For the French novelist, for all his so-called realism, takes neither his characters nor his scenes from everyday life, his contention being that, were he to do so, he would produce a work so insufferably dull that no one would buy it. Writing, not as we do _virginibus puerisque_, but for readers who like the dots to be placed upon the i’s, he sets before them a succession of pictures from life, drawn often with great power and insight into human nature, nearly always with scrupulous exactitude of detail, and asserts—what cannot be denied—that they are true pictures. It is a pity that they are usually unpleasant pictures, and that they are liable to be misinterpreted by readers who adopt the too common course of arguing from the particular to the general. There is no occasion to dispute the accuracy of the scenes portrayed in such books as “Le Nabab” or “Les Rois en Exil,” or to doubt that the author could, if he chose, point to the living or dead originals of his chief characters and declare that he has maligned none of them; but when we find him, year after year dwelling and insisting upon what is most ignoble in his fellow-creatures, we are surely entitled to accuse him of a _suppressio veri_ and a _suggestio falsi_. With the single exception of “Tartarin de Tarascon,” which is a burlesque, I do not remember one of M. Daudet’s books, from “Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné,” down to “Sapho,” his last and infinitely his worst production, which does not leave behind it a profound impression of sadness. “C’est la faute de la vie, qui dicte,” he said once, in answer to this reproach, as though life had but one side, or as though the literal truthfulness of a photograph conveyed all that there is to be seen in a landscape. But indeed some people, as we know, have the misfortune to be color-blind, and to them, no doubt, the outlines of the world must seem to be filled in rather with shade than with light. One may pay a willing homage to M. Daudet’s genius and yet suspect that life, if he had chosen to listen, might have dictated to him different stories from those which he has published, and one may question whether his sons will be much the better for reading “Sapho” even “quand ils auront vingt ans.”