Ten Tales by Francois Coppee Fiction Free eBook

Contents

The Captain’s Vices
Two Clowns
A Voluntary Death
A Dramatic Funeral
The Substitute
At Table
An Accident
The Sabots Of Little Wolff
The Foster Sister
My Friend Meurtrier

The conte is a form of fiction in which the French have always delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the jongleurs and the trouvères, past the periods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the present. The conte is a tale, something more than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The Canterbury Tales are contes, most of them, if not all; and so are some of the Tales of a Wayside Inn. The free-and-easy tales of Prior were written in imitation of the French conte en vers; and that, likewise, was the model of more than one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin Dobson.

No one has succeeded more abundantly in the conte en vers than M. Coppée. Where was there ever anything better of its kind than L’Enfant de la Balle? - that gentle portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed in a chain of occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical managers and at their hostility towards poetic plays. Where is there anything of a more simple pathos than L’Épave? - that story of a sailor’s son whom the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship M. Coppée loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the streets of the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story some incident of daily occurrence made significant by his interpretation; he chooses some character common-place enough, but made firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to Uncle Tom’s Cabin would serve to cover most of M. Coppée’s contes either in prose or verse; they are nearly all pictures of life among the lowly. But there is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. The tone is always manly and wholesome.


It is of good augury for our own letters that the best French fiction of to-day is getting itself translated in the United States, and that the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is more consciously an art in France than anywhere else - perhaps partly because the French are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic endeavor. In the short story especially, in the tale, in the conte, their supremacy is incontestable; and their skill is shown and their æsthetic instinct exemplified partly in the sense of form, in the constructive method, which underlies the best short stories, however trifling these may appear to be, and partly in the rigorous suppression of non-essentials, due in a measure, it may be, to the example of Mérimee. That is an example we in America may study to advantage; and from the men who are writing fiction in France we may gain much. From the British fiction of this last quarter of the nineteenth century little can be learned by any one - less by us Americans in whom the English tradition is still dominant. When we look to France for an exemplar we may find a model of value, but when we copy an Englishman we are but echoing our own faults. “The truth is,” said Mr. Lowell in his memorable essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners - “the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.”
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