His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook, often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola. In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a _conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet, poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform, standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes, tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.