French short stories

Preface

In late years constantly increasing attention has been given to the study of the short story in our schools and ^"colleges. Numerous texts have been prepared to meet this new tendency, but in all of them there has been a preponderance of English and American stories. The few foreign stories included in some of the collections implied a scant recognition of the fact that there were excellent stories in literatures other than those in the English language.

The present war has greatly stimulated interest in continental literature, especially in that of our Allies. Of all these none is richer in its fiction than France. The high artistic excellence of the French short story has long been recognized and the more important French writers are well known everywhere; but up to the present no representative collection of French short stories has been made for school use. This volume aims to present such a collection.

The editor wishes to make a general acknowledgment of his indebtedness to all previous editors of collections of short stories which included the French. He has also received much help and stimulation from the many recent books on the art of the short story. Special acknowledgments are due to Mr. C. E. Miller and Mr. R. A. Alpiser, both of the Mercantile Library of St. Louis, for their many courtesies, and to the editor's friend and colleague, Mr. Louis LaCroix.

Acknowledgments to publishers will be found in connection with the stories themselves.

St. Louis, Mo., April, 1918. H.C.S.

Contents

PAGE

Preface 3

Introduction

I. The Short Story Today 7

II. The Short Story of Antiquity 12

III. The Short Story in Modern France 15

Pronouncing Glossary 18

Balzac 19

Merimee 143

Musset 159

Maupassant 192

Daudet 243

The Last Lesson 247

The Reverend Father Gaucher s Elixir 262

Coppee 273

France 282

Bazin 291

The Birds in the Letter-Box 292

Claretie 300

Lemaitre 309

INTRODUCTION

The Short Story Today

Fiction in its most comprehensive sense is coeval with the beginnings of literature, and the short story is as old as the art of narration itself. However, it has been left to comparatively modern times to give close attention to the definition of the literary forms now included in the general term prose fiction, until today the terms novel, romance, and short story have come to mean something fairly distinctive. For many centuries looseness in the matter of construction was characteristic of the long story and the short, both in poetry and prose. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the modern novel began to shape itself, more care was bestowed on the question of form, and, as the art of fiction progressed, the short story gradually began to emerge as a separate variety. But looseness of structure was not definitely attacked until about the middle of the last century when Poe, by precept and practice, proclaimed the short story as something new and distinct in fiction, subject to special laws of its own. He published Berenice, his first story, in 1835, and in 1842 he wrote his famous review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, Both the Tales and the critique are landmarks in the development of the short story. Poe's influence in this development can hardly be over-emphasized. In France his stories had the good fortune to be translated by Baudelaire (1856-1865), and with such remarkable fidelity and exquisite style did the Frenchman perform his task that the stories ranked practically as original work. Poe became equally popular in other countries, especially in England, Germany, and Russia.

It is an ancient truism to say that literature is a reflection of life, but the idea has special application in a consideration of the development of the short story. In the last fifty years life has become more complicated, the field of human thought and endeavor has widened, action has become more and more specialized, education is almost common property, and reading a universal habit. These very conditions, however, have imposed restrictions on leisure for reading, so that today a hundred readers find time for a short story to one who can devote himself to a long novel. The short story, therefore, fills a natural want created in large part by the conditions of modern life, and writers have not been slow in taking advantage of this demand for brevity.

A concomitant factor in the popularization of the short story is the stupendous growth of the magazine as a medium of publication, especially in America. In the earlier magazine, more particularly in England, short stories were used mainly as "fillers," while today the bookstands everywhere fairly groan with magazines which loudly proclaim themselves as containing short stories only. Even the more conservative of the older periodicals do not hesitate to call special attention to their short stories. Besides, a surprisingly large number of these stories find their way into book form, assuring them a greater degree of permanency. This insistent and constantly growing demand has not only stimulated production; it has also been responsible for greater merit in the stories themselves.

