SOURCE: Taylor, Una A. “The Short Story in France, 1800-1900.” Edinburgh Review, no. 445 (July 1913): 137-50.

[In the following essay, Taylor recounts the nineteenth-century shift in the French conte from the aesthetic compositions of Mérimée, Gautier, and Flaubert to the lucid simplicity of Maupassant's short stories.]

It was during the period when the genius of romanticism had saturated the public with exuberant rhetoric and eloquent sentimentalism, typified by Victor Hugo and George Sand, that the contes of Mérimée and Gautier revindicated, in different fashion and by opposite methods, the supreme value of form in composition and of that unity of effect which is twin to structural completeness. Neither, it is true, escaped the infection of contemporary taste. The infatuation of the monstrous and the exceptional possessed the imaginations of both writers, and the themes they selected by preference are insulated by abnormality of character and incident, or detached by remoteness of time and place, from ordinary experience. Mérimée's pages are dyed with sanguinary extravagances, as in ‘Carmen,’ ‘Les Âmes du Purgatoire,’ and ‘Lokis’; Gautier portrays to satiety the Byronic frenzies of sensuous passion in his ‘Fortunio,’ ‘Le Roi Candaule,’ and ‘La Morte Amoureuse.’

But apart from a similar tendency towards the exotic and the abnormal, and apart from their place as pioneers of the doctrine of art for art's sake, no two artists ever reached their goals by more contrary paths. Gautier sought his end in concentration, Mérimée in elimination of detail. Gautier, by accumulated touches, all conducing to one effect, attained his special quality—pictorial unity. Mérimée with trained precision resumed in some few clearly outlined traits whole groups of minutiæ. Further, Mérimée carried to perfection the economy of words. ‘La Vénus d'Ille,’ a modernised version of the ring given to the goddess, illustrates the process. A Parisian archaeologist is the guest of a provincial confrère. His host owns an antique Venus of dubious date and sinister aspect. The statue stands at an angle of the garden hedge which bounds the village tennis-ground. The son of the house, bridegroom-elect, has possessed himself of an antique ring for the approaching marriage ceremony. The suggestion of the whole plot is contained in these two presentments: the ring—the statue. The guest depicts the tedious family life, trite, vulgar, pretentious; but now here, now there, comes a glimpse of some undercurrent of dim horror. Soon the first hint of vitality in the sullen, inanimate bronze is given. The Venus, ‘l'idole,’ is in ill repute with the superstitious villagers. As the guest gazes from his window at dusk some lads in passing have caught sight of the ominous idol, the ‘coquine.’ A stone is thrown—there is a cry, a sound of clumsy flight. ‘Elle me l'a rejetée!’ She has thrown it back at me! The story progresses; its surface the usual, the familiar; its understrata the abnormal, the impossible. The traditional incidents follow. Upon the wedding-eve there is tennis-play; the bridegroom joins the play, he sets his ring for safety upon the finger of the malignant effigy, forgets it, seeks it at nightfall. ‘Elle a serré le doigt,’ stammers the bridegroom to the guest. He has been drinking hard at the marriage feast—maybe it was a drunken illusion. The supper ended, the Parisian retreats to his own bedchamber located in the wing allotted to the newly-wed couple. Night has come. ‘Le silence régnait depuis quelque temps lorsqu'il fut troublé par des pas lourds qui montaient l'escalier. Les marches craquèrent fortement. …’ Oppressed with some sense of disquiet he sleeps a disturbed sleep; when he wakens, ‘Il pouvait être cinq heures du matin … le jour allait se lever. Alors j'entendis distinctement les mêmes pas lourds. Cela me parut singulier.’ A pause—he listens—there comes a cry, bells ring, steps pass hither and thither, servants run to and fro. The guest rises, dresses in haste; he seeks the corridor; the door of the nuptial-room is open wide. Across the bed the body of the bridegroom is stretched—‘il était déjà raide et froid. Ses dents serrées … on eût dit qu'il avait été étreint dans un cercle de fer. Mon pied posa sur quelque chose de dur qui se trouvait sur le tapis; je me baissai et vis la bague.’

