After the ninth of Thermidor, the nuns and the Abbé de Marolles were able to go about Paris without incurring the least danger. The first errand of the old priest was to a perfumer’s shop, at the sign of _La Reine des Fleurs_, kept by Citizen and Citizeness Ragon, formerly perfumers to the Court, who had remained faithful to the royal family, and of whose services the Vendeans availed themselves to correspond with the princes and the royalist committee in Paris. The abbé, dressed according to the style of that epoch, was standing on the doorstep of that shop, between Saint-Roch and _Rue des Frondeurs_, when a crowd which filled the _Rue Saint-Honoré_ prevented him from going out. “What is it?” he asked Madame Ragon. “It is nothing,” she replied; “just the tumbril and the executioner, going to the Place Louis XV. Ah, we saw him very often last year; but to-day, four days after the anniversary of the twenty-first of January, we can look at that horrible procession without distress.” “Why so?” said the abbé. “It is not Christian, that which you say.” “Eh, it’s the execution of the accomplices of Robespierre. They defended themselves as long as they could, but they’re going now themselves where they have sent so many innocents.” The crowd passed like a flood. Over the sea of heads, the Abbé de Marolles, yielding to an impulse of curiosity, saw standing on the tumbril the man who, three days before, had listened to his mass. “Who is that?” he said, “that man who----” “That is the headsman,” replied Monsieur Ragon, calling the executioner of the great by his monarchical name. “My friend, my friend,” cried Madame Ragon, “_monsieur l’abbé_ is fainting!” And the old woman seized a phial of salts, in order to bring the old priest to himself. “Without doubt he gave me,” said he, “the handkerchief with which the King wiped his brow when he went to his martyrdom.... Poor man! ... That steel knife had a heart, when all France had none!” The perfumers thought that the unhappy priest was delirious. LUDOVIC HALÉVY, PARISIAN That there is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a French short-story, Ludovic Halévy’s fictional work illustrates perfectly, for in theme, tone, and treatment it is French. More specifically still, it is Parisian. As Professor Brander Matthews observes in his discerning introduction to _Parisian Points of View_, a collection of our author’s stories, “Cardinal Newman once said that while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the other, may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.” His was indeed the Parisian point of view, his the sympathetic understanding of the pursuits, the temperament, the ideals, of the dwellers in the Capital of Europe.