A study of the short story inevitably suggests a contrast with the novel. In a general way the material is the same for both, as well as the fundamental elements of construction. "The subject-matter with which prose fiction deals," says Prof. Bliss Perry, "is human life itself; the experience of the race, under countless conditions of existence." And again, fiction writers "all have something to say about life." That

INTRODUCTION 9

surely is broad enough to include both novel and short story. Yet there are differences. In general, the novel is more expansive in theme and more elastic in treatment; it can, and usually does, reproduce a larger phase of life than the short story, one involving more characters and greater variety of incident, and affording a more extended range for the portrayal of human emotion. In the novel there is an elaborate plot, frequently supported by one or more sub-plots which help to create the complication in which much of the interest of the story is embodied. Opportunity is given for leisurely narration, often relieved by incidental description — only such, however, as will not obscure the effect which the writer wishes to create. In order to achieve his purpose artistically the novelist arranges the incidents and episodes in the lives of his characters in such a way as to lead up to the climax which permanently affects the destiny of the important characters at least, or involves them in a definite catastrophe.

In some such way the ideals of the novel may be summarized, and, of course, some of the points just made apply to the short story as well, especially the older variety. But it has become the fashion to discriminate between the novel and the short story and much has been written in this connection. Rules have been formulated as to what is and what is not a short story, with considerable emphasis on the idea that a short story is more than a story that simply happens to be brief. In order to bring out these distinguishing features of the short story as it is now concerned it may not be irrelevant to give a brief synopsis of the fundamental elements of prose fiction.

In every story, long or short, there are characters, setting, and plot. In other words, there are certain persons or characters who do something amid certain surroundings. The characters are described by direct statement of the author, or by what they do and say as the story progresses. The setting of a story includes its location in time and place. The plot gives life to the story; it implies action, the incidents and episodes in which the characters are involved being artistically arranged to lead to some certain end. The novel employs these elements with greater elaboration, as suggested in a previous paragraph, while the short story of necessity is of simple form.

Many attempts have been made in recent years to give more precise and exact definition to the term short story as distinguished from the mere tale or sketch, but it does not seem essential to the present purpose to contribute to this discussion, for in this book all three forms are represented. The one trait common to all is singleness of effect, secured by repression in the use of material and by concentrating the interest upon some one character or some one incident; by compactness of construction and swiftness of movement. The contrast with the looser and more leisurely manner of the novel is obvious. In the ideal short story there is little room for description. Action is the word. The rest is usually quite secondary, although in the short story there has always been a marked fondness for local color effects because of the air of realism which they impart.

The field of the short story is almost unlimited, both in range of subject-matter and method of treatment. The most successful stories of all times have always been those which appealed to the deep-seated emotions common to humanity, such as love, hate, jealousy, revenge, friendship, courage, devotion, self-sacrifice ; or again, the appeal may lie in the type of character, the soldier, the beggar, the criminal, the athlete; and sometimes the appeal is in the effect only, for example, humor, pathos, or horror. It is not unusual for writers to combine two or more of these motives. In the present volume nearly all of the elements just mentioned

INTRODUCTION H

may easily be detected, and readers will find it a pleasant exercise to note, after they have read a story, what effect has been produced upon them and how the author managed his material in order to secure it.

At the present moment no form of writing is more in vogue than the short story. There is more and more of a tendency to place the emphasis on the short. Several reasons for this have already been indicated, but at least one other may be mentioned, imitation. Two of the foremost modern writers of the short story practiced the very short form — Maupassant and O Henry — and they did it surpassingly well. They followed Poe in pointing the way for the type of story that limited itself to the sharply-drawn photographic detail, and so successful were they that all the world seems inclined to follow them. Narrative art with them meant the focussing of the attention on some one character or some one trait or some one incident, by means of which they created the single impression sought.

The modern devotion to hurry and speed has helped to popularize the very short form, and the- newspapers and magazines are doing their best to foster this type. They prefer to print half a dozen stories by different authors rather than one or two longer ones which might actually have a higher claim to literary distinction. It is natural that an author can build better if he is not cramped for elbow-room, and this is exemplified by some of the older writers born before brevity became an altar on which all else must be sacrificed. Among them are such writers as Balzac, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. Readers who have not already done so should not fail to read Turgenev's A 'Lear of the Steppes, as well as the longer of the short stories by Balzac. Among the few more recent writers who wrote as they pleased rather than fit their stories into the space allotted by the magazines was Henry James. Some day, when it is no longer a popular literary sport to cast slurs upon that great literary figure, the reading public will wake up to the fact that it has been most unjustly neglecting one of the foremost writers of the short story in English.