ion of the old French schoolmaster taking leave
of his Alsatian pupils, has a symbolic breath not easy to match in the
livelier tales written before the surrender at Sedan; and in the "Siege
of Berlin" there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can
discover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. He
had had an inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeing
its hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of its
servants; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible
"Downfall" contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of the
imperial army than is to be read in Daudet's "Game of Billiards."

The short story, whether in prose or in verse, is a literary form in
which the French have ever displayed an easy mastery; and from Daudet's
three volumes it would not be difficult to select half-a-dozen little
masterpieces. The Provencal tales lack only rhymes to stand confessed
as poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights before
Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's
Mule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy?
And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic?
Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and
these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but his
stroke is never malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor poison
on the tip.

Scarcely inferior to the war-stories or to the Provencal sketches are
certain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, glimpsed
by an unforgetting eye, the "Last Book," for one, in which an unlovely
character is treated with kindly contempt; and for another, the
"Book-keeper," the most Dickens-like of Daudet's shorter pieces, yet
having a literary modesty Dickens never attained. The alleged imitation
of the British novelist by the French may be left for later
consideration; but it is possible now to note that in the earlier
descriptive chapters of the "Letters from my Mill" one may detect a
certain similarity of treatment and attitude, not to Dickens but to two
of the masters on whom Dickens modelled himself, Goldsmith and Irving.
The scene in the diligence, when the baker gently pokes fun at the poor
fellow whose wife is intermittent in her fidelity, is quite in the
manner of the "Sketch Book."

There is the same freshness and fertility in the collection called
"Artists' Wives" as in the