Theuriet’s selection of themes is a happy index to his nature. The one and the other are clean, uncomplicated by intrigue, and in the main agreeable. Are there many to-day who will be attracted to this man when his fiction is called restful and gentle? I do not know, since we are all so busy and turbulent and--disillusioned. But we ought to be, if we are not, drawn by thoughts of a melodious rhythm of words portraying honest emotions, of country life that exhales the “perfume of new hay and of ripe wheat,” of woodsy ways and forest folk--in a word, thoughts of a world where, as in _La Bretonne_, the lowliest respond to human need, and even crime cannot stamp out the image of the beautiful, a world full of goodness rising out of the ooze of evil. And so it was country-life--country-life in Lorraine, enriched and made beautiful by the Loire--that inspired not only his early poems, but also the numerous novels, plays, sketches, and short-stories which stand to his credit--and I use the word designedly. After a notable if not brilliant career as author and journalist, Theuriet died in Paris, 1897. Relatively little of Theuriet’s work is known to readers who know not French, but of this little probably the long short-story, “The Abbé Daniel,” is the most familiar. It is in the style of Ludovic Halévy’s “Abbé Constantin,” and of about the same length--a little classic of “polite rusticity,” of pastoral love, sorrow, loss, and happiness, limpid in style and artistically balanced in structure. The plot is simple: Young Daniel loves his beautiful cousin Denise, but she marries Beauvais, the rough, hearty, typical bourgeois landed proprietor. A daughter is born--a second Denise--but the mother does not long survive. Young Daniel has entered the church and become “The Abbé Daniel.” His simple goodness leads him to adopt an orphaned lad, whom he cherishes as he would his own. One day the Abbé finds little Daniel, as he is called, feeding a threshing machine. In terror for the child’s danger, the Abbé shows his friends what the lad was doing, and the loss of his own arm is the penalty. He now resigns his parish and goes to live with the widowed father of the little Denise and assumes charge of her education, lavishing upon the child the affection he was forbidden to give to her mother. The children learn to love each other, but young Daniel goes away to the Crimean War and seems to forget. Meanwhile, Beauvais plans to marry his daughter Denise to a worthy young nobody of means, but the loving Abbé sends for his protégé, who promptly returns on leave, and the end is not difficult to surmise. All this brief narration is but sketching the frame and omitting the picture, for who can feel the charm of the simple but never insipid story when it is bereft of the witchery of Theuriet’s style! It is worth while knowing at first hand a real French home, with the farmer-father, the daughter, the young soldier, and the Abbé Daniel.