Thus the modern development of the short story in France has both its own artistic interest and the further historical interest of background. When Charles Nodier (1783–1844), in the time of our own Irving, harked back from the novel to the tale, he but followed consciously what others had followed unconsciously, a tradition of his race.[31] Some of Nodier’s legends are as mediæval in form as in subject. But when he wrote _La combe à l’homme mort_ he made of the same material something which, emerging here and there in the middle age, waited for definite acceptance till Nodier’s own time--a short story. The hypothesis that Nodier was a master to Hawthorne is not supported by any close likeness. Yet there are resemblances. Both loved to write tales for children; both lapse toward the overt moral and fall easily into essay; both use the more compact short-story form as it were by the way and not from preference. _Smarra_ (66 pages, 1821), acknowledging a suggestion from Apuleius, is an essentially original fantasy, creating the effect of a waking dream. The nearest English parallel is, not Hawthorne, but De Quincey, or, in more elaborate and restrained eloquence, Landor. _Smarra_, as Nodier says in his preface, is an exercise in style to produce a certain phantasmagorical impression. The clue to the effect he sought is given by the frequent quotations from the _Tempest_. It is “such stuff as dreams are made on.” _Jean François-les-bas-bleus_ (1836) and _Lidivine_, on the other hand, are almost documentary studies of character. _La filleule du Seigneur_ (1806), legendary anecdote like Irving’s, shows where Nodier’s art began. He carried his art much further; but his pieces of compactness, like _La combe à l’homme mort_, are so rare that one may doubt their direct influence on the modern development of form. For the bulk of Nodier’s work is not _conte_, but _nouvelle_. These two terms have never been sharply differentiated in French use. _Les cent nouvelles nouvelles_ are not only shorter, in average, than the _novelle_ of Boccaccio; they are substantially like the _Contes de la Reine de Navarre_. Some of the _nouvelles_ of Nodier, Mérimée, and Gautier are indistinguishable in form from the _contes_ of Flaubert, Daudet, and Maupassant. But though even to-day a collection of French tales might bear either name, the short story as it grew in distinctness and popularity seems to have taken more peculiarly to itself the name _conte_.[32] Correspondingly _nouvelle_ is a convenient name for those more extended tales, written sometimes in chapters, which in English are occasionally called novelettes, and which have their type in _Aucassin and Nicolette_. In this sense Nodier’s writing is mainly, and from preference, _nouvelle_. Taking as his type for modern adaptation the longer mediæval tale, he did not work in the direction of short story. [Sidenote: Mérimée.]