J. BERG ESENWEIN
EDITOR OF LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE

The Home Correspondence School
Springfield, Massachusetts
1912

Copyright 1911 and 1912—J. B. Lippincott Company
Copyright 1912—The Home Correspondence School
All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

VOLUME I

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 FRENCH SHORT-STORY

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 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.