Few authors have shown more skill than Mérimée in expressing a character by an isolated action, or a complete personality by one type-feature. The prefatory incident in the story of Arsène Guillot when Arsène, abandoned by her lovers, expends her last five-franc piece in votive candles to the intent that her livelihood may be assured in her unavowable trade, elucidates the whole course of the narrative. It is the casual episode that determines the nature of the ensuing catastrophe, nor could pages of analytic psychology characterize more completely the attitude of heart and mind belonging to the naïve sinner of her forlorn class. Mastery in the art of such abbreviations is a leading factor throughout Mérimée's fiction. Having presented his ‘signe’ he states his facts with studied moderation and inimitable conciseness of phrase and diction. The very violence of the action depicted in many instances facilitates his aim. Extremes admit of no superlatives and invite little annotation. He leaves them unexplained, uninterpreted; they need no commentary. Logically enchained, episode succeeds episode with calculated crescendo of emphasis. They are viewed from one standpoint only—the bystander's. Mérimée makes no pretence to be the depositary of human secrets; his is not the office of the confessor but of the detective, and his psychology lies not in the dissection of mental states but in their visible outcome and exposure.

In a different way it is for the sense of sight that Gautier wrote, as with rapid visualizing touches he regretted that ‘less happy than painter or musician, he could only present the objects not simultaneously but in succession.’ His stories resolve themselves into sequences of scenes; ‘Le Roi Candaule,’ ‘La Toison d'Or,’ ‘Le Nid de Rossignols,’ are picture-narratives. Colour and form engross the author's attention. Where the conte cruelle of literature sought sensational stimulus from instincts of physical or moral repulsion, Gautier, on the other hand, sought it in the principle of non-moral physical attraction. Beauty is the decorum of his art; and as for the moralist goodness is the redemption of life, so for Gautier beauty is the veil cast over the deformities and distortions of nature. In it he sought immortality, ‘dans l'art les événements passent et la beauté seule reste.’¹ In excess of detail he approaches Balzac; but where Balzac inventories, Gautier depicts; his catalogue consists of illustrations. Every non-pictorial element is ignored, nor is any pictorial element admitted which is not in close relation to the colour, outline, and movement of the picture. In his use of words the translation of things seen to things written is as direct as language permits. To present, not to suggest, is his endeavour; hence his general avoidance of allegorical and emblematic imagery whenever the dictionary could supply a term, however recondite and technical, sufficiently distinctive to characterize the object treated. He is no doubt driven, as all writers must be at times, to employ descriptive metaphorical diction, but when it occurs it lies as close to the object described as the mould to the cast. ‘La pluie hachait le ciel à fils menus.’ ‘Le houblon du treillage passait familièrement sa petite main verte par un carreau cassé.’

‘Une Nuit de Cléopâtre’ is perhaps the most brilliant example of an art where the pen acts as a substitute for the brush. The hot desolation of the vast Egyptian necropolis of mystery and granite, ‘where the sole occupation of the living would appear to be the embalming of the dead,’ is outstretched before our eyes, threaded by the opaque waters of the sluggard Nile. Over all ‘une lumière crue, éclatante et poussiéreuse à force d'intensité, ruisselait en torrents de flamme, l'azur du ciel blanchissait de chaleur comme un métal à la fournaise.’

The scene shifts to the queen's garden, with its pools and fountains, its verdurous luxuriance of leaf and blossom. Thither Meïamoun penetrates Actaeon-wise—death the penalty. Cleopatra arrests the doom; his life is in truth forfeit, but it pleases her first to pay its price—the payment, one night, ‘une nuit de Cléopâtre.’ Again the scene shifts. Meïamoun as a god sits enthroned beside that woman-glory of the ancient world. The death-cup is outpoured, Meïamoun lifts it. For a moment Cleopatra's touch retards the crisis, for a moment only; the sound of trumpets breaks the spell; Anthony's heralds ride into the vast hall, and Cleopatra's detaining hand falls from her lover's arm. ‘C'est l'heure où les beaux rêves s'envolent.’ Meïamoun raises the cup to the lips Cleopatra has kissed. … ‘Whose is the dead body lying upon the marble?’ Anthony asks, as he greets the queen.

