artistry grew, until the perfection of his chiselling left critics wordless. The deft maker of word-masterpieces never lost the artist in the man.

According to this warped genius, life was intended to amuse, to gratify self. Inner beauty he[Pg 60] scouted—the beauty of the seen he adored. For such a nature the ideal existed only as a foolish figment. Even ideal love he scouted, depicting with relentless fidelity the sins of a mother as discovered by her loving children, the universal laxity of the Norman peasants as condoned by complacent priests, the ravishing of every illusion, the degradation of every virtue. What other conclusion was there for so sad, so hopeless, so pitiless, so materialistic, a philosophy, than What’s the use!

But if there was little of apparent beauty in our author’s character, it is impossible not to admire his industry, his will, his passionate devotion to a perfect art, his relentless literary fidelity to truth as he saw it, his magic mastery of diction and of dialogue, his incisive though unmoral analysis of character and life, his constant advance in craftsmanship to the end. To turn out something beautiful in form was to him worth a lifetime of effort. How great would he have grown had his eyes been opened to the inner light!

I have chosen his Clair de Lune for presentation here because it more nearly approaches spiritual beauty than any other of his stories. It needs no commentary—it speaks its own beauties in tones subtly delicate yet silver clear.

The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His will, His purposes.

As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind: “Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God, he searched obstinately for the answer—and nearly always found it. It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for what He does, or if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”

To him, all nature seemed created with a logic[Pg 62] as absolute as it was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and the night darkened for sleep.

The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and to the priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs, and that, on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same inexorable laws of period, climate, and matter.

But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think that God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of his hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation—she was a feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.

He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even though he knew himself[Pg 63] to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their hearts.

In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to test him. She should never be even approached without those defensive measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor, when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her lips open and arms extended towards man.

Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were rendered harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the same, because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humbled hearts, he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly surged up toward him, priest though he was.

Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more limpid with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.

So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and stride off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.

Now the Abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.

She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at her, she laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him vehemently, pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively seek to disengage himself from this embrace—which, all the same, gave him a thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that feeling of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.

Often as they walked together along the footpaths through the fields, he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely heard him, for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away to catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which blooms perennial in the heart of woman.

And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!

He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all over his face, for he was shaving.

When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not true. You are lying, Mélanie!”

But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord judge me if I am lying, monsieur le curé. I tell you she goes out to him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and midnight to see for yourself.”

He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as was his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try to finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.

All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with indignation and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love was now added the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of the guardian of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with by a mere child. He felt that egotistical suffocation which[Pg 66] parents experience when their daughter tells them that she has selected a husband without their advice and in defiance of their wishes.

After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not—he grew more and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his cane, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went out at night to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge cudgel, gripped it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it menacingly in the air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought it down upon a chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.

He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold, surprised by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.

And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of the pale-faced night.

In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed breath—the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear night.

He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost forgotten.

When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams without thought—that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with kisses.

The Abbé moved on again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted—he longed to sit down, to linger there, to glorify God for all His works.

A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light transparent down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and transmuted by them into gleaming silver.

The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.

And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.

Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset? And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb—why was it come to illuminate all the shades?

Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like the others, instead of singing in the unquiet dark?

Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?

Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?

But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.

The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck; and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. Suddenly they animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to his question, they moved toward the priest.

Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body—all the glowing romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing itself into his mind.

And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”

He withdrew before this pair who went ever arm in arm. True, it was his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he visibly encompass it with glory such as this?

And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a temple wherein he had no right to enter.

When the gods parceled out their gifts, to Alphonse Daudet fell a rich endowment: a poet’s imaginative nature, yet withal a clear vision for realities which is often denied the disciple of poesy; a sure dramatic instinct, too, with a contrasting power of repression which checked his slightest tendency toward the florid and the melodramatic; and, coloring all, a native sense of humor so tenderly sympathetic that it prevented his satire from biting with that acid sharpness of which his wit was capable. An all-round, well-poised literary genius was he, efficient in many fields, and preëminent in more than one.

There is one word of all the happy many which, in the opinion of all his critics, fitly characterizes Daudet—he possessed charm, charm of manner personally and charm of literary style. I wish his portrait were before us here, that we might trace in that striking countenance the record of those fascinating qualities of mind and heart which are so patent in his life and work.

As for his person, from boyhood his hair grew in that untamed profusion which we so often associate with strong individuality, and even in later life he wore his locks long and full. His[Pg 72] beard was silky, and unrestrained rather than unkempt. Near-sighted eyes, peering from behind the inevitable black-rimmed pince nez, or at times a monocle, seemed curious and inquiring, typifying perfectly the spirit of naïve interest with which he looked out on life to observe its myriad moods and forms. In this look there was something reflective, too, as though he had just noticed a matter of unusual interest, and was inwardly speculating upon its further meanings. The nose was pleasure-loving, though robust, dignified, and individual—counteracted upon by the satirical mouth, whose sarcasm, in turn, was gently toned by twinkling furrows that flanked his eyes. In later days the sharpness of Daudet’s expression of mouth had been almost lost, and a gentle detachment, betokening a just but sympathetic critical spirit, marked his countenance and made it less keen than lovable. Yet it was in those later years that his cherished hatred for the French Academy led to the bitter satirical outburst against that institution in his novel, The Immortal (1888). But that was only one phase temporarily dominant in the man whom everyone loved and who himself loved all.

Alphonse Daudet was—especially in youth—the exponent of the south, the south as typified by his native Provence. His was the rich, effusive,[Pg 73] impressionable southland nature—abundantly moved upon by all the southern charm and vivacity and naïveté and life, as well as richly gifted in the ability to reproduce those impressions in the pages of his writings. Then what more natural than that he should both personally and in his fiction embody the vivid life of the carefree land? When, in 1869, his first important volume of collected stories appeared, it was seen that into Letters from My Mill—which included “The Pope’s Mule”—Daudet had poured not only the young unspoiled richness of his own buoyancy, but also the fulness of his feeling for local landscapes, traditions, and characters of town and country. And again and again, even in his later work, Daudet reverts to the scenes of his boyhood life, and gives us pictures—now jocund as the wine of the country, now sad as a poet’s wail—whose tone and spirit are of the Provençal life, all delicately set in the atmosphere of that sunny clime.

In the History of My Books, which forms an integral part of the author’s Thirty Years in Paris, he takes us by the hand in his dear, intimate way and shows us the great white house, the ancient and unique manor of Montauban. Near by, its shattered wings swaying in the wind on the summit of a little pine-clad mountain, stands Mon[Pg 74] Moulin—the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the province.

“Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature, to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of our little Provençal hills.”

The greetings of old friends at an end, he would whistle to Miracle, a venerable spaniel some fisherman had once found on a bit of wreckage at sea, and climb up to his mill, there to browse and dream and wander in fancy whithersoever the spirits of the place should beckon.

“The mill was a ruin,” he says; “a crumbling mass of stone, iron, and ancient boards which had not turned in the wind for many years, and which lay, with broken limbs, as useless as a poet, while all around on the hillside the miller’s trade prospered and ground and ground with all its wings. Strange affinities subsist between ourselves and inanimate objects. From the first day, that cast-off structure was dear to my heart; I loved it for its desolation, its road overgrown with[Pg 75] weeds, those little grayish, fragrant mountain weeds with which Père Gaucher compounded his elixir; for its little worn platform where it was so pleasant to loiter, sheltered from the wind, while a rabbit hurried by, or a long snake, rustling among the leaves with crafty detours, hunted the field mice with which the ruin swarmed. With the creaking of the old building shaken by the north wind, the flapping of its wings like the rigging of a ship at sea, the mill stirred in my poor, restless, nomadic brain memories of journeys by sea, of landings at lighthouses and far-off islands; and the shivering swell all about completed the illusion. I know not whence I derived this taste for wild and desert places which has characterized me from my childhood, and which seems so inconsistent with the exuberance of my nature, unless it be at the same time the physical need of repairing by a fast from words, by abstinence from outcries and gestures, the terrible waste which the southerner makes of his whole being. Be that as it may, I owe a great deal to those places of refuge for the mind; and no one of them has been more salutary in its effect upon me than that old mill in Provence.”

Here, both in boyhood and in young manhood’s revisitations, Daudet found the “grasshopper’s library,” and in its secret alcoves discovered such[Pg 76] delightful stories as “The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Goat of Monsieur Seguin,” “Master Cornille’s Secret,” and “The Old Folks,” all abounding in naïve character and told with his own delicate charm. Here, too, he learned to take a delight in his craft which waned not with the years; and to find joy in pleasing “the people,” who were ever the subjects of his finest delineations.

Born at Nîmes in 1840, and as a mere lad leaving home for the city of Lyons, Daudet’s public career began with his journey to Paris in November, 1857. The boy of seventeen and a half came possessed of a slender collection of poems which, though the product of so youthful a rhymester, met with no little favor. In manner common to those who must win their way along the precarious paths of letters, he pressed on, until in 1859—he being not yet twenty—Daudet published his first volume of poems, Les Amoureuses, which won high praise from the critics, but is now sought chiefly by collectors. Thus he began to gain confidence, and others of his works followed almost yearly. The pages of Le Figaro were now freely opened to him, and that public by whom he never ceased to be loved began to scan its columns for his fantastic chronicles of[Pg 77] Provençal life. In that same journal he began in 1866 to publish his Letters from My Mill, which were collected in volume form in 1869, and constituted his first real popular triumph.

The third period in our author’s life is marked by the sad experiences of the Siege of Paris, in 1870. Just as his life in the south inspired the Letters, so did the grave impressions made by those terrible days in the French capital during the Franco-Prussian War move him to write the little masterpieces which, in part, appeared in the volume entitled Monday Tales, published in 1873. Who that has read them can forget the “piercing pathos” of “The Last Class” and “The Siege of Berlin”? Not only are these human episodes of singularly tender appeal, but they are masterpieces of form, unsurpassed among short-stories of any language. As Daudet’s best work, they deserve further notice here.

At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace and Lorraine were ceded to Germany by France. One of the edicts issued by the conquerors, with a view to nationalizing the acquired territory, was that the French language should no longer be taught in their public schools. And this furnishes the motif for Daudet’s “The Last Class.”

