_Marie-Claire_ is the history of an orphan girl, brought up in an orphanage, placed out at thirteen years of age as little shepherdess on a farm; some five years later--after the merest sketch of a love-story with her mistress’s brother--dismissed; again received at the orphanage as cook or kitchen-maid, until, on the last page of all--not yet twenty years of age, she takes the train for Paris. Can one imagine anything flatter, staler, more unprofitable? Such stories must be written by the thousand in the simple annals of the poor. And yet _Marie-Claire_ is a sequence of images of unforgettable loveliness. The story is divided into three parts; and if the beginning and the end--the convent and the love-story--have their rare merits, the middle section, the life of the little shepherdess on the farm, seems to me in all sincerity equal to the loveliest pastoral novels of George Sand--to _François le Champi_ or _Le petite Fadette_. The shepherdess and her flock lost in the mist, and that winter scene, when a ‘great yellow dog’ pounces on a sheep and drags it away while the collie howls plaintively, crouching at the shepherdess’s feet:-- ‘Aussitôt je devinai que c’était un loup. Il emportait le mouton à pleine gueule, par le milieu du corps. Il grimpa sans effort sur le talus et quand il sauta le large fossé qui le séparait du bois, ses pattes de derrière me firent penser à des ailes. À ce moment je n’aurais pas trouvé extraordinaire qu’il se fut envolé pardessus les arbres.’ And the personages of the farm: Maître Sylvain, the kind Pauline, the friendly delicate-minded Eugène, are drawn not only with an artist’s sense of beauty, but with a marvellous and mysterious sense of life. In France to-day there are many women writers of great talent and success: Madame Marcelle Tinayre, with her _Maison du Péché_; Madame de Noailles, with her wonderful poems; Mlle Marie Lenéru, with her plays; I admire them all with my heart, but I think I would as soon have written _Marie-Claire_! Madame Audoux is not the only pupil of Charles-Louis Philippe: Émile Guillaumin is also of his following, or at least he resembles him in his birthplace and his profession. Guillaumin is a farmer who lives on his farm, about ten miles from Cérilly; he works the land with his brother; and, in the intervals of seedtime and harvest he, too, writes pastoral novels about the pleasant country round the Allier river.