“Et de même que, tous les soirs, Ils font autour du reliquaire Fumer les légers encensoirs. Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire Qui pousse des cris importuns, Dans ces poèmes je veux faire A tous mes beaux rêves défunts, A toutes mes chères reliques, Une chapelle de parfums Et de cierges mélancoliques.” In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of his architecture. He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability. Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that pervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father, learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he himself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Coppée finds in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped out of it. I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not often cry aloud, “Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.” He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head, he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant. Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and loss of it.