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rs, is a work of far different style and scope from his first great success. Among the rising writers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ the name of Andre Theuriet is rapidly becoming prominent. As chaste, as tender, as sincere as Daudet, if less gifted and poetical, he depicts provincial life and manners with scarcely less skill than does his brilliant contemporary the factory and the salons of the Marais. He is, above all, an adorer of the woods--not such wild virgin forests as may still be met with in our own land, but the decorous and well-trained woods of France, where the very trees seem to have learned politeness and keep to their own places, not one of them daring to tower to an undue height or to spread its roots or branches over an unaccustomed breadth of space. Born at Marly-le-Roi, his youth was spent at Bar-le-Duc, and in his mature manhood he was transferred to Auberive--three points where his love of forests could be indulged in to any extent. Something of the freshness, the summer sweetness, the natural charm of his favorite haunts seems to pervade the atmosphere of his graceful and delicate tales. He is one of the few French novelists one can imagine writing in English. _Gerard's Marriage_, _Angele's Fortune_, _An Undine_, are all imbued with that peculiar quality which the French call _honnetete_--an expression for which our language furnishes no equivalent. Neither striking in incident nor complicated in plot, his stories charm by their delicate delineations of character, their refinement of tone and sincerity of sentiment, and their truthfulness of description. His stories remind one of what Miss Mulock's novels used to be when she wrote her best, while Daudet might be characterized as a Parisian mingling of Hawthorne and Bret Harte, and Zola as