The story is simply told in the first person by Frantz, a little Alsatian. Frantz recalls that[Pg 78] historic day when he set off for school a little late. Hoping that he might perhaps escape the teacher’s ferrule, he cuts across the public square without even stopping to find out the meaning of the knot of perturbed villagers who are discussing an announcement upon the bulletin board in front of the mayor’s office. As he slips into his seat, hoping to escape observation, he is impressed by the unnatural quiet in the school-room, and also by the presence of a number of the town notables, all solemnly garbed in holiday dress.

The lad marvels that he is not even chided for his lateness, and is more than ever mystified as the schoolmaster proceeds with one lesson and another, all under stress of deep emotion.

By and by the schoolmaster tells his pupils of the cruel edict, and Frantz begins to realize that the worthy master will no longer rule in his accustomed place. He becomes conscious of neglected work, and a whole tide of better resolutions surges in his breast. Finally the master has heard the last class and arising seeks utterance for his farewells. At first he is able to give his pupils some sound advice, but at length no words will come, and with such quiverings of lip as even Daudet tries not to depict, he chokes, swiftly turns to the blackboard, takes a piece of chalk, and, bearing with all his might, dashes off his[Pg 79] final expression of patriotic protest and personal sorrow:

“Then he stood there, with his head resting against the wall, and without speaking, he motioned to us with his hand:

On rereading “The Last Class” for the dozenth time, I find that it is surrounded with an emotional atmosphere which, textually, the story does not contain. I think this must be the aura emanating from the spirit of the story; for a great work of fiction is not only the product of emotion, but it kindles emotion, because it is a creation, an entity, a living being. Doubtless the contention could not be demonstrated that, when properly received, a great work of fictional art will arouse the same emotions in the reader as were first enkindled in the breast of its author when the story was born. None the less, I believe it to be true. What feelings, then, must Daudet have known when he gave forth this little master-story! It must be these that I myself feel, for I do not, by analysis, find them all present in the text, even by suggestion. Happy artist, who can so project the creations of his soul that they henceforth live and[Pg 80] expand and communicate their messages to multitudes to him unknown! So all great fiction is alive; so lives the work of Alphonse Daudet.

The emotion in “The Siege of Berlin” is of a different type. It, too, finds its motif in the Franco-Prussian War; this time in the Siege of Paris itself.

An invalided old cuirassier of the First Empire, Colonel Jouve, lies in his room in the Champs-Élysées, fronting the Arc de Triomphe. Day by day his grand-daughter brings to him news of the progress of the war. So fully is his life wrapped up in the success of the French armies that, in order to brighten his closing days, they tell him fictitious stories of his compatriots’ success. But one day, when the enemy’s lines have drawn close about the beleaguered capital and the end is at hand, it becomes difficult to deceive the old soldier any longer. Still, fresh victories are always supplied by the news-bureau of love, and the old man can scarcely wait for the homecoming of the victorious battalions. So when one day the sound of bugle and drum is heard, and the tramp of marching feet beneath the windows of the upper room, you can picture the delight of this old veteran. With a superhuman effort he leaves his bed and looks out of the window—only to see the Prussian troops instead of[Pg 81] the cheering cohorts of his countrymen! And in this last pang of disappointment, the old man dies.

Both of these stories end with the note of disappointment and consequent sorrow. Poe has declared that the tone of beauty is sadness, and surely there is a penetrating beauty as well as a thrill of sublimity in the sadness of these wonderfully-wrought episodes. Here may be seen the beginnings of the realistic method which Daudet later adopted. Yet, as these stories both indicate, he still carried with him the romanticism of his earlier inspirations, untouched by either the too painful naturalism or the sentimentality of some of his later stories.

In still greater contrast than either of these to the other is the story of our present translation, “The Pope’s Mule.” Here are all the joyous satire, the rollicking fun-making, and the picturesque description, of this unexcelled interpreter of southern life. Daudet’s wit and humor, characterization and description, local color, kaleidoscopic pageantry, are at their best, with never a thought of enforcing a moral or of sounding any emotion deeper than that of boyish amusement. It is the creator of Tartarin who now writes, and not the later master of the novelist’s art.

Notwithstanding the success of the fecund and versatile author of Sapho, as a playwright, and[Pg 82] his much wider vogue as a novelist, I wonder if after all he did not love best his short-stories and prose fantasies. In his greatest real novels, Froment, Jr., and Risler, Sr.; Jack; The Nabob; Kings in Exile; and Numa Roumestan, the episode often occurs, of which literary form some further words will be said in the treatment of Loti.

Such a temperament as Daudet’s, both introspective and finely sensitive to the impressions of his surroundings, would naturally make much of his fiction biographical, and even autobiographical. Indeed, a close study of his works, read in the light of his life, shows how he has woven into his stories many personal facts. In that exquisite child-document Little What’s-His-Name, we have a rather full record of his boyhood and entrance into Paris. Jack, also, is full of his own early sorrows, while one character after another may be traced to folk whom he knew. His mind, and his heart too, were note-books on which he was always transcribing his impressions of life, and—here is the vital thing, after all—recreating them for use in his own inimitable way.

So Daudet was not an extreme realist—scarcely a typical realist at all—for while he used the realistic method for observation and faithful record, he no more got beyond sympathizing with his characters than did Dickens, to whom more[Pg 83] than to any other English-writing novelist he must be compared. Daudet “belonged” to no school, expounded no theories, stood for no reforms. He was just a kindly, humorous, sympathetic, patiently exact maker of fascinating fictions, and as such we shall love him quite in the proportion that we know him. Life, as he saw it, was full of sadness, but that did not make him conclude it to be not worth the living. Happily married, he knew the solaces of home life. Unlike Maupassant, “What’s the use!” was far from being the heart of his philosophy. Disenchanted with life he never was. A disheartening view of sordidness, vice, and misery left him still with open eyes, for he would not close them against truth; but it never prevented his turning his gaze upon the beautiful, the humorous, and the good—a lovable trio ever!—and finding in them some healing for his hurt.

Of all the pretty sayings, proverbs, or adages with which our Provence peasants embroider their discourse, I know none more picturesque or singular than this: within fifteen leagues around about my mill, whenever a person speaks of a spiteful, vindictive man, he says, “That man there—look out for him! He is like the Pope’s mule, who kept her kick in waiting for seven years.”

I hunted diligently for a long time to find out whence that proverb could have come, what was that papal mule, and that kick reserved throughout seven years. No one here has been able to inform me on this subject, not even Francet Mamaï, my fife player, though he has all the Provençal legends at his fingers’ ends. Francet thinks with me that it must be founded upon some old tradition of Provence; yet he has never heard it referred to except in this proverb.

“You will not find that anywhere but in the Library of the Grasshoppers,” said the old fifer to me, with a laugh.

The idea struck me as a good one, and since the Library of the Grasshoppers is at my door, I went and shut myself up there for a week.

It is a marvellous library, admirably equipped, open to poets day and night, and attended by little librarians who constantly make music for you with cymbals. There I passed some delicious days, and, after a week of research—on my back—I ended by discovering what I wished to know, that is to say, the history of my mule and of that famous kick saved up for seven years. The story is a pretty one, although a trifle naïve, and I am going to try to tell it you just as I read it yesterday morning in a sky-colored manuscript, which smelled delightfully of dry lavender, and had long gossamer threads for binding threads.

He who has never seen the Avignon of the time of the Popes, has seen nothing. For gayety, for life, for animation, for a succession of fêtes, there never was a city its equal. From morning till night there were processions and pilgrimages; streets strewn with flowers and hung with rich tapestries; cardinals arriving by the Rhône, banners flying, galleys bedecked with flags; papal soldiers chanting in Latin on the public squares; begging friars with their alms-rattles; then, in addition, from roof to cellar of the houses which swarmed humming around the great papal palace[Pg 87] like bees about their hive, there were heard the tic-tac of the lace-makers’ looms, the flying of the shuttles weaving cloth-of-gold for vestments, the little hammers of the vase-sculptors, the keyboards being attuned at the lute-makers’, the songs of the warpers; and, overhead, the booming of the bells was heard, and always below sounded the tinkle of the tambourines on the river bank by the bridge. For with us, when the people are happy they must be dancing, dancing ever; and since in those days the streets in the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifers and tambourine players took up their post upon the Avignon Bridge, in the cool breezes of the Rhône, and day and night they danced and danced.... Ah! happy time, happy city, when halberds did not wound, and state prisons were used only for cooling wine! No famine; no wars! That shows the way the Popes of the Comtat[11] knew how to govern their people; that is why their people regretted them so deeply!

There was one Pope especially, a good old gentleman whom they called Boniface. Ah! how many tears were shed for him in Avignon when he died! He was such an amiable, affable prince! He would smile down at you so genially from his [Pg 88]mule! And when you passed him—whether you were a poor little digger of madder or the grand provost of the city—he would give you his benediction so courteously! A genuine Pope of Yvetot was he, but of an Yvetot in Provence, with something sly in his laughter, a sprig of sweet marjoram in his cap—and not the semblance of a Jeanneton. The only Jeanneton the good Father had ever been known to have was his vineyard—a little vineyard which he had planted himself, three leagues from Avignon, among the myrtles of Château-Neuf.

Every Sunday, on going out from vespers, the worthy man went to pay his court to it, and when he was seated in the grateful sun, his mule close beside him, his cardinals stretched at the foot of the vine stocks all about, then he would order a flagon of wine of his own bottling—that exquisite, ruby-colored wine, which has been called ever since Château-Neuf of the Popes—and he would drink it appreciatively in little sips, and regard his vineyard with a tender air. Then—the flagon empty, the day closed—he would return joyously to the city, followed by all his chapter; and, after crossing the Bridge of Avignon, in the midst of drum-beats and farandoles, his mule, stirred by the music, took up a little skipping amble, while he himself marked the time of the dance with his[Pg 89] cap—a thing which greatly scandalized his cardinals, but caused all the people to say, “Ah! that good prince! Ah! that fine old Pope!”

