COPPÉE AND HIS WRITINGS
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was born in Paris, January 12, 1842. He was educated at the Lycée St. Louis, and early attracted attention by his poetic gifts. He held office as Librarian of the Senate, and also Guardian of the Archives at the Comédie Française. The honors of membership in the French Academy and that of being decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor were given him in 1883 and 1888 respectively. He died May 23, 1908.
François Coppée was a poet, dramatist, and short-story writer. The collection Poèmes Modernes, published at the age of twenty-seven, contains some remarkable work which well represents his talent. The plays Madame de Maintenon and Le Luthier de Crémone rank with his best dramatic work. Among his short-story gems are “The Sabots of Little Wolff,” “At Table,” “Two Clowns,” “The Captain’s Vices,” “My Friend Meurtrier,” “An Accident,” and “The Substitute.”
As a novelist, Coppée left no permanent mark upon his times, for in this field he was far surpassed 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, and Mérimée. From the work of these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished. The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and, by the same token, an infinitely harder one; Daudet, child of Provence though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire; and the Parisian Mérimée, though nearer than any other to Coppée in his manner of work, was less in sympathy with his own characters than the warmer-hearted author of “The Sabots of Little Wolff” and “The Substitute”—which follows in a translation by the author of this volume. Coppée was almost an idealist—certainly he was quick to respond to the call of the ideal in his themes. Amidst so much that is sordid and gross in French fiction, how refreshing it is to read a master who could be truthful without wallowing, moral without sermonizing, compassionate without sniveling, humorous without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a sympathetic lover of mankind. Like Dickens, he chose the lowly for his characters, and like Dickens, he found poetry in their simple lives.
In common with other modern French writers, with Daudet, Maupassant, and others, Coppée excels in the writing of tales. His prose is remarkable for the same qualities that appear in his poetical works: sympathy, tenderness, marked predilection for the weak, the humble, and especially a masterly treatment of subjects essentially Parisian and modern.—Robert Sanderson, François Coppée, in Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature.
Compassion is the chief quality of this little masterpiece,—compassion and understanding of a primitive type of character. The author shows us the good in a character not altogether bad; and he almost makes us feel that the final sacrifice was justifiable. He succeeds in doing this chiefly because he shows us the other characters only as they appeared to Jean François, thus focusing the interest of the reader on this single character.—Brander Matthews, The Short-story.
More than Daudet, Coppée deserves the title of the French Dickens. A fellow member of the French Academy, José de Heredia, calls him “the poet of the humble, painting with sincere emotion his profound sympathy for the sorrows, the miseries, and the sacrifices of the meek.” As an artist in fiction, says Heredia, “Coppée possesses preëminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction,” and a “great grasp of character,” enabling him “to show us the human heart and intellect in full play and activity”—both of which endowments were the supreme characteristics of the author of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield.—Merion M. Miller, Introduction to The Guilty Man.
Contrast the touching pathos of the “Substitute,” poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from, that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is—contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds “My Friend Meurtrier” boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties—making the coffee of his good old mother, and taking her poodle out for a walk.... No doubt M. Coppée’s contes [stories] have not the sharpness of Maupassant’s nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet’s. But what of it? They have qualities of their own. They have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppée’s street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadow of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful.—Brander Matthews, Aspects of Fiction.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON COPPÉE
Introduction to Ten Tales by Coppée, Brander Matthews (1890); Books and Play-Books, Brander Matthews (1895); Literary Movement in France during the Nineteenth Century, Georges Pellissier (1897); Hours with Famous Parisians, Stuart Henry (1897).
FOR ANALYSIS