Viewing the subject generally, as one must in attempting a survey of so varied a field as the last eighty years in French fiction, there are several periods fairly well-defined in the movement of the short-story. As a differentiated type the short-story appeared at a time when classical ideals of form had broken down and moral ideals also had quite fallen. For three decades, precise, logical prose had been as cheerfully scouted as were old-fashioned swaddling-clothes of personal virtue. For a period equally long, “Freedom” had been the sweet word every one uttered with unction. Rousseau had laid his blade to the root of the existing order; Chateaubriand had broken loose from the fetters of old literary forms; Madame de Staël had coined the word “romanticism” with a new image and a superscription enchanting to the mind agitated by the sudden opening of the unknown; the success of French arms abroad had let in a flood of new ideas--the reign of romance was undisputed. Color, movement, dreams, enthusiasm--all these prose began to borrow from poetry. Charles Emmaniel Nodier--a classicist in form, but a romanticist in spirit--began his florid tales, while Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset applied their poetic skill to the telling of prose stories. But the romantic movement began to wane in the early forties, not, however, before reaching a brilliant high-tide in the work of the elder Dumas. Even Gautier would sometimes scoff in his supremely clever style at the extravagances of the period. But the chief force in this breakdown of the romantic school was Honoré de Balzac, whose brilliant short-story work, chiefly done from 1830 to 1832, laid the foundations of a new school of shorter fiction in France, as the de Goncourts and Stendhal had already done for longer fiction--for Balzac was less an originator than a developer of the psychological novel. However, in fiction long and short, his moderate realism stands to-day as the most important example of his school. Prosper Mérimée became a realist only after having begun as a romanticist; Alphonse Daudet never fully came under the sway of realistic principles; and Ludovic Halévy generally chose a romantic theme even when treating it realistically, so that we must turn to Balzac as the representative of his class. In Gustave Flaubert, a stylist of the most finished order, but latterly a severe classicist, we find an example of the slight classical reaction which followed the reign of realism. A similar romantic reaction is seen in the short tales of the collaborators, Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain, as well as of François Coppée. Here the joint influence of the German Hoffmann and the American Poe is plainly evident.