Next to his vineyard at Château-Neuf, the thing that the Pope loved best in the world was his mule. The good old man doted on that beast. Every evening before going to bed he went to see if her stable was well shut, if nothing was lacking in the manger; and he never rose from the table without having had prepared under his very eyes a huge bowl of wine à la Française, with plenty of sugar and spice, which he himself carried to the mule, despite the remarks of his cardinals. It must be admitted, however, that the animal was worth the trouble. She was a beautiful mule, black and dappled with red, glossy of coat, sure of foot, large and full of back, and carrying proudly her neat little head, all decked out with pompons, rosettes, silver bells, and bows of ribbon—all this with the mildness of an angel, a naïve eye, and two long ears, always in motion, which gave her the air of an amiable child. All Avignon respected her, and when she went through the streets there was no attention which she did not receive; for everyone knew that this was the best way to be in favor at court, and that, for all her innocent air, the Pope’s mule had led more than[Pg 90] one to fortune—witness Tistet Védène and his prodigious adventure.

This Tistet Védène was, from the very first, an audacious young rascal whom his father, Guy Védène, the gold-carver, had been obliged to drive from home because he would not do anything, and demoralized the apprentices. For six months he could be seen trailing his jacket through all the gutters of Avignon, but especially around the papal palace, for this rascal had long had his eye fixed on the Pope’s mule, and you will see what a villainous scheme it was. One day when his Holiness was taking a walk all alone beneath the shadows of the ramparts with his steed, behold my Tistet approached and, clasping his hands with an air of admiration, said to him:

“Ah! mon Dieu! what a splendid mule you have there, Holy Father! Permit me to look at her a moment. Ah, my Pope, the emperor of Germany has not her equal!”

And do you know what happened the next day? Tistet Védène exchanged his old yellow jacket for a beautiful vestment of lace, a violet silk hood, and buckled shoes; and he entered the household of the Pope, where never before had any been received but sons of nobles and nephews of cardinals. There is an intrigue for you! But Tistet did not stop there.

Once in the service of the Pope, the rascal continued the game which had succeeded so well. Insolent with everyone else, he had nothing but attention, nothing but provident care for the mule; and one was always meeting him about the palace court with a handful of oats or a bunch of clover, whose rosy clusters he shook gently and glanced at the balcony of Saint Peter as if to say: “Ha! for whom is this?” And so it went on until the good Pope, who felt that he was growing old, ended by leaving it to him to watch over the stable and to carry to the mule her bowl of wine à la Française—which was no laughing matter for the cardinals.

No more was it for the mule—it did not make her laugh. Now, at the hour for her wine, she always saw coming to her stable five or six little clerks of the household, who hastily buried themselves in the straw with their hoods and their laces; then, after a moment, a delicious warm[Pg 92] odor of caramel and spices filled the stable, and Tistet Védène appeared carefully carrying the bowl of wine à la Française. Then the martyrdom of the poor beast began.

That perfumed wine which she loved so well, which kept her warm, which gave her wings, they had the cruelty to place before her, there in her manger, and let her sniff it; then, when she had her nostrils full of it, it was gone—that lovely rose-flamed liquor all went down the gullets of those good-for-nothings. And yet if they had only stopped at taking her wine; but they were like devils, all these little clerks, when they had drunken. One pulled her ears, another her tail; Quinquet mounted himself upon her back, Béluguet tried his cap on her, and not one of those little scamps reflected that with a single good kick that excellent beast could have sent them all into the polar star, and even farther. But no! It is no vain thing to be the Pope’s mule, the mule of benedictions and indulgences. The children went blithely on, she did not get angry; and it was only against Tistet Védène that she bore malice. But that fellow, for instance, when she felt him behind her, her hoof itched, and truly she had excellent reason. That ne’er-do-well of a Tistet played her such villainous tricks! He had such cruel fancies after drinking!

One day he took it into his head to make her climb up with him into the clock tower, all the way up to the very top of the palace! And it is no myth that I am telling you—two hundred thousand Provençals saw it. Imagine for yourself the terror of that unhappy mule when, after having for a whole hour twisted like a snail blindly up the staircase, and having clambered up I know not how many steps, she found herself all at once on a platform dazzling with light, and saw, a thousand feet beneath her, a fantastic Avignon: the market booths no larger than walnuts, the papal soldiers before their barracks like red ants, and farther down, over a silver thread, a microscopically little bridge on which the people danced and danced. Ah! poor beast! What panic! At the bray she uttered all the windows of the palace trembled.

“What’s the matter? What are they doing to her?” cried the good Pope, and rushed out upon the balcony.

Tistet Védène was already in the courtyard, pretending to weep and tear out his hair.

“Ah! Holy Father, what is the matter? There is your mule.... Mon Dieu! what will happen to us! Your mule has gone up into the belfry!”

“Yes, Holy Father, all by herself. Stay![Pg 94] Look there, up high. Don’t you see her ears waving? They look like two swallows.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the poor Pope on raising his eyes. “But she must have gone mad! Why, she will kill herself. Will you come down, you unhappy creature!”

Pécaïre! She could have asked nothing better than to come down; but how? The stairs—they were not to be thought of: one could mount those things, but as to coming down, one could break one’s legs a hundred times. And the poor mule was disconsolate; but as she roamed about the platform with her great eyes filled with vertigo she thought of Tistet Védène.

That idea of a kick restored a little courage to her heart; except for that she could not have held out. At last they succeeded in getting her down, but it was not an easy affair. They had to lower her in a litter, with ropes and windlass, and you may imagine what a humiliation it must have been for a Pope’s mule to see herself hanging at that height, afloat with her legs in the air like a beetle at the end of a string. And all Avignon looking on!

The unhappy beast did not sleep that night. It seemed to her as though she were forever turning[Pg 95] upon that accursed platform, with the laughter of the city below. Then she thought of that infamous Tistet Védène, and of the delightful kick that she proposed to turn loose the next morning. Ah, my friends, what a kick! They could see the smoke at Pampérigouste.

But, while this pretty reception was being prepared for him at the stable, do you know what Tistet Védène was doing? He was going singing down the Rhône on one of the papal galleys, on his way to the Court of Naples with a company of young nobles whom the city sent every year to Queen Joanna for exercise in diplomacy and in manners. Tistet was not of noble birth; but the Pope desired to recompense him for what he had done for his mule, and above all for the activity he had shown throughout the day of the rescue.

“Ah, the bandit! He suspected something!” she thought as she shook her bells in fury. “But it’s all the same; go, scoundrel! You will find it waiting for you on your return, that kick—I’ll save it for you!”

After the departure of Tistet, the Pope’s mule once more found her course of tranquil life and her former habits. Neither Quinquet nor Béluguet[Pg 96] came again to her stable. The delightful days of wine à la Française had returned, and with them good-humor, the long siestas, and the little prancing step when she crossed the Avignon bridge. However, since her adventure she was always shown a slight coldness in the city. Folks whispered together as she passed; the old people shook their heads, the children laughed as they pointed to the belfry. Even the good Pope had no longer quite the same confidence in his friend, and whenever he permitted himself to take a little nap on her back on Sundays on returning from his vineyard, this thought always came to him: “What if I should awake 'way up there on the platform!” The mule discerned this and suffered, without saying a word; only, when any one near her mentioned the name of Tistet Védène, her long ears quivered, and with a little laugh she would sharpen the iron of her shoes on the paving.

Seven years passed thus; then at the end of those seven years Tistet Védène returned from the Court of Naples. His time there was not at an end; but he had learned that the Pope’s chief mustard-bearer had died suddenly at Avignon, and, since the post suited him well, he had come in great haste in order to apply for it.

When that intriguer of a Védène entered into the great hall of the palace, the Holy Father had[Pg 97] difficulty in recognizing him, so tall had he grown, and stout of body. It must be said, too, that the worthy Pope had grown old and could no longer see well without spectacles.

“What, Holy Father, you do not remember me any more? It is I, Tistet Védène!”

“Why, yes, you know very well—the one who used to carry the wine à la Française to your mule.”

“Oh—yes—yes—I remember. A good little fellow, that Tistet Védène! And now, what is it that he wants of us?”

“Oh, a very little thing, Holy Father. I came to ask you—by the way, do you still have your mule? And is she well? Ah, so much the better! I came to ask of you the post of the chief mustard-bearer, who has just died.”

“Twenty years two months, illustrious Pontiff, just five years older than your mule. Ah! that excellent creature! If you only knew how I loved that mule! How I languished for her in Italy! Are you not going to let me see her?”

“Yes, my child, you shall see her,” said the good Pope, deeply moved. “And since you loved[Pg 98] her so much, that excellent animal, I do not wish you to live apart from her. From this day, I attach you to my person as chief mustard-bearer. My cardinals will raise an outcry, but so much the worse! I am used to it. Come to meet us tomorrow as we return from vespers, we will deliver to you the insignia of your office in the presence of our chapter, and then—I will take you to see the mule, and you shall come to the vineyard with us two—ha! ha! Go along, now!”

If Tistet Védène was content upon leaving the grand hall, I need not tell you with what impatience he awaited the ceremony of the next day. Meanwhile, they had some one in the palace who was still more happy and more impatient than he: it was the mule. From the time of Védène’s return, until vespers on the following day, the terrible creature did not cease cramming herself with oats and kicking at the wall with her hind feet. She too was preparing herself for the ceremony.

Accordingly, on the morrow, when vespers had been said, Tistet Védène made his entrance into the courtyard of the papal palace. All the high clergy were there—the cardinals in red robes, the advocate of the devil in black velvet, the convent abbés with their little mitres, the church-wardens of the Saint-Agrico, the violet hoods of the[Pg 99] members of the household, the lesser clergy also, the papal soldiers in full uniform, the three brotherhoods of penitents, the hermits from Mount Ventoux with their ferocious eyes and the little clerk who walks behind them carrying the bell, the Flagellant Brothers, naked to the waist, the blond sacristans in robes like judges—all, all, down to those who pass the holy water, and he who lights and he who extinguishes the candles—not one was missing. Ah! That was a beautiful installation, with bells, fireworks, sunlight, music, and, as always, those mad tambourine players who led the dance down by the Avignon Bridge.

