That the propagation of the short story in France owes much to Balzac might readily be presumed from the enormous influence of Balzac’s work in general, but can hardly be held after scrutiny of his short pieces in particular. Of these, two will serve to recall the limitations of the great observer. _El Verdugo_ (1829), though it is reduced to two days and substantially one scene, hardly realises the gain from such compression. Instead of intensifying progressively, Balzac has at last to append his conclusion, and for lack of gradation to leave his tale barely credible. _Les Proscrits_ (1831), more unified in imaginative conception, and again limited in time-lapse, again fails of that progressive intensity which is the very essence of Poe’s force and Mérimée’s. It is not even held steady, but lapses into intrusive erudition and falls into three quite separate scenes. Others of Balzac’s short pieces, _La messe de l’athée_ (1836), for example, and _Z. Marcas_ (1840), are obviously in form, like many of Hawthorne’s, essays woven on anecdote or character. Some of his tales may, indeed, have suggested the opportunity of different handling. Some of them, at any rate, seem from our point of view almost to call for that. But his own handling does not seem, as Poe’s does, directive. And in general, much as Balzac had to teach his successors, had he much to teach them of form? [Sidenote: Gautier.] The tales of Musset, which are but incidental in his development, and are confined, most of them, within the years 1837–1838, show no grasp of form. Gautier, even more evidently than Mérimée, preferred the _nouvelle_, partly from indolent fluency, partly from a slight sense of narrative conclusion. Few even of his most compact _contes_, such as _Le nid de rossignols_, compress the time. He was garrulous; he had read Sterne[34]; above all, he was bent, like Sterne, on description. But Gautier too shows a striking exception. _La morte amoureuse_, though it has not Poe’s mechanism of compression, is otherwise so startlingly like Poe that one turns involuntarily to the dates. _La morte amoureuse_ appeared in 1836; _Berenice_, in 1835. The _Southern Literary Messenger_ could not have reached the boulevards in a year. Indeed, the debt of either country to the other can hardly be proved. Remarkable as is the coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of a new literary form, it remains a coincidence. And whereas by 1837 Poe was in full career on his hobby, Gautier and Mérimée did not repeat the excursion. [Sidenote: France and America.]