Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. MASTER-TALES PARISIAN POINTS OF VIEW BY LUDOVIC HALEVY TRANSLATED BY EDITH V.B. MATTHEWS WITH INTRODUCTION BY BRANDER MATTHEWS [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION vii ONLY A WALTZ 3 THE DANCING-MASTER 37 THE CIRCUS CHARGER 49 BLACKY 69 THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN PARIS 83 THE STORY OF A BALL-DRESS 113 THE INSURGENT 137 THE CHINESE AMBASSADOR 147 IN THE EXPRESS 161 INTRODUCTION THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY To most American readers of fiction I fancy that M. Ludovic Halevy is known chiefly, if not solely, as the author of that most charming of modern French novels, _The Abbe Constantin_. Some of these readers may have disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's because of its bad moral, and this or that novel of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, and all of them were delighted to discover in M. Halevy's interesting and artistic work a story written by a French gentleman for young ladies. Here and there a scoffer might sneer at the tale of the old French priest and the young women from Canada as innocuous and saccharine; but the story of the good Abbe Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl the nephew loved in spite of her American millions--this story had the rare good fortune of pleasing at once the broad public of indiscriminate readers of fiction and the narrower circle of real lovers of literature. Artificial the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it was with an artifice at once delicate and delicious; and the tale itself won its way into the hearts of the women of America as it had into the hearts of the women of France.