When Védène appeared in the midst of the assemblage, his imposing deportment and fine appearance called forth a murmur of approbation. He was a magnificent Provençal of the blond type, with long hair curled at the ends and a small unruly beard which resembled the shavings of fine metal from the graving tool of his father, the carver of gold. The report was current that the fingers of Queen Joanna had now and then toyed with that blond beard; and the Sire de Védène had in truth the haughty air and the absent look of those whom queens have loved. That day, to do honor to his nation, he had replaced his Neapolitan garb by a jacket bordered with color-of-rose,[Pg 100] in the Provençal fashion, and in his hood trembled a great plume of the Camargue ibis.

As soon as he had entered, the first mustard-bearer bowed with a gallant air, and directed his steps toward the grand dais, where the Pope awaited him in order to deliver to him the insignia of his office: the yellow wooden spoon and the saffron-colored coat. The mule was at the foot of the staircase, all caparisoned and ready to depart for the vineyard. When he passed her, Tistet Védène had a pleasant smile and paused to give her two or three friendly pats upon the back, looking out of the corner of his eye to see if the Pope noticed him. The situation was admirable. The mule let fly:

“There! You are trapped, bandit! For seven years I have saved that for you!”

And she let loose a kick so terrible, so terrible that at Pampérigouste itself one could see the smoke: a cloud of blond smoke in which fluttered an ibis plume—all that was left of the ill-fated Tistet Védène.

Mules’ kicks are not ordinarily so appalling; but then this was a papal mule; and besides, think of it! she had saved it up for seven years. There is no finer example of an ecclesiastical grudge.

Among French masters of the short-story, Prosper Mérimée easily holds rank in the first group. Both personality and genius are his, and both well repay scrutiny.

Stendhal has given us a picture of Mérimée as a “young man in a gray frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man had something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes, small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look was ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my present friends.”

An examination of at least eight several portraits of Mérimée indicates that Stendhal’s picture is far from flattering, yet no one ever charged Mérimée with being pretty.

Our author was born in Paris, September 28, 1803. His father, Jean François, was a cultivated artist and a writer of some ability. While professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, the elder Mérimée married Anne Moreau, a pupil. She was a successful painter of children, and often kept them in quiet pose by telling them stories. Her grandmother, Madame de Beaumont, had[Pg 102] long before endeared herself to children of all time by writing “Beauty and the Beast.” The Mérimée home naturally attracted the artists and celebrities of many lands, so that Prosper was reared in an air of refinement and inspiration.

Versatile from childhood, Mérimée took to drawing like a fine-arts pupil, passed through college, was successful in his law examinations, and at an early age took up literature as a vocation.

His career was seconded by many journeys abroad, where he served his country particularly as man of letters, art critic, and archæologist. At home he received important public recognition, notably membership in the French Academy and appointment as a Senator of France. This latter honor evidenced the warm personal esteem of the Empress Eugénie, whom he had known as a girl in Spain, and at whose court—in the reign of Napoleon III—he was received as an intimate rather than as a courtier. Notwithstanding his reticence, everywhere his friends were many and distinguished, for scarcely any other Frenchman ever labored so brilliantly in capacities collateral with literature and yet attained to such a pinnacle of many-sided authorship. He died at Cannes, September 23, 1870, lacking five days of rounding out his sixty-seventh year.

Those who would know somewhat of Mérimée’s spirit must read his Letters to an Unknown Woman—letters covering thirty-nine years of his life. For the first nine years the correspondents never met, but when at length they did, it was to love; and though during the succeeding thirty years the affection cooled, there never failed a solid attachment, and the last letter to his Inconnue was penned but two hours before his death. True, in these epistles the author is always the literary artist expressing the moods of a man and a lover, and so is never to be taken quite unawares, yet all his traits are disclosed with sufficient openness to show the real man.

And this real man, who was he? An alert student of history, who yet was so fascinated by its anecdotal phases that he cared not at all for the large philosophy of events in sequence; a linguist who early delved into Greek and Latin, knew English well enough to memorize long passages from the poets, spoke Castilian Spanish as well as several dialects, and translated Russian—Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenieff—with rare ability; an epicure in travel, keen for the curious and the novel; a connoisseur in art and archæology of sufficient distinction to warrant his appointment as the national “Inspector of Monuments;” a prejudiced scorner of priests and[Pg 104] religion, yet bitterly distrustful of his own inner light; an orderly man, systematic even in his indulgences; a pagan in refined sensualism, which he always checked before its claims impinged too largely upon other domains; an aloof spirit, ironical and cold, yet capable of the warm friendship that made Stendhal happy for two days by receiving one of Mérimée’s letters, constant enough to pour out his best at the feet of his Unknown for more than half a lifetime, and so gentle as to crave with the tender heart of a father the love of little children.

The sum of all this is Enigma. We are not sure which is the real man; but this we know: his was a tender, susceptible heart beating under an outer garment of ironical coldness. To love deeply was to endure pain, to follow impulse was to court trouble, to cherish enthusiasms was to delude the mind—so he schooled himself to appear impassive and blasé. How much of this frosty withdrawal was genuine and how much a protective mask, no man can say.

Mérimée’s literary methods reflected his singularly composite personality, yet the author is not apparent in his work. He delighted to tell his tales in the impersonal, matter-of-fact manner of the casual traveller who had picked up a good story and passed it on just as it was told to him.

“They contain,” writes Professor Van Steenderen, “no lengthy descriptions. There are no reflections, dissertations, or explanations in them. They bring out in relief only the permanent features of a given situation, features interesting and intelligible to men of other ages and climes. They are lucid and well constructed. Their plots turn about a simple action with unique effect. Their style is alert, urbane, discreet, and rich, seeking its effect only through concrete and simple means. They deal but very slightly with lyrical emotion, they deal with passions and the will.”

Mérimée’s literary career began at the age of twenty-two, when he published a collection of eight of his short plays purporting to be translated from the Spanish. His portrait, disguised as a Spanish actress, serves as a frontispiece. He perpetuated a similar hoax two years later when he issued a volume of pseudo-Illyrian poems, “translated into French.” These brilliant jokes gulled the literary world as completely as did Chatterton.

His historical fiction, pure history, dramas, criticisms, essays, and works on art and archæology, we must pass. His shorter fiction claims attention now.

“Colomba”—a novelette in length, but a long short-story in structure—is the story of a[Pg 106] Corsican vendetta, followed to the end by the heroine (from whom the story takes its title) with a wild ferocity tempered with a queer sort of piety. Mérimée’s fatalism underlies the whole—circumstances control the will, chance decides the brigand or the benefactor, virtue and crime are mere accidents.

When Mérimée published “Colomba,” in 1840, he was at the height of his genius, and notwithstanding the enervating philosophy in which the romance is steeped, it remains one of the most powerfully dramatic stories ever written—both terrible and sweet.

Of his twenty-some briefer fictions—mostly tales in form—eight at least are brilliant examples of the story-teller’s art, and all show marks of distinction. Six were published in one fruitful year—1829: “Mateo Falcone,” “The Vision of Charles XI,” “The Taking of the Redoubt,” “Tamango,” “Federigo,” and “The Pearl of Toledo.”

“Tamango” is a fine specimen of Mérimée’s artistic irony, yet underneath are compassion, and hatred of injustice. As does most of the author’s work, this tale reveals his tendency to tragedy, even his love for picturing the gruesome. There is in all literature no more terrible picture of the slave-trade and its revolting consequent evils.

“Mateo Falcone” is a technically perfect short-story. Mateo is a well-to-do sheep-raiser living in the plateau country of Corsica, whose thickets were often the resort of fugitives from justice. One day Mateo and his wife set out early to visit one of their flocks, leaving the little son, Fortunato, at home. Several hours later a bandit, limping painfully from a wound received from the pursuing soldiery, claims sanctuary as a Corsican and protection because of his friendship for Mateo. Fortunato hesitates, but at sight of a five-franc piece hides the man under a haystack. Soon the soldiers come, but threats cannot make the boy betray the bandit. A silver watch, however, proves an effective bribe. Just as the wounded bandit is dragged from the haystack, Mateo returns and learns the truth. When the soldiers have gone, bearing their contemptuous prisoner on a litter, the father takes out little Fortunato and, after giving him time to say a final prayer, shoots him as the first traitor in the family.

This, says Walter Pater, is “perhaps the cruellest story in the world.” But it is not all cruelty. So skilfully, so sincerely, does the narrator make us feel the whole spirit of the scene, the people, the crisis, that we are prepared to witness the awful penalty for violating the Corsican[Pg 108] code of sanctuary. But oh, the hopelessness of that mother, as she stoically, yet with breaking heart, sees the inevitable tragedy closing in upon those whom she loves!

“The Venus of Ille” the author thought to be his best story. It is notable—as all of Mérimeé’s stories are—for its perfect local color, as well as for its subtle air of the weird. It is one of the classic “ghost” stories of the world—a tale of supreme distinction. It is also, structurally, the author’s most perfect short-story.

M. de Peyrehorade unearths a bronze statue of a woman, which is thereafter known as The Venus of Ille. From the beginning this statue is feared by the peasantry, for when it was dug up it fell upon and broke the leg of a workman. Peyrehorade’s son Alphonse is betrothed to a wealthy girl. On their wedding day, while playing tennis, he removes from his hand the bride’s diamond ring and places it on the finger of the statue. On arriving at the home of the bride-to-be, he discovers the absence of the ring, but replaces it with another, without mentioning the incident. After the wedding he returns with his bride to his father’s home and tries to remove the ring from the hand of the Venus; but her fingers are now bent and he cannot. That night the terrified bride hears the Venus enter their bed-chamber[Pg 109] and lie down beside her. Thinking it to be her husband, she makes no comment. But presently the husband does come in and lies down upon the bed. Whereupon the bronze Venus crushes him to death in her embrace and then moves away as she came.

In “Arsene Guillot” (1844), Mérimée’s masterpiece of pathos, he has given freer rein to his sympathies, and the result is a tenderly moving tale illustrating the virtue of tolerance.

In early manhood Mérimée spent long stretches in Spain, there absorbing rich material for his stories. “Carmen”—the story on which Bizet founded his opera—is the greatest of these. It was published in 1845, and in length is almost a novelette.