Gautier was essentially a specialist of the Short Story. Compare the method of ‘Cléopâtre’ with Flaubert's conte—‘Hérodias’—belonging to the same epoch of Eastern life. The Flaubert of ‘Hérodias’ manifests himself as the novelist-genius who re-constructed history at length in Salammbô and whose psychological study of Madame Bovary was the chef-d'œuvre of its species. The Gautier of ‘Cléopâtre’ shows the true genius of the conte-writer whose attempts at prolonged romance as in ‘Le Capitaine Fracasse’ and ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’ displayed a total lack of structural unity both in the dislocations of plot and the inconsequences of character. The contrast of conte with conte illustrates at once the diversity of method and the diversity of talent between two artists essentially gifted to create different forms of fiction. In each story there is the same objectivity of treatment, the same withdrawal of the author's personality from view, the same search for exactitude in the descriptive word, the same perfection of pictorial effect.

In the hands both of Mérimée and of Gautier, as in those of d'Aurevilly and l'Isle Adam, the art of the French conte remained for the most part definitely objective, and in this quality, despite differences of constituent elements, it was a legitimate descendant of the novella of Boccaccio, of Bandello, and of Strapparola, whose love of beauty equalled Gautier's. All these French writers dealt primarily with exteriorised passions, with events and actions; they told what happened and what was the end of the happening; their design was to kindle interest and excite curiosity. For them, as for the Italian novelists, action was the mainspring of invention. It fell, by poet-right, to Alfred de Vigny the thinker, to Alfred de Musset the lover, to inaugurate the distinctively subjective Short Story, where emotional values supersede all others and where success lies in the evocation of sympathy.

The fever of romanticism was at its height when Alfred de Vigny, amongst romantics ‘le plus, peut-être le seul, penseur’² published the Épisodes which form the volume where Stello, the melancholic patient of ‘le docteur Noir,’ is distracted from his malady of mortal egoism by the three narratives of his physician's professional experiences. For Vigny, whose star, in Gautier's memorable tribute, ‘burnt less brilliantly than its fellows because it rode higher in the heavens,’ form and structure, the mould of art, were of secondary importance. The preoccupation of the thinker had so impregnated Vigny's imagination that, even in the classic sentimental masterpiece of Kitty Bell and the starving of Chatterton, he is not content to abide by the emotional issue of the catastrophe. The moral is epitomised in the concluding incident. ‘England’—Chatterton is made to declaim—‘England is a magnificent vessel, we are her mariners all, to each his own task.’ Beckford, the poet's interlocutor, beneficent patron of the commonplace, listens unmoved. ‘C'est bien, mon enfant; mais que diable peut faire le Poète dans la manœuvre?’ ‘Le Poète,’ cries the doomed genius, ‘cherche aux étoiles quelle route nous montre le doigt du Seigneur.’ The protest of the divine apologist is unheeded, the world of Mammon has its own compass to steer by, and the starved boy in his empty garret, the torn sheets of unpublished poems scattered around, ends the short chapter of his life. A note—‘un petit billet’—lies amidst the torn poetic manuscripts. ‘Que lui offrait donc M. Beckford dans son petit billet?’ inquires Stello. “Ah, à propos,” dit le docteur Noir, “c'était une place de premier valet de chambre “chez lui.”

