The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une Jeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final. There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout. When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop, and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens, all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is speaking.