Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,” a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men, attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter, when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities, rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt, like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone. 1909. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION _To I. C. R._