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
THE SUBSTITUTE
(LE REMPLAÇANT)
BY FRANÇOIS COPPÉE