Keen of wit, light of hand, none of the abstract conceptions that tortured Vigny's mournful imagination distracted the mind of Alfred de Musset from sentimental issues as he set himself to the art of prose fiction. Subjective to the core, the emotional current in his Contes et Nouvelles is confined to the narrow channel of his individual experiences and experiments; it was a boundary he rarely transgressed. From that limitation his works derived the unity of effect incident to personal consistency of standpoint and of sentiment. The stories, it is true, fall short of ideal standards. Released from the discipline of poetic form and the restrictions of dramatic dialogue they lack compression, conciseness, and structural proportion. Unessential trivialities overlap due bounds, the dramatic crises of situations lose their relief. But the sincerity of his autobiographical emotionalism, the semi-truths of psychological instinct in his ‘profils de grisettes,’ Mimi Pinson and Bernerette, and in his profils of other equally frail heroines, ‘Emmeline’ and ‘Les deux maîtresses,’ invest the portraits with the vitality not only of choses vues but of the chose sentie. Grace, charm, the freshness of an inalienable birthright of youth, cling to the figures which have passed from Musset's pages into the dusty gallery of literature. And in that gallery they stand, all with the same sentimental appeal; the pity of it—the pity of life, the pity of dying—of loving, the pity of joy itself. Mimi Pinson, ‘plus jolie que la beauté’ in her white headgear and little black gown—‘Elle n'a qu'une robe au monde, Et qu'un bonnet,’—dancing, singing, drinking, smoking, reckless, courageous, generous, pawning her gown to feed a companion, was at that day and hour a unique conception. Gay and hungry she sallies forth to her fête-day mass shawled in a window-curtain, gay and hungry she seeks the garret where Rougette starves in misery, for M. le baron de Rougette has proved ‘insecourable.’ And Musset's wit lent its edge of comedy to the scene. “Ces pauvres filles,” Eugène, student and humanitarian, cries to his friend, the world-wise Marcel. What can he do for their welfare? How rescue them from the precarious life of prodigality and destitution? He has seen its misery with his heart.

En ce moment les deux amis passaient devant le café Tortoni. La silhouette de deux jeunes femmes qui prenaient des glaces se dessinait à la clarté des lustres. L'une d'elles agita son mouchoir et l'autre partit d'un éclat de rire. “Parbleu,” dit Marcel, “les voilà! … il paraît que M. le baron [de Rougette] a bien fait des choses.”

Ices and champagne or—the river. “Ma vie s'est passée à tâcher de vivre, et finalement à voir qu'il faut mourir,” says Mimi's sadder sister, Bernerette, to her sometime lover with the acquiescent hopelessness of Mérimée's Arsène Guillot. Of story, in the popular sense of the word, Musset's contes have little; they are mere narratives of emotional developments and intricacies with clear characterization, instinctive rather than psychological, of the few persons concerned. They may be accepted as exemplifying the transition of the theme of the Short Story from the without to the within and, addressing themselves solely to the sympathies of the reader, are the precursors of the long line of what may be named after Loti's livre-type, stories of Pity and Death.

Mérimée, Gautier, Flaubert, exercised, however covertly, an art of composition; they disposed their incidents in due order of sequence; they arranged their figures with an aesthetic sense of perspective, prepared and suspended their crises and held the balance of accent and emphasis. In the hands of their successors, of Daudet, Loti, Maupassant, the Short Story underwent fundamental modification. One and all were content, with occasional reversions to older tradition, to abandon any attempt at narrative structure. They substituted for the plot of consecutive events and actions, which to a greater or less degree constituted the framework of earlier contes, the presentment of detached episodes, single personalities, and isolated situations. The Short Story of the artist was resolving itself into the sketch of the literary journalist. The unity of effect attained in earlier days through the harmonizing dominance of a single note of passion or emotion, or by the accentuated impress of some individual trait of temperament and character, was achieved by the exclusion from the canvas of all happenings, all ideas, save one. Under stress of this exclusion the conte became not seldom a mere art of anecdote, an art of the memorandum book. Of this art, in his contes, Alphonse Daudet was master. A naturalist by intention and conscience, intention and conscience suffered daily defeat overcome by the sympathetic humanitarianism of his Provençal temperament. The spiritual leaven in his nature proved, in the judgment of the realist, an invincible weakness—‘La maîtresse faculté de Daudet c'est la faculté de l'attendrissement.’ His sensitive, nervous perceptions caught and trapped sentiment on the wing and registered the impression of its passage across the sordid or brutal human background. His scenes are drawn from the stage of realism, the sentiments appertain to the sphere of sympathetic idealism: ‘J'ai toujours été très curieux de ces petites scènes silencieuses et intimes qu'on devine encore plus qu'on ne les voit … de ces pantomimes qui … d'un geste vous révèlent toute une existence.’

