The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the influence of which was visible in André Gide's _Les Caves du Vatican_, have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels of M. Pierre Benoit, _Königsmarck_ and _l'Atlantide_, are clever books, in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider Haggard, have not already given him. The _Maître du Navire_ of M. Louis Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in _Le Chant de l'Equipage_ of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the same difference as between the ghost in _Hamlet_ and the ghost which Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone, in _Semiramis_. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season. What I have called the little novel of irony and sentiment has had a longer, a more vivacious, and a more durable existence. It is almost peculiar to French literature and produces every year a good harvest of agreeable books. It is generally an invertebrate composition, made up of humorous episodes and reflections, the slight daily impressions of a man of letters, delicate and fatigued, in Parisian surroundings. It is, as it were, the chronicle-novel of French literary life. A great number of the works of M. Abel Hermant belong to this style, and among them, in particular, the Anglo-French novel, half of Paris, half of Oxford, which he is now publishing, and the first two parts of which are called _L'Aube Ardente_ and _La Journée Brève_ (the latter in course of publication in the _Revue de Paris_). These are, like M. Hermant's books, the elegantly but frigidly written compositions which come only from a literary and conventional atmosphere and appear to have been developed in the author's mind as in an artificial incubator.