An invalided old cuirassier of the First Empire, Colonel Jouve, lies in his room in the Champs-Élysées, fronting the Arc de Triomphe. Day by day his grand-daughter brings to him news of the progress of the war. So fully is his life wrapped up in the success of the French armies that, in order to brighten his closing days, they tell him fictitious stories of his compatriots’ success. But one day, when the enemy’s lines have drawn close about the beleaguered capital and the end is at hand, it becomes difficult to deceive the old soldier any longer. Still, fresh victories are always supplied by the news-bureau of love, and the old man can scarcely wait for the homecoming of the victorious battalions. So when one day the sound of bugle and drum is heard, and the tramp of marching feet beneath the windows of the upper room, you can picture the delight of this old veteran. With a superhuman effort he leaves his bed and looks out of the window--only to see the Prussian troops instead of the cheering cohorts of his countrymen! And in this last pang of disappointment, the old man dies. Both of these stories end with the note of disappointment and consequent sorrow. Poe has declared that the tone of beauty is sadness, and surely there is a penetrating beauty as well as a thrill of sublimity in the sadness of these wonderfully-wrought episodes. Here may be seen the beginnings of the realistic method which Daudet later adopted. Yet, as these stories both indicate, he still carried with him the romanticism of his earlier inspirations, untouched by either the too painful naturalism or the sentimentality of some of his later stories. In still greater contrast than either of these to the other is the story of our present translation, “The Pope’s Mule.” Here are all the joyous satire, the rollicking fun-making, and the picturesque description, of this unexcelled interpreter of southern life. Daudet’s wit and humor, characterization and description, local color, kaleidoscopic pageantry, are at their best, with never a thought of enforcing a moral or of sounding any emotion deeper than that of boyish amusement. It is the creator of Tartarin who now writes, and not the later master of the novelist’s art. Notwithstanding the success of the fecund and versatile author of _Sapho_, as a playwright, and his much wider vogue as a novelist, I wonder if after all he did not love best his short-stories and prose fantasies. In his greatest real novels, _Froment, Jr., and Risler, Sr._; _Jack_; _The Nabob_; _Kings in Exile_; and _Numa Roumestan_, the episode often occurs, of which literary form some further words will be said in the treatment of Loti.