In 1878, after having been for some years employed in the Senate Library, Coppée was appointed Guardian of the Archives of the Comédie Française. It was then that he began to produce that remarkable series of some fifty short fictions by which he is best known to us. One year after the publication of his first volume of stories, _Contes en Prose_ (1882), he was distinguished by election to the Academy, and in 1885 he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. His other collections of stories are _Vingt Contes Nouveaux_ (1883), _Contes et Recits en Prose_ (1885), _Contes Rapides_ (1888), _Contes Tout Simples_ (1894), and _Contes pour les Jours de Fête_ (1903). In considering Coppée’s fictional work, it seems worth while to point out its varied types, and at the same time note the meaning of several short fictional forms which will be referred to frequently in this volume and in succeeding volumes of the series. His favorite type seems to have been the tale--which is not the plotted short-story, nor yet the sketch, but rather a straightforward narration with little or no plot, and usually depending for its interest upon a longer or shorter chain of incidents. The French word _conte_ sufficiently describes the tale, because _conte_ means really just _story_, and thus the generic term includes all the shorter fictional forms. To most English readers, the term short-story means merely a story that is short, but modern usage limits the word--the compound word, to be precise--to a somewhat specialized type. The typical short-story eludes precise definition, because it is an elastic, living thing--often the more interesting for its very disregard of an exact technical form. Certain things, however, the real short-story does possess: a single central dominant incident, a single preëminent character or pair of characters, a complication (not necessarily at all involved) the resolution or untying or dénouement of that complication, and a treatment so compressed and unified as to produce a singleness of impression. Here, naturally, is much latitude, but above all the short-story must focus a white light upon one spot, upon a crucial instance, to use Mrs. Wharton’s admirable expression, and must not diffuse that light over a whole life, a series of loosely related happenings, or a general condition of affairs. But the fictional sketch presents nothing of the organization seen in the typical short-story. It is a fragment, a detached though perhaps a complete impression, a bit of character caught in passing, a rapidly outlined picture, but not depending upon a complication and its unfolding for its interest.