"The Lighthouse
Keeper" looking on any lighthouse, or "Yanko the Musician" listening
to a poor wandering boy playing on the street, or "Bartek the Victor"
seeing soldiers of which military discipline have made machines rather
than thinking beings, or "The Diary of a Tutor" contemplating the pale
face of children overloaded with studies. Another difference between
those two writers--the comparison is always between their short
stories--is this, that while Sienkiewicz's figures and characters are
universal, international--if one can use this adjective here--and can
be applied to the students of any country, to the soldiers of any
nation, to any wandering musician and to the light-keeper on any sea,
the figures of Francois Coppee are mostly Parisian and could be hardly
displaced from their Parisian surroundings and conditions.

Sometimes the whole short story is written for the sake of that which
the French call _pointe_. When one has finished the reading of "Zeus's
Sentence," for a moment the charming description of the evening and
Athenian night is lost. And what a beautiful description it is! If
the art of reading were cultivated in America as it is in France
and Germany, I would not be surprised if some American Legouve or
Strakosch were to add to his repertoire such productions of prose as
this humorously poetic "Zeus's Sentence," or that mystic madrigal, "Be
Blessed."

"But the dusk did not last long," writes Sienkiewicz. "Soon from the
Archipelago appeared the pale Selene and began to sail like a silvery
boat in the heavenly space. And the walls of the Acropolis lighted
again, but they beamed now with a pale green light, and looked more
than ever like the vision of a dream."

But all these, and other equally charming pictures, disappear for a
moment from the memory of the reader. There remains only the final
joke--only Zeus's sentence. "A virtuous woman--especially when she
loves another man--can resist Apollo. But surely and always a stupid
woman will resist him."

Only when one thinks of the story does one see that the ending--that
"immoral conclusion" I should say if I were not able to understand the
joke--does not constitute the essence of the story. Only then we find
a delight in the description of the city for which the wagons cater
the divine barley, and the water is carried by the girls, "with
amphorae poised on their shoulders and lifted hands, going home, light
and graceful, like immortal nymphs."