83. The wags now made him recite “The Piece of String” for their amusement, as one persuades a soldier who has been through a campaign, to tell the story of his battles. His mind, attacked at its foundations, began to totter.
84. Towards the end of December he took to his bed.
85. During the first days of January he died, and, in the delirium of his mortal agony he protested his innocence, repeating:
Climax.
86. “—a li’l’ piece of string ... a li’l’ piece of string ... see, here it is, m’sieu le maire.”
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.