Don José Lizzarrabengoa, Navarrese, and corporal in a cavalry regiment, meets at Seville the gypsy, Carmen. While taking her to prison for a murderous assault on another woman, he is induced to connive at her escape, and is punished by being reduced to the ranks. Through jealous infatuation for her, he kills his lieutenant, and joins a band of smugglers of which Carmen is the leading spirit. In a duel with Garcia, her rom, or husband, Don José kills Garcia, and becomes in his turn the rom of the fascinating gypsy. Jealous of every man who sees her, Don José[Pg 110] offers to forget everything if she will go with him to America. She refuses—for the sake of another lover, as he believes—and he threatens to kill her if she persists. She answers that it is so written, and that she has long known it, but that “free Carmen has been, and free she will always be.” Don José does kill her, buries her in the woods, and rides to Cordova, where he delivers himself to the authorities.

But it is now time to look particularly at one of Mérimée’s earlier tales—written when he was but twenty-six—“The Taking of the Redoubt.”

Technically it is a tale, with the picture-phrases of the sketch. It is a marvellous brief story rather than a marvellous short-story, which, as I have before remarked, must exhibit more plot, more complication, with its consequent dénouement, than is found in either the tale or the sketch. As a work of art, it ranks with the author’s most vivid stories. In the memorable phrase of Walter Pater, “Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon’s mouth.”

Before reading the story itself in translation, some explanatory words may be helpful. It is interesting to note the device which Mérimée uses to add reality to his narrative—he tells us that the story, the characters, the place, the fight, are real. Even those who stand in the wings, flitting[Pg 111] across the stage but once as if to say, “I am flesh and blood, and not a mere stuffed figure like the doll whose only pains were in her sawdust”—even they have names and personalities dimly veiled under the initial and the dash.

Mérimée’s friend, the “military man” from whom he got the story, is Henri Marie Beyle—who called himself de Stendhal. Stendhal was a somewhat prolific author, but it was La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) that brought him fame. As a romantic tragi-comedy, dealing with Italy in the Napoleonic era, it is worth a reading, but particularly because the so-called Épisode de Waterloo (in chapters 3 and 4) reveals the measurable debt which Mérimée owed to his friend.

Stendhal was indeed “a military man.” He first smelled powder in the Marengo campaign (1800), and served long in Napoleon’s armies. But he was actually present in 1812 at the assault upon Cheverino, in the Moscow campaign, and doubtless he afterward poured its dramatic story red-hot into the soul of Mérimée.

In another detail also Mérimée departs from fact—Stendhal died in Paris in 1842 of apoplexy, and not of “a fever in Greece;” but surely that is a mild variation for a fictionist. “The 4th September” is also true to the actual, since the[Pg 112] battle of Borodino took place on the 7th, and the arrival at Moscow on the 14th, 1812. “General B——” is General Berthier, chief-of-staff for Napoleon in the Moscow campaign. “Madame de B——” has been identified as Madame de Boigne, the intimate of Madame Récamier, and a resident of the rue de Provence. In her salon Mérimée read aloud many of his stories before publication. Other critics suggest that “Madame B——” is Madame (la comtesse) de Beaulaincourt, and support this contention by referring to a collection of eleven letters addressed to this noble dame by Mérimée, and later published. Finally, “General C——” is that famous Napoleonic soldier, Jean Dominique Compans, who actually commanded the 57th and the 61st regiments at Cheverino.

But a volume might be written on the art of this master story-teller, on the life-experiences from which he drew his plots, and on the glowing praises which his work has called forth for three-quarters of a century. Doubtless, however, his own work will now serve better than further pages of introduction.

A friend of mine, a military man, who died of a fever some years ago in Greece, described for me one day the first engagement in which he had taken part. His recital so struck me that I wrote it from memory as soon as I had the leisure. Here it is:

I joined the regiment the 4th September at evening. I found the colonel in the camp. He received me rather bruskly; but after having read the letter of recommendation from General B—— he changed his manner and spoke to me a few courteous words.

I was presented by him to my captain, who had returned at that instant from a reconnoissance. This captain, with whom I had had scarcely time to become acquainted, was a tall, dark man, of hard, repellent visage. He had been a private, and had won his epaulets and his cross upon the field of battle. His voice, which was hoarse and feeble, contrasted singularly with his almost gigantic stature. They told me he owed that[Pg 114] strange voice to a ball which had pierced him through and through at the battle of Jena.

On learning that I had just left the school at Fontainebleau, he made a grimace and said:

I understood that he meant to say, “It is you who must take his place, and you are not capable of it.” A sharp retort leaped to my lips, but I contained myself.

The moon was rising behind the redoubt of Cheverino, which was situated two cannon-shots from our bivouac. She was large and red, as usual at her rising. But, on this evening, she seemed to be of extraordinary grandeur. For one instant the redoubt stood out sharply in black against the glittering disk of the moon. It resembled the cone of a volcano at the moment of eruption.

An old soldier, beside whom I found myself, remarked upon the color of the moon.

“She is very red,” said he; “it’s a sign that it will cost us dear to take that famous redoubt!”

I have always been superstitious, and that augury, above all at that moment, affected me. I sought my couch, but I was not able to sleep. I arose, and for some time I walked, watching the immense line of fires which covered the heights above the village of Cheverino.

When I believed that the fresh and sharp air of the night had sufficiently cooled my blood, I returned to the fire; I enveloped myself carefully in my mantle, and I closed my eyes, hoping not to open them before day. But slumber refused to come. Insensibly my thoughts took on a doleful hue. I told myself that I had not one friend among the hundred thousand men who covered that plain. If I were wounded, I should be in a hospital, treated without regard by ignorant surgeons. All that I had heard said of surgical operations recurred to my memory. My heart thumped with violence, and mechanically I arranged like a kind of cuirass the handkerchief and the portfolio I had in my bosom. Weariness overwhelmed me, I nodded every instant, and every instant some sinister idea reproduced itself with renewed force and startled me out of my sleep.

However, fatigue carried the day, and when they beat the reveille, I was sound asleep. We were drawn up in battle array, the roll was called, then we stacked arms, and everything indicated that we should pass a tranquil day.

About three o’clock, an aide-de-camp arrived, bringing an order. We were ordered to take up arms again; our skirmishers spread themselves over the plain; we followed slowly, and in about[Pg 116] twenty minutes we saw all the Russian advance-posts fall back and reënter the redoubt.

One battery of artillery was established on our right, another at our left, but both well in advance of us. They opened a very lively fire upon the enemy, who replied vigorously, and soon the redoubt of Cheverino disappeared under the dense clouds of smoke.

Our regiment was almost covered from the Russian fire by a rise of ground. Their bullets, rarely aimed at us (for they preferred to fire at our gunners), passed over our heads, or at worst showered us with earth and little stones.

As soon as we had received the order to march forward, my captain looked at me with an attention which obliged me to pass my hand two or three times over my youthful mustache with an air as unconcerned as was possible to me. In truth, I was not frightened, and the sole fear that I experienced was lest he should imagine that I was afraid. The harmless bullets contributed still more to maintain me in my heroic calm. My self-esteem told me that I was going into real danger, since at last I was under battery fire. I was enchanted to be so at my ease, and I dreamed with pleasure of telling in the salon of Madame B——, rue de Provence, how the redoubt of Cheverino was taken.

The colonel passed before our company; he said to me: “Well, you are going to have hot work for your début.”

I smiled with a perfectly martial air as I brushed the sleeve of my coat, on which a bullet that had struck the earth thirty yards away had cast a little dust.

It appeared that the Russians had observed the ill success of their cannon-balls; for they replaced them with shells, which could more easily reach us in the hollow where we were posted. One rather big explosion knocked off my shako, and killed a man near me.

“My compliments,” said the captain, as I picked up my shako. “You are safe now for the day.” I knew that military superstition which believes that the axiom, non his in idem[12], finds its application on a field of battle as in a court of justice. I jauntily replaced my shako.

“That is making a man salute, without ceremony,” I said, as gaily as I could. That bad joke, in the circumstances, seemed excellent.

“I felicitate you,” responded the captain. “You will get nothing worse, and to-night you will command a company; for well I know that the oven is being heated for me. Every time that [Pg 118]I have been wounded the officer nearest me[13] has been touched by a spent ball, and,” he added, in a lower tone, and almost as though ashamed, “their names always commenced with a P.”

I pretended to feel brave; many persons would have done as I did; many persons too would have been as deeply impressed by those prophetic words. Conscript as I was, I realized that I could not confide my sentiments to any one, and that I must always appear coolly intrepid.

After about a half-hour, the Russian fire diminished perceptibly; whereupon we sallied from our cover to march upon the redoubt.

Our regiment was composed of three battalions. The second was ordered to turn the redoubt on the side of the entrance; the two others were to make the assault. I was in the third battalion.

In coming out from behind the species of ridge which had protected us, we were received by several discharges of musketry which did but little damage in our ranks. The whistling of the balls surprised me: often I turned my head, and so drew upon myself divers pleasantries on the part of my comrades who were more familiar with that sound.

“Take it all in all,” I said to myself, “a battle is not such a terrible matter.”

We advanced in double-time, preceded by skirmishers: all at once the Russians gave three hurrahs—three distinct hurrahs—then remained silent, and without firing.

“I don’t like this silence,” said my captain. “It bodes no good for us.”

I thought that our men were a trifle too noisy, and I could not help mentally comparing their tumultuous clamor with the imposing silence of the enemy.

We quickly attained the foot of the redoubt; the palisades had been shattered, and the earth ploughed up by our balls. The soldiers rushed upon these new ruins with cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” with more vigor than one would have expected to hear from men who had already cheered so much.

I raised my eyes, and never shall I forget the spectacle that I saw. Most of the smoke had lifted and remained suspended like a canopy about twenty feet above the redoubt. Through a bluish vapor, behind their half-ruined parapet, one could descry the Russian grenadiers, firearms raised, immobile as statues. I think I can see each soldier yet, the left eye fastened upon us, the right hidden behind his levelled musket. In an embrasure, a few feet from us, a man holding a lighted fuse stood beside a cannon.

A roll of drums resounded within the redoubt. I saw every musket lowered. I closed my eyes, and I heard an appalling crash, followed by cries and groans. I opened my eyes, surprised to find myself still living. The redoubt was anew enveloped in smoke. I was surrounded with the bleeding and the dead. My captain was stretched out at my feet: his head had been crushed by a bullet, and I was covered with his brains and his blood. Of all my company none remained but six men and me.

