There are, in the literary world of Paris, those who do not scruple to assert that Madame Audoux’s great pastoral novel, _Marie-Claire_, was in reality written by Charles-Louis Philippe. I wonder if those inconsiderate critics can have read either author! It is as though one should accuse Baudelaire of having written the country novels of George Sand; as though one should say that Thomas Hardy really wrote Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_. The incomparable simplicity and serenity of _Marie-Claire_ are as different as may be from the difficult harmony, the obscure, subtle, poignant intuitions of Philippe. It is true that Philippe was gaining in simplicity (perhaps from his contact with Madame Audoux?) when he died. And no doubt he was prodigal of counsel, aid, and precept to the little dressmaker who was his pupil in letters: he showed her, perhaps, in a novel, how to ‘cut out.’ But their genius, their experience, their character, and even their view of life is quite distinct: the one infinitely minute, tormented, tragic; the other large, quiet, and serene; either equally sincere. It was Madame Audoux who called the friends--the ardent, devoted friends--of Philippe to the nursing home in the Rue de la Chaise, where he lay dying of typhoid fever; it was she, with his mother, summoned from Cérilly, who received his dying breath; and he had often spoken in his circle of the noble imagination, the just and luminous elegance of mind which distinguish _Marie-Claire_. So that when the book appeared there were friends to greet it--the friends of poor Philippe, dead in his grave. But the book did not need these protectors, for its success was immediate, popular, immense, and by no means purely literary; readers, who had barely heard of Philippe himself, of André Gide, of any of Madame Audoux’s literary clan, opened her volume in their thousands. The story has been translated into several languages--into English, I think. No doubt it owed something to Mirbeau’s eloquent preface, revealing the author’s personality. The public is sentimental; it was touched by the picture of the poor little dressmaker--not a princess of tape and scissors, but one of those little snips who go out to ladies’ houses, working for half a crown a day. The account of this poor woman, no longer quite young, suddenly threatened with blindness if she pursue her trade; turning then, for a consolation, as much as for a means of livelihood, to literature, and with her first venture discovering herself a great artist; this poignant history seemed to the public a novel before the novel began. Will Marguerite Audoux, intimidated by this rare success, remain the woman of one book? I hope not! If she dare not again attack the pastoral novel, let her write the touching life of her friend and master, Philippe. Or let her turn from the fields of France to the moving story of a woman alone in Paris, earning the right to live as she draws an interminable thread.