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, 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 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.