To this carnage succeeded a moment of stupor. The colonel, putting his hat on the point of his sword, was the first to scale the parapet, crying: “Vive l’Empereur!” He was followed instantly by all the survivors. I do not remember clearly just what followed. We entered within the redoubt, how I do not know. We fought body to body amid a smoke so dense that we could not see one another. I believe that I smote, for I found my sabre was all bloody. At last I heard the cry, “Victory!” and, the smoke diminishing,[Pg 121] I saw blood and dead bodies completely covering the earthworks of the redoubt. The cannons especially were buried beneath piles of corpses. About two hundred men, in the French uniform, were grouped without order, some loading their muskets, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven hundred Russian prisoners were with them.

The colonel was lying all covered with blood upon a broken caisson near the entrance. Several soldiers bestirred themselves around him: I approached.

“This gentleman here, who arrived yesterday,” said the sergeant, in a perfectly calm tone.

“Come, sir,” he said to me, “you are now in chief command; promptly fortify the entrance of the redoubt with these wagons, for the enemy is in force; but General C—— will see that you are sustained.”

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Latin: not twice in the same (place).

[13] In rank.

Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world, not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist, writing at a time when realism was most potent in France.

The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer visited the island in 1872.

The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight in his autobiographic Le[Pg 124] Roman d’un enfant not only inbreathed his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery—as his Cross of the Legion of Honor testifies—in the Tonquin campaign, when France must needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia.

M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by year.

In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and Scribe.

Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard, tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our[Pg 125] author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like muscles to spectacular account!

So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the task gave pause even to Loti himself.

He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering variety. A composite is Loti—almost a chameleon, not only entering into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn, but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of this somewhat more in due order.

Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or frankly named in propria persona. So while we are at no time at a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is both embarrassingly rich and—contradictory. Still, no one can mistake the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct.

Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He[Pg 126] moved in the upper layers of feeling—feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for woman—and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover. His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found him fresh, tender, elemental—and as sincere as the temporary lover can be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed sea he felt a vast concern.

Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little; at last his faith was doubt.

Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms. Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit—these excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he painted with supernal beauty.

In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us[Pg 127] unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into accepting his pictures as ever new.

In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will you find aught to excel this passage from Mon frère Yves?

“Even the nights were luminous. When all was slumbering in heavy immobility, in dead silence, the stars shone out above, more dazzling than in any other region of earth, and the sea also was illumined from beneath. There was a sort of immense gleam diffused over the waters; the lightest motion, such as the slow gliding of the boat, or a shark darting after it, brought out upon the warm eddies flashes like the color of a fire-fly. Then, over the great phosphorescent mirror of the deep, there were millions of wild flames—they were like little lamps lighting themselves everywhere, burning mysteriously for a second or two, then dying out. These nights were swooning with heat, full of phosphorescence; and in all this dim immensity light was brooding, and all these seas held latent life, in a rudimentary state, as did formerly the gloomy waters of the primeval world.”

As in the foregoing, so in the following, see how this necromancer of words accomplishes the impossible—“the[Pg 128] planks of the ship” are the only solid, palpable substances in this atmospheric delicacy from Pecheur d’Islande (An Iceland Fisherman):

“Outside it was daylight, perpetual daylight. But it was a pale, pale light, resembling nothing else; it threw dim reflections over everything, as of a dead sun, and beyond these, all was an immense void without color; everything outside the planks of the ship seeming diaphanous, impalpable, unreal.

“The eye could scarcely distinguish the sea. First it took on the aspect of a sort of trembling mirror, with no image reflected in it; as it spread further it seemed to become a vaporous plain, and beyond this there was nothing—no outline nor horizon.

“The damp freshness of the air was more intense, more penetrating, than actual cold; and in breathing it one was conscious of a taste of brine. All was calm, and it was no longer raining; above, formless, colorless clouds seemed to hold that latent, unexplained light; one could see plainly, while conscious all the time that it was night, and all these pallors were of no shade that can be named.”

This is not description—it is miracle; it is, in the fine phrase of M. Doumic, “evocation;” it is music, color, subtlety, spirit, all thrown upon the soul’s retina and sensed in some magic manner that refuses to be classified. No one but a pantheist, sensitive to all the moods of nature—and especially those of that abysmal enigma, the sea—could have evoked such visions, such realities, where other eyes see—water.

In form our author’s books are varied, following rarely any preconceived plan, we may well suppose—only this, that the literary wanderer with his new book every year takes us by the hand and shows us the intimacies of his own life-experiences, discloses the little-known beauties and sadnesses he has uncovered everywhere, and turns into simple yet exquisitely wrought fictions the poignant truths that have entered his own heart. Not one novel, technically considered, did he write, but sketches strung like pearls upon a thread: vivid impressions of home and foreign life, longer or shorter stories of simple folk whose days dawned to labor and were twilit with weariness, colorful pictures of men and women living under eastern skies—and beneath and about all, the many-spirited sea.

It would require a volume to deal adequately with Loti’s many books; but one point invites[Pg 130] mention: each new annual volume for a score of years discloses his life in some new land, or in the Brittany of his affection.

His first volume, Aziyadé (1879), is the record of his love for a beautiful Circassian slave while he sojourned in Turkey—the record, too, of how she died of grief after his departure. Rarahu—later issued as Le Mariage de Loti—recounts his loves in Tahiti, and much of charm and beauty besides. Le Roman d’un Spahi transports us to the Sahara and Senegal, Fleurs d’ennui to Montenegro, Madame Chrysanthème to Japan, Au Maroc to Fez and Tangier, and Le désert, and Jérusalem, and La Galilée, to Palestine.

I name these volumes not to attempt a catalogue of Loti’s works, but to show how world-broad were the scenes he chose for his impressionistic brush. Naturally, all of the foregoing works are more or less oriental in tone, and the moral code revealed is not that of “the most approved families.” But three masterpieces there are which breathe a more wholesome air—though heavy, each one, with the tragedy of life.

Mon frère Yves is the plotless account of “a splendid Breton sailor and the author, his officer.” They enjoy “a sort of companionship which finds its analogy—in a way—in the friendly relations formerly [held] between young master and slave[Pg 131] in our Southern States.” No picture of the robust rollicking sailor—superstitious, drink-loving, adventurous, warm-hearted—could be more real, none more pathetic, and none more rich in fragments of narrative.

In Le livre de la pitié et de la mort eleven stories are brought together to harmonize with the saddening title—“The Book of Pity and of Death!” One of these, “The Sorrow of an Old Convict” is an impressionistic tale of an old highwayman who is being shipped away to exile. His only solace is a caged bird with a broken wing, and when one day the door is opened the little bird falls into the sea. That is all—but to read it is to feel with Yves the heart-break of that bereft old man.

“The Wall Opposite” is a study of human tendencies. A mother, a daughter, and an aged aunt are compelled by reverses to let out those rooms of their apartments that faced out upon the street, but their own little back suite had a cozy and intimate air. Its windows overlooked a court whose walls were covered with honeysuckle and roses. One day they were told that in the court a high wall was to be built which would steal away the air and hide the sun. They had no money wherewith to buy off the project, so in one short month a grayish-white wall—almost like a twilight sky of November—shut them in.

Long they had looked for an inheritance which would some day come to them. Then they would buy the house and tear down that wall—and always the old aunt used to pray that she might live to see that day. But the bequest was long in coming.

One day a young man came, introduced by friends, and for a while he sat at the table of these “three ladies without fortune.” He was handsome and high-spirited, and the young girl loved him, but she was poor, and for lack of sunlight the color had begun to fade from her cheeks. So he went away and never returned.

Twenty years passed—the aunt had died, the mother had grown gray, and the daughter was now past forty. Then at last the inheritance came. They sent away their lodgers, but somehow the two women remained in the little back salon. They had come to love it. At last the wall which for twenty years they had endured would be torn down. At twilight of the second day the wall was razed, but the mother and daughter sitting at their table were bewildered at seeing so clearly. The wall was gone—they had the light, the roses and vines! For twenty years they had hoped for this happiness, yet now—they were uneasy, something seemed to have gone wrong. A sort of melancholy had come over them.

The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes,[Pg 133] saw tears. “It can be built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the same again?”

“I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you see? It would never be the same!”

And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture—the face of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time.

This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes—as to which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, Pecheur d’Islande.

Fortunately for the spontaneity of the novel, many authors are more concerned for the vividness of their narration than for mere technical form. Hence they feel free to introduce incidents which are related more or less loosely to the plot, and serve rather as auxiliaries than as vital parts of the action. The purpose may be to develop a tone, suggest an atmosphere, illustrate certain traits of character, or, it may be, to amplify an organic part of the plot. This narrative by-path,[Pg 134] this illuminating side-light, we technically call an episode. It was most in vogue among the early English novelists; Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith followed it so habitually that all of their novels are episodic in form. But even in the more highly organized French romances of plot—Les Miserables and Les Mystères de Paris, for example—we find frequent episodes. This tendency is naturally more marked in the tale and in the prolonged sketch than in the closely plotted novel. Indeed, it is only in the very long plot-novel that the episode can find room, since the prosperity of the short plot-novel lies largely in the close and rapid sequence of its incidents.

Even though “The Marriage to the Sea”—as I have ventured to entitle this climacteric close of An Iceland Fisherman—is an essential plot incident, and therefore an organic part of the whole, still, considered solely for its own sake, it is easily detachable. So we may regard it as almost a typical specimen of the episode; that is to say, we need only have some slight prior knowledge of the setting and the relation of the characters to invest it with the completeness and unity of a perfect short-story. True, the crisis has occurred—unknown to the fisherman’s wife—before this episode begins, but that could scarcely[Pg 135] have been arranged more artistically, with regard to suspense, had Loti purposed to use the episode as a separate story. Here we have the carefully laid groundwork of tone, environment, and characters. Here, too, are the breathless expectancy, the increasing suspense (which constitutes the complication), two false anticipations of a happy dénouement, and then the actual dénouement, with the artistic close.

