The primacy of the French as _conteurs_ is doubtless due quite as much to the rich and colorful provincial life which surrounds the capital as to their priority as tellers of short tales. It has been said that Paris is France. Nothing could be less true. Here is a nation which presents the unique paradox of being at once and supremely homogeneous and heterogeneous. The life of each province is part of its soil, colored by the soil--or by the ever-present sea. Yet France has a spirit of nationality equalled by no other nation. While what is now the German Empire was still an unrelated number of minor peoples or an integral part of some vaster state, France was a unified or at least a closely federated kingdom. While Britain was changing under its successive tides of invasion, what was essentially France was sending out its national culture world-wide--it over-climbed the Pyrenees, it spread into the Low Countries, in the west it conquered the Swiss tongue, it permeated the Rhenish provinces, it implanted Norman life in Britain. Thus grew the French national spirit. Yet the provinces held tenaciously to their own picturesque types, spoke their more than a hundred _patois_, wore their folk costumes, sang their native songs, danced their own dances--unchanging through the centuries. And nowhere more than in the French short-story may we see depicted the peculiar French provincial traits. The folk of Champagne and Picardy are shrewd, subtle, ardent, and born _conteurs_--witness the stories of Juliette Lamber. Those of Berry are stolid and solid, as pictured by Madame Nahant. The Gascons are vivacious, daring, and cunning, as set forth by Emil Pouvillon. The people of Languedoc are simple, strong and violent, as described by Georges Baume. The happy, excitable sun-children of Provence, reveling among their olive groves and vineyards, have been portrayed by Alphonse Daudet; the picturesque Provençal sailors and fisherfolk live again in the stories of Auguste Marin; while Paul Arène has done loving service not only for Provence but for Maine as well. Maupassant has given us notable portraits of the Norman--bold, tricky, ambitious, economical, and of superb physique as befits the sons of sturdy men-at-arms. Loti’s stories are redolent of the salty spume of rough, melancholy, religious Brittany. And so, in the same recognition of rich material, Theuriet paints Lorraine, Erckmann and Chatrian the Rhine province of Alsace, Fabre the Cévennes, Anatole le Braz the Breton coast, Mérimée Corsica, Maupassant Auverne, and Balzac Touraine. What a wonderful color box has the French story-painter always open to his brush! Truly the soil and the sea have marked this period of the short-story as well as the novel.