“The Insurgent,” first published in 1872, follows, in translation. It is without doubt Ludovic Halévy’s most intense and dramatic short narrative, yet none is more simply told. In this expanded anecdote the writer actually becomes the Insurgent, and so vigorous, so sympathetic, is the portraiture that every word comes sincerely and naturally from the soul of the speaker. Halévy does not speak _as_ such a one would--he _is_ the Insurgent--life, breath, and word. It is a miracle of compression--not the compression of conscious literary art, but the tense, naïve, open brevity of one who has no embroideries for his words, no masks for his sentiment, no apologies for his acts, but goes, as with the cleavage of an axe, straight to the heart of what he means. Yet with all of this brusk, speedy simplicity, abrupt, halting and rudely frank in style, there is a note of poignant pathos at the close that leaves the eye misty and the heart warm. In no one of Halévy’s stories do we see so clearly the application of his robust, sincere literary creed as confessed in his own words: “We must not write simply for the refined, the blasé, and the squeamish. We must write for that man who goes there on the street with his nose in his newspaper and his umbrella under his arm. We must write for that fat, breathless woman whom I see from my window, as she climbs painfully into the Odéon omnibus. We must write courageously for the _bourgeois_, if it were only to try to refine them, to make them less _bourgeois_. And if I dared, I should say that we must write even for fools.” THE INSURGENT (_L’INSURGÉ_) By Ludovic Halévy _Done into English by the Editor_ “Prisoner,” said the president of the court-martial, “have you anything to add in your defense?” “Yes, my colonel,” responded the accused; “you have given me a little advocate who has defended me according to his idea. I want to defend myself according to my own. “My name is Martin--Louis Joseph; I am fifty-five years old. My father was a locksmith. He had a little shop in the upper part of the Faubourg Saint-Martin and did a small business. We just about lived. I learned to read in _Le National_, which was, I believe, the paper of Monsieur Thiers. “The 27th of July, 1830, my father went out early in the morning. That evening at ten o’clock they brought him back to us dying on a litter. He had received a bullet in the chest. By his side upon the litter was his musket. “‘Take it,’ he said to me; ‘I give it to you, and every time there is to be an insurrection, be against the government--always! always! always!’