In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark Twain the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English which furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration and long citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme. Blanc introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile Blemont, in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still further enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a number of his slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations) of 'Life on the Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un humoriste'; and his prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in France at that time may be accepted as authoritative. He pointed out the praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popularize these “transatlantic gaieties,” to import into France a new mode of comic entertainment. Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national character, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a country, the specialized conception of the _vis comica_ revealed in Mark Twain's works, confined them to a restricted milieu. The result of all the efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess. By some, indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental alienation; and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a passport to the incoherence of his conceptions. “It has been said,” remarked M. Forgues, with keen perception, “that an academician slumbers in the depths of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the success of Mark Twain in France. Humour, in France, has its laws and its restrictions. So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of the crowd. They were tenacious in resisting all such blandishments . . . . As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated in France. The appreciation he ultimately secured--an appreciation by no means inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries--was due to his sagacity and penetration as an observer, and to his marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and situations by the clever use of the novel and the _imprevu_. There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an intelligence absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence for traditionary views _qua_ traditionary.” Though at first the salt of Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition of the genially naive American, in time won its way with the _blase_ Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street