Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: FRANCOIS COPPEE.] FROM THE FRENCH Ten Tales By Francois Coppee _Translated by WALTER LEARNED, with fifty pen-and-ink drawings by ALBERT E. STERNER, and an introduction by BRANDER MATTHEWS_ NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1891 Copyright, 1890, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ CONTENTS. THE CAPTAIN'S VICES TWO CLOWNS A VOLUNTARY DEATH A DRAMATIC FUNERAL THE SUBSTITUTE AT TABLE AN ACCIDENT THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF THE FOSTER SISTER MY FRIEND MEURTRIER INTRODUCTION. The _conte_ is a form of fiction in which the French have always delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the _jongleurs_ and the _trouveres_, past the periods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the present. The _conte_ is a tale, something more than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The _Canterbury Tales_ are _contes_, most of them, if not all; and so are some of the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The free-and-easy tales of Prior were written in imitation of the French _conte en vers_; and that, likewise, was the model of more than one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin Dobson. No one has succeeded more abundantly in the _conte en vers_ than M. Coppee. Where was there ever anything better of its kind than _L'Enfant de la Balle?_--that gentle portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed in a chain of occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical managers and at their hostility towards poetic plays. Where is there anything of a more simple pathos than _L'Epave?_--that story of a sailor's son whom the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship M. Coppee loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the streets of the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story some incident of daily occurrence made significant by his interpretation; he chooses some character common-place enough, but made firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's _contes_ either in prose or verse; they are nearly all pictures of _life among the lowly_. But there is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is