Graceful and sympathetic, the pastel vignettes, for they are little more, added by Daudet to the list of Short Stories, fringe the profounder depths of irreparable sadness which his longer novels portray. They are concise, with the terseness of an artist who has learnt never to transgress the limits of his chosen frame; their unity of effect is that of a scene, coloured and permeated by its own sentiment, reflected in the sensitive mirror the artist has prepared on which to net its fugitive image. This note of sympathetic sadness which runs through Daudet's work was deepened and expanded by Pierre Loti. The episodes Loti treats—the mournful reluctance of the seaman to whom has fallen the task of tending the ship's cattle when the last calm-eyed victim awaits its hour of slaughter, the hopeless pathos of human dying in ‘Tante Claire nous quitte’—are not as Daudet's vignettes, anecdotes of an observer, nor are they isolated scenes noted in a sketchbook. They are rather the memento mori of fugitive emotional impressions. Moreover, they are impressions stamped and sealed with the signature of sincerity. It is by force of emotion alone that they live in the memory, and emotion is the true medium of that ‘talent d'évocation’ by which Loti supplements his descriptive gift.

‘L'Étui de Nacre,’ published in 1892, marked a new era in the history of the Short Story. Since the days of Mérimée, objective intellectualism, so far as the conte was concerned, had passed by on the other side. The great naturalists, Flaubert (with the exception of his ‘Trois Contes’—‘Un Cœur Simple,’ ‘La Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier,’ ‘Hérodias’), the brothers Goncourt, and Émile Zola (whose ‘Contes à Ninon’ (1864) belongs to the realms of pure fantasy) occupied their talents upon themes requiring larger spaces than the conte affords for due development. But outside the school of realism Anatole France filled the gap. His legends of primitive and medieval faith, his short studies of Revolution incidents, are trammelled by no sense of emotional obligation. There is no revolt against inexorable fatalities, no doctrinaire assertions of faith or unfaith in men or gods. On the contrary an attitude of sentimental neutrality leaves M. France at leisure to bring the conte to an unrivalled excellence of literary perfection. He reproduces no pattern process in form and structure, and his method as a master of diction adapts itself with fluent transformations to his varied themes. He relates his stories of the naïve faith of medieval ages in clearly cut, delicately chiselled narratives modelled by a talent which lends itself without effort to the terse utterance which the short story demands. The effects aimed at are diverse as his subjects: the volume opening with the reminiscences of Pilate closes with anecdotes ‘de Floréal, An II.’ In the presentment of the familiar from a novel standpoint, in the presentment of the unfamiliar as a commonplace of daily happening, M. France is an accomplished artist. Monk Célestin walking the woodlands in the company of his converted faun; Gestas the drunken penitent battering at the shut door of the confessional, infuriated that no priest aspires to have the honour of hearing his ‘belle confession’; Frère Barnabé, the meek-hearted saltimbanque who, full of humble emulation for the worthier talents consecrated by other monks to divine service, performs his feats in honour of Madame la Vierge and ‘la tête en bas, les pieds en l'air jonglait avec six boules de cuivre et douze couteaux,’ in the monastery chapel, are presented with a lucidity of outline, a felicity of touch, which, if it leaves them devoid of any illusion of reality, endows them with the vitality of art. The ‘Procurateur de Judée’ stands foremost as an attempt, in strict accordance with the genius of the Short Story, to concentrate in one salient phrase the gist of the whole preceding narrative. It is a mode of procedure peculiarly in keeping with the aims of the conte-writer. The scene of the story is the Roman watering-place where Aelius Lamia, returned in middle age to Italy after the long exile of his riotous youth, encounters his friend of past years, the exprocurator of Judea. The invalids discourse together concerning the last period of Pilate's residence in Palestine. To Lamia's questions Pilate replies at length. Lamia too has Judean memories of exile, memories belonging to the green years of youth. One memory has outlived all others. It is of a woman of Jerusalem, before whose beauty Cleopatra's might have paled. To ill-famed hovels of fisher folk, to taverns crowded with soldiers and publicans, he had followed her vagrant steps. And then she had vanished from the streetways. Men said she had joined herself to a little band of disciples, disciples of a young thaumaturge, a Galilean wanderer. ‘“Il se nommait Jésus, il était de Nazareth, et il fut mis en croix pour je ne sais quel crime. Pontius, te souvient-il de cet homme?” Pontius Pilatus fronça les sourcils et porta la main à son front comme quelqu'un qui cherche dans sa mémoire. Puis—“Jésus?” murmura-t-il; “Jésus, de Nazareth? Je ne me rappelle pas.”’