An Iceland Fisherman is Pierre Loti’s most perfect work, and it is gratifying to note that it is also his most popular, as witness some three hundred and fifty French editions, and an unknown number of translations. In form, it is less a typical novel than a brilliant impressionistic tale. A major episode is the story of Sylvestre, which, woven closely in its earlier part with the life of Yann and his sweetheart Gaud, at length diverges, when the fisherboy passes into the navy, fights a good fight in Cochin-China, and dies amid pathetic circumstances in far-off Singapore.

The plot is very simple. It is laid in Paimpol, in Brittany, whose dwellers rely solely upon the Iceland fisheries. Every year these hardy Vikings of Northern France fare away to the Iceland waters and return only after a long season there. The chief characters are Yann Gaos, a great[Pg 136] splendid young fisherman with handsome brown curls, and Gaud, the daughter of “the great man” of the town. The two are in love, and Yann ventures some hesitating advances; but her father’s wealth deters the fisherman from making a full avowal. However, when Gaud’s father dies she is found to be penniless; still Yann unaccountably holds back, much to Gaud’s secret sorrow. Homeless, she goes to live with Granny Moan, the grandmother of the ill-fated young Sylvestre, who had been betrothed to Yann’s sister. At length, in the little hut where Gaud lives as the bereft old woman’s foster-grandchild, she and Yann are married.

Only a few days after their wedding, the bridegroom sails away on the fine new Léopoldine for the Iceland fisheries. When autumn comes the boat does not return with the others. All that is heard of her is from the crew of the Marie-Jeanne, who report a mystic meeting with the Léopoldine in a dense fog, when each vessel loomed up to the other out of the mist and then passed spectre-like away, with time for only a few quick cries of recognition from fellow-townsmen. The final scene opens with all the town awaiting the return of the fishers. One vessel has already come in, and then opens this closing episode.

The Iceland ships were returning—two the second day, four the next, and twelve during the week following. And throughout the country joy returned with them—there was happiness for the wives and mothers; happiness too in the taverns where the pretty Paimpol girls served drink to the fishermen.

The Léopoldine was in the group of belated ones; there were still ten missing. They could not be long now, and Gaud, in the thought that Yann would be there within a week—an extreme of delay which she allowed for so as not to be disappointed—was in a delicious intoxication of expectancy, keeping the home well in order—very clean and very neat—to receive him.

Everything being in readiness, there was nothing more for her to do; besides, in her impatience her head could hold only the one thought.

Three more of the tardy ships now arrived, and[Pg 138] then five. Only two were wanting from the muster.

“Come!” they said to her laughingly, “this year it is either the Léopoldine or the Marie-Jeanne that will have to stay behind 'to sweep up.’”

And Gaud laughed—even she—more animated and more beautiful in her joy of anticipation.

She continued to dress every day, to put on a gay air, to go to the harbor a-gossiping with the others. She said that it was all quite natural, this delay. Didn’t they see the same thing every year? Oh, as to their coming back at all—with such good sailors, and two such good boats!

Afterwards, when she was back home at night, the old shiver of anxiety, of anguish, would come over her.

Could it be really possible that she began to fear—already? Was there any cause for fear? And she trembled, for having so soon been afraid.

One morning when there was a cold mist over the earth, a true autumn morning, the rising sun found her early seated under the porch of the chapel of the shipwrecked mariners, at the place where the widows go to pray—seated, she was,[Pg 139] with eyes fixed and temples tense as though held in a band of iron.

Two days ago these melancholy mists of dawn had begun, and on this particular morning Gaud had awakened with a more poignant inquietude, caused by this impression of winter. Why was it so this day, this hour, this moment, more than the preceding? She knew well enough that boats were often two weeks late—even a month.

But there was something different about this particular morning, without doubt, for she had come to-day for the first time to sit under the chapel porch and reread the names of the young men who had died.

Like a great shudder, a gust of wind was heard rising from the sea, and at the same time something fell like rain upon the roof: it was the dead leaves. A whole host of them were blown in at the porch; the old wind-tossed trees of the graveyard were losing their foliage, stripped by this gale from the sea. Winter was coming.

Lost at Sea,
Near the Norden-Fjord,
In the Storm of the 4th and 5th of August, 1880.

She read mechanically, and through the arch of the doorway her eyes sought to pierce the distance over the sea: that morning it was very vague, under the gray mist, and a suspended cloud-drapery trailed over the horizon like a great mourning-veil.

Another gust of wind, and other dead leaves came dancing in. A stronger squall, as if the west wind that had strewn these dead over the sea wished to torment even the inscriptions which recalled their names to the living.

Gaud looked with involuntary persistence at an empty space upon the wall which seemed to wait with terrible expectancy; she was pursued by the thought of a fresh slab that might perhaps soon be placed there, with another name which even in spirit she did not dare repeat in such a place.

She felt cold, but remained seated on the granite bench, her head thrown back against the stone wall.

... Lost Near the Norden-Fjord,
In the Storm of the 4th and 5th of August,
At the Age of 23 Years,
May He Rest in Peace!

Iceland appeared to her, with its little cemetery—Iceland far, far away, lighted from below the sea-line by the midnight sun ... and suddenly—still[Pg 141] in the same empty space on the wall which seemed to be waiting—she saw with horrifying clearness the vision of that new slab she had imagined: a fresh tablet, a death’s-head and cross-bones, and in the centre, within a flame, a name—the adored name of Yann Gaos! Then she drew herself up straight and stiff, with a hoarse, wild cry in her throat like a mad creature.

Without, the gray dawn-mist still hung over the earth, and the dead leaves continued to come dancing into the porch.

Steps on the foot-path!—Was somebody coming?—Then she arose quickly, with a swift movement readjusting her coif, and composed her countenance. The footsteps came nearer, as though they would enter. At once she assumed the air of being there by chance. Not for anything in the world would she as yet seem like the widow of a shipwrecked mariner.

It was only Fante Floury, the wife of the mate on the Léopoldine. She understood at once what Gaud was doing there; it was useless to dissemble with her. And at first they stood mute, the one before the other, these two women; all the more alarmed and angry at being entrapped while in the same mood of fear, they almost hated each other.

“All those from Tréguier and from Saint-Brieuc[Pg 142] have been back for a week,” said Fante at last, pitilessly, in a voice low and almost irritated. She carried a taper, meaning to make a votive offering.

Ah! Yes! a votive offering—Gaud had not wished to think as yet of that last resort of the desolate. But she entered the chapel behind Fante, without saying anything more, and they knelt side by side, like two sisters.

To the Virgin, Star of the Sea, they said their passionate prayers with all their hearts. But only the sound of sobs was heard, and their rapid tears began to fall upon the floor.

They arose together, more tender, more confident. Fante aided the tottering Gaud, and, taking her in her arms, she kissed her.

After wiping away their tears, arranging their hair, and brushing the saltpetre and dust of the flagstones from their skirts at the knees, they went away without saying anything more, by different paths.

This September’s close was like another summer, only it was somewhat melancholy. The weather was really so beautiful this year that had it not been for the dead leaves that fell in a mournful shower along the roadways one might have said that it was the gay month of June.[Pg 143] Husbands, fiancés, sweethearts, had all returned, and everywhere was the joy of a second spring-time of love.

At last one day one of the delayed ships from Iceland was signalled in the offing. Which one?

On the cliff, groups of mute and anxious women quickly formed. Gaud was there, trembling and pale, by the side of the father of her Yann.

“I firmly believe,” said the old fisher—“I firmly believe it’s them! A red sail, a topsail that clews up—that’s jolly well like them anyhow. What do you say, Gaud, my girl?

“And yet—it isn’t,” he went on, with sudden discouragement; “no, we’ve made a mistake again, the boom isn’t the same, and they have a flying jib. Well, well, it isn’t them this time, it’s the Marie-Jeanne. Oh! but very surely, my girl, they’ll not be long now.”

And day followed day, and each night came at its appointed hour, with inexorable tranquillity.

Gaud continued to dress every day, somewhat like a mad woman, always in fear of seeming to be the widow of a shipwrecked sailor, exasperated when others glanced at her compassionately and furtively, and looking aside so that she might not meet those glances that froze her very blood.

Now she had fallen into the habit of going of[Pg 144] mornings right to the end of the headland on the high cliffs of Pors-Even, passing behind Yann’s paternal home so as not to be seen by his mother or his little sisters. She went all alone to the extreme point of the Ploubazlanec land, which is outlined in the shape of a reindeer’s horn against the gray Channel, and sat there all day long at the foot of a lonely cross, which rises above the immense expanse of waters.

There are many of these granite crosses hereabout, set up on the uttermost cliffs of this land of mariners, as though to implore mercy,—as though to appease that restless, mysterious thing that lures men away and never gives them back, and by preference keeps the bravest, the noblest.

Around this cross of Pors-Even stretched evergreen moors, carpeted with short rushes; and at this great height the sea air was very pure, having scarcely any of the briny smell of the seaweed, but perfumed with the delicious ripeness of September.

Outlined in the far distance could be seen, one after another, all the indentations of the coast, the land of Brittany terminating in ragged edges which stretched far out into the tranquil void of the waters. Near at hand the reefs riddled the sea, but out beyond nothing troubled its polished mirror. There sounded over all a soft, caressing[Pg 145] murmur, light and infinite, arising from the deeps of its every bay. And the distance seemed so calm, and the depths so soft! The great blue void, the tomb of the Gaos family, guarded its inscrutable mystery while the breezes, faint as human sighs, wafted here and there the perfume of the gorse, which had bloomed again in the latest autumn sun.

At certain hours regularly the sea retreated, and shallow places grew larger everywhere, as if the Channel were slowly emptying itself; then, with the same lazy slowness, the waters rose again, and continued their eternal going and coming without any heed of the dead.

And Gaud, seated at the foot of the cross, remained there, in the midst of these tranquil scenes, gazing ever before her, until the night fell, until she could see no more.

September had passed. Gaud could no longer take any nourishment, she could no longer sleep.