The process here is obvious: the places, the names, the ideas, referred to in the dialogue are already familiar to the reader, hence all explanatory details are obviated, and the author draws into his service all the associations attached. The keen and subtle irony which threads the pages to the climax lies throughout, it may be said, in what is not written. And in the final sentence placed in Pilate's mouth—‘Je ne me rappelle pas’—it is our consciousness that the name that Pilate has forgotten has focussed the remembrance of nineteen centuries, that gives its point to the story.

But if amongst moderns M. France has achieved singular distinction as the intellectualist of the modern conte; if Alphonse Daudet coloured his brief notes from life with the tenderness of his Provençal sympathy; if Pierre Loti has lent the accent of poignant emotional fatalism to the vraie vérité of the tragedies of insignificant lives, Guy de Maupassant holds rank as the supreme conteur of his century in the estimation of his countrymen. ‘Saveur, amplitude, puissance,’ were the qualities which Flaubert's pupil sought, and the fashion of his finding elicits from M. Doumic the pronouncement that commentary fails where the critic is face to face with ‘la perfection même.’³ Some two hundred and more ‘nouvelles’ belong to his short period of incredibly productive activity. In the telling of these stories there is no search for dramatic phrase, no suspension of the crises for dramatic effect, no resort to disused, artificial, or technical terms for direct descriptive expression. His talent for observation, his faculty for description and narrative, were unrivalled; he possessed a faultless sense of proportion in fitting his theme to the dimensions of its frame, and above all he achieved the finished art of simplicity of thought: ‘J'ai pensé simplement.’ Absolute lucidity of statement, combined with a brevity which never suggests an abbreviation, was the result of that prominent characteristic of his literary processes. Moreover, it is noticeable that his psychology is the psychology of the immediate circumstance and sensation; his characters have neither past nor future. Within the confines enumerated by M. Lanson, confines admitting no indication—except by rare exception—of any spiritual side to life material and sensual, it would be difficult to say what aspect of mœurs contemporaines he has not treated. His pictures of peasant life—emulating the brutality of Balzac's ‘Paysans’—form a group unrivalled in their adaptation of intimate knowledge to its verbal expression. He has mirrored his slow-witted villagers in the egoistic animalism of their unawakened sympathies. The provincial bourgeois, equally sordid if less frankly brutal, supplies him with another series of models. He has portrayed the libertine survival of monarchism; the Paris viveur, his emotions blunted, his sensations dulled, his passions atrophied; depraved little marquises, in exquisite toilettes, with a callous sensuality, a gross shamelessness their sisters of the street would find it hard to emulate. Episode after episode of intrigues, base, vicious and squalid, succeed one another, the last vestige of all that makes the desire of man for his mate a healthful and regenerating force in Nature's great economy eliminated. His hunting anecdotes are stories of sportsmen possessed by sanguinary manias; his contes-à-rire retain the grossness of oral folk-tales or medieval farce. In ‘La Peur,’ ‘Lui,’ ‘Qui ‘sait?’, notably in his masterpiece of terror ‘Le Horla,’ he has chronicled the hauntings of his own diseased brain as sanity made surrender to the delusions of a madman's fantasy.⁴

To what extent was the torturing mental malady that shadowed all his popular triumphs responsible for the artist's conception of life and character? To what extent should the absence of certain aesthetic moral qualities and the lack of experience implied by his avowal: ‘Je n'ai jamais aimé. … Je ris souvent des idées sentimentales, très sentimentales et tendres que je trouve en cherchant bien,’ share the onus attaching to the extraordinarily narrow outlook from which he treats, with wearying recurrence, the relationship of man and woman as one of mutual degradation? It is a question for the psychologist to determine. For the critic of non-latin race, to read consecutively a prolonged series of Maupassant nouvelles is to alternate between an attitude of acute homage to his genius and one of equally acute exasperation at the continuous and monotonous ascription of a crude animalism as the source of every action and the mainspring of every character depicted. It might almost be said that the accuracy of truth to life in detail enhances the sense of the want of truth to life in its entirety, for life as a whole embraces, with a wider tolerance than his harsh pessimism dreams of, good with evil, compassions with cruelties, the loves of spirit with the loves of sense.

What Maupassant could effect on the silver reverse of his genius has, nevertheless, been understated. Finer intuitions not seldom mitigated and enlarged his materialistic preconceptions, more especially as the childish desire Gautier initiated, to scandalize the bourgeois, gave place to other aesthetic motives. ‘Claire de Lune,’ in its moonlit atmosphere, where the old priest signs an armistice with the humanity of mating love, ‘Le Pardon,’ where Berthe lays the heavy bouquet of roses, white roses, on the tomb of her husband's mistress, with ‘une prière inconnue et suppliante’; ‘L'Enfant,’ where the younger Berthe takes in her arms the new-born child of the dead woman Jacques had loved and abandoned: ‘La mère est morte, dites-vous—nous l'élèverons, ce petit,’ are records of absolutions none the less divine because purely human. ‘Une Veuve,’ which curiously enough suggests the pen of an Emily Brontë, where ‘la vieille tante,’ wearing upon her finger the ring of blonde hair, relates the long-past story of her child-cousin's precocious and fatal passion, primitive in its violence, piteous in its issue, is a story of pure sentiment. In all these, to name no more, sympathy and emotion vibrate through the assumed impassibility of the conteur. And he has told finally, in ‘L'Amour,’ of that greatest love that no man can outdo. It is the dawn scene of a hunter's chase. The first shot has broken the truce of night and darkness on the frozen marsh, the slaughter of flying fowl has begun, the dogs bring in the bleeding, stricken wild duck to the feet of the two sportsmen. Presently in the cold, clear sunrise light two silver-breasted teal rise from the rushes:

Je tirai—une d'eux tombe presque à mes pieds. Alors, dans l'espace au-dessus de moi une voix, une voix d'oiseau cria. Ce fut une plainte courte, répétée, déchirante, et la bête, la petite bête épargnée, se mit à tourner dans le bleu du ciel au-dessus de nous, en regardant sa compagne morte que je tenais entre mes mains. Karl à genoux, le fusil à l'épaule, l'œil ardent, la guettait, attendant qu'elle fût assez proche—“Tu a tué la femelle,” dit-il: “le mâle ne s'en ira pas.” Certes il ne s'en allait point. Il tournoyait toujours et pleurait autour de nous. Jamais gémissement de souffrance ne me déchira le cœur comme l'appel désolé de ce pauvre animal perdu dans l'espace. Parfois il s'enfuyait sous la menace du fusil qui suivait son vol; il semblait prêt à continuer sa route, tout seul, à travers le ciel. … Mais il revenait bientôt. … “Laisse-la par terre,” me dit Karl, “il approchera tout à l'heure. Il approchait, en effet, … affolé par son amour, amour de bête. Karl tira. … Je vis une chose noire qui tombait … et Pierrot me le rapporta … Je les mis, froids déjà, dans le même carnier, … et je repartis ce jour-là pour Paris.”

Such is Maupassant's rendering of L'Amour, nor, one may conjecture, was it wholly in irony that he attributed love's supreme sacrifice to the love of the mated bird.

A complete survey of the French conte would resolve itself into a mere catalogue of authors and titles, and in a brief study of some definite types many noteworthy names must necessarily be omitted.⁵ Further, in a criticism of foreign literature it is well that the critic's endeavour should be rather to interpret qualities and methods than to class them in orders of preeminence; for him it is wise to lay the finger on the lips, and recall the axiom of a greater critic: ‘C'est le temps qui classe les hommes, et il les classe selon l'influence qu'ils ont sur l'avenir.’

Notes

1. ‘Hist. du Romantisme.’ T. Gautier. 1874.

2. ‘Hist. de la Littérature Française.’ G. Lanson. Paris. 1909.

3. ‘Ecrivains d'Aujourd'hui.’ René Doumic.

4. ‘La Vie et l'Œuvre de Guy de Maupassant.’ E. Maynial. Paris.

5. Notably Balzac, Sand, Coppée, Mirbeau, Catulle Mendés, etc.