She remained at home now, and sat crouching with her hands between her knees, her head thrown back and leaning against the wall behind. What was the good of getting up, what was the good of going to bed? When she was too much exhausted she threw herself dressed upon her bed. Otherwise she always remained seated, benumbed;[Pg 146] her teeth chattered with cold, in her stony quiet; always she had that sense of a band of iron round her brows; her cheeks felt drawn, her mouth was dry, with a feverish taste, and at times a raucous groan rose from her breast, spasmodically repeated again and again, while she beat her head against the granite wall.

Or else she called Yann by his name, very tenderly, in a low voice, as if he were quite close, and whispered to him words of love.

Sometimes she would think of other things besides him—of many little, insignificant things; she would amuse herself, for example, by watching the shadow of the china Virgin and the holy-water basin lengthen slowly over the high woodwork of her bed as the sun went down. And then the thoughts of anguish returned with more horror, and her cry broke forth again while she beat the wall with her head.

And so all the hours of the day passed, one after the other, and all the hours of the evening, and all those of the night, and all those of the morning. When she had reckoned how long it was since he ought to have been back, a still greater terror laid hold upon her; she wished to forget all about the dates and even the names of the days.

Usually there are some indications concerning[Pg 147] the wrecks off Iceland: those who return have seen the tragedy from afar; or else they have found some wreckage, or a dead body, or have some sign from which to divine the facts. But no, of the Léopoldine nothing had been seen, nothing was known. The men of the Marie-Jeanne, the last to have seen her on the 2d of August, said that she was to have gone on fishing farther towards the north, and beyond that the mystery was unfathomable.

Waiting, always waiting, without knowing anything. When would the moment come when she truly need wait no longer? She did not even know that; and now she almost wished that it might be soon.

Oh! to see him as he was at this very moment—him, or even what remained of him! If only the Virgin, prayed to so often, or some other such power, would grant her the blessing of showing him to her, by some sort of second-sight—her Yann—him—living, struggling to return to her—or else his body surrendered by the sea, so that she might at least be sure, that she might know.

Sometimes she would suddenly have the feeling that a sail was appearing on the rim of the[Pg 148] horizon: the Léopoldine approaching, hastening home! Then she would make the first involuntary movement to rise, and rush to look out at the ocean, to see whether it were true.

She would fall back. Alas! where was the Léopoldine now? Where could it be? Out afar, doubtless, at that awful distance of Iceland, abandoned, crushed, lost!

And this ended in that never-fading vision, always the same: a wreck, gaping and empty, rocked upon the silent sea of gray and rose—rocked slowly, slowly, without sound—with an extreme of gentleness quite ironical—in the midst of the vast calm of the dead waters.

It was at night especially that she held herself attentive to all the steps that approached; at the least stir, at the slightest unaccustomed sound, her temples vibrated; from being overstrained that they might sense things from without, they had become terribly sensitive.

Two o’clock in the morning. This night as on others, hands clasped and eyes open in the dark, she listened to the wind making its well-nigh eternal moan over the earth.

Suddenly the steps of a man—rapid steps on the path! At such an hour, who could be passing?[Pg 149] She drew herself up, stirred to the deeps of her soul, her heart ceasing to beat.

He! Oh! joy of heaven, he! Some one had knocked, could it be any other! She was up, barefooted; she, so feeble for so many days, had sprung up nimbly as a cat, her arms outstretched to wind round her well-beloved. Without doubt the Léopoldine had come in at night, and anchored opposite Pors-Even Bay; and he—he had rushed home; she arranged all this in her mind with the swiftness of lightning. And now she tore her fingers upon the spikes of the door—in her fury to draw the bolt it had stuck.

Ah!... And now she slowly moved back, crushed, her head fallen upon her breast. Her sweet mad dream was over. It was no one but Fantec, their neighbor. She could just comprehend that it was not he, her Yann, that no part of his being had passed through the air; she felt herself plunged again into her old abyss, to the uttermost depths of her same awful despair.

He apologized, poor Fantec: his wife, as Gaud knew, was very ill, and now their baby was suffocating in its cradle, seized with a malignant sore throat; so he had come to beg for help, while he ran to hunt up the doctor at Paimpol.

What did all this matter to her? She had gone mad in her grief, she had nothing left to offer to others in distress. Huddled on a bench, she sat before him with eyes glazed, as one dead, not answering him, not hearing him, not even looking at him. What were these things to her that the man was saying!

He understood it all; he divined why the door had been opened to him so quickly, and he had pity for the pain he had brought about.

He stammered out an apology: Just so; he ought never to have disturbed her—her especially.

Life had returned to her suddenly, for still she did not want to appear despairing before the eyes of others—for that she was quite unwilling. And besides, in her turn she pitied him; she dressed to accompany him and found strength to go see his little child.

When she returned to throw herself upon her bed, at four o’clock, sleep laid hold upon her in a moment, for she was utterly fatigued. But that moment of immense joy had left upon her mind an impression which, in spite of all, was persistent; she awoke soon with a shudder, rising a little, as remembering something.... She had some[Pg 151] news concerning her Yann.... In the midst of this confusion of ideas which came back to her, rapidly she searched and searched her mind for what it could have been.

And a second time she fell back to the depths of the old abyss. No, in reality, nothing was changed in her morbid, hopeless waiting.

Still, to have felt Yann there so close was as if some emanation from him had come floating back to her; it was what they call in Breton land a token; and she listened still more attentively for footsteps outside, divining that some one would perhaps come who would talk to her of him.

And indeed, when the day broke, Yann’s father entered. He took off his cap, pushed back his beautiful white locks, which were in curls like those of his son, and sat down beside Gaud’s bed.

His heart too was in agony, for his Yann, his splendid Yann, was his first-born, his favorite, his glory. But he did not despair, not really, he did not despair yet. He began to reassure Gaud in a very gentle way: to begin with, the latest ones to return from Iceland had all spoken of the extremely dense fogs which might easily have delayed the vessel; and then too an idea had come to him: a stop-over at the Faroes,[Pg 152] which are islands situated on their route, at a great distance; and when they sent letters from there, they took a long time to come; the same thing had happened to himself forty years ago, and his poor dead mother had already had a mass said for his soul.... And such a good boat, was the Léopoldine, and all those aboard were such able mariners.

Old Granny Moan walked around them, shaking her head; the distress of her foster grand-daughter had almost given her back her own strength and reason; she tidied up the place, glancing from time to time at the little faded portrait of her Sylvestre, which hung upon the granite wall with its anchor emblems and mourning-wreath of black beadwork; no, since following the sea had robbed her of her grandson, she believed no longer in the safe return of sailors; she now prayed to the Virgin only from fear, with the outside of her poor old lips, cherishing in the bottom of her heart a grudge against her.

But Gaud listened eagerly to these consoling reasonings, her large sunken eyes looking with deep tenderness upon this old sire who so much resembled her well-beloved; just to have him near her was like a hostage against death, and she felt more reassured, nearer to her Yann. Her tears fell silently and more gently, and she repeated[Pg 153] again her passionate prayers to the Virgin, Star of the Sea.

A stop-over, 'way out at those islands, to repair damages, was a likely event. She rose, brushed her hair, and made some sort of toilet, as if he might possibly return. Doubtless all was not lost if his own father did not yet despair. And for a few days she again took up her waiting.

It was full autumn now, late autumn—with the nightfalls gloomy, and all things growing dark early in the old cottage, and all the Breton land looking sombre, too. The very days seemed but twilight; immeasurable clouds, slowly passing, would suddenly bring darkness at broad noon. The wind moaned constantly—it was like the sound of a great cathedral organ at a distance, but playing profane airs, or despairing dirges; at other times it would come close to the door, and lift up a howl like wild beasts.

She had grown pale, pale, and became ever more dejected, as if old age had already touched her with its featherless wing. Very often she would finger the belongings of her Yann, his fine wedding clothes, folding and unfolding them like some maniac—especially one of his blue woolen jerseys, which still retained the form of his body; when thrown gently on the table, it disclosed from long usage the outlines of his shoulders and[Pg 154] chest; but at last she placed it by itself on a shelf of their wardrobe, never to remove it, so that it might long preserve that impress.

Every evening cold mists rose from the ground; then through her little window she would gaze over the melancholy land, where little patches of white smoke began to rise here and there from other chimneys: the rest of the men had returned, migratory birds driven home by the cold. And before many of these fires the evenings would be sweet; for the spring-time of love had begun with winter, in all this country of “Icelanders”.

Still clinging to the thought of those islands where he might perhaps have put in, buoyed up by a kind of hope, she had again begun to expect him.

One night in August, far away in the waters of gloomy Iceland, amid a great fury of storm, he had consummated his Marriage to the Sea—to the Sea which had been his nurse: it was she who had cradled him, who had made him a big and strong youth, and afterward, in his superb manhood, had taken him back again for herself alone.

A profound mystery had surrounded the unhallowed nuptials. All the while, dark veils trembled overhead, moving and twisting curtains[Pg 155] were spread so as to conceal the ceremony; and the bride gave voice, ever seeking with louder and more awful roars to stifle his cries.... He, thinking of Gaud, his mortal wife, had battled with giant strength against this spouse of the tomb—until the moment when he at last surrendered, with a great cry, deep as the roar of a dying bull, his mouth already filled with water, his arms open, extended, and stiffened forever.

And at his wedding were all those whom he had at one time invited. All except Sylvestre, who himself had gone to sleep in the enchanted gardens, far, far at the other side of the earth.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES, VOL. 1 ***

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	Page
General Introduction: The French Short-Story	3

François Coppée and His Work	21
Story: The Substitute	33

Guy de Maupassant, Realist	53
Story: Moonlight	61

Alphonse Daudet, Man and Artist	71
Story: The Pope’s Mule	85

Prosper Mérimée, Impersonal Analyst	101
Story: The Taking of the Redoubt	113

Pierre Loti, Colorist	123
Story: The Marriage to the Sea	137

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 1

SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES

THE FRENCH SHORT-STORY

FRANÇOIS COPPÉE AND HIS WORK

THE SUBSTITUTE

GUY DE MAUPASSANT, REALIST

MOONLIGHT

ALPHONSE DAUDET, MAN AND ARTIST

THE POPE’S MULE

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, IMPERSONAL ANALYST

THE TAKING OF THE REDOUBT

PIERRE LOTI, COLORIST

THE MARRIAGE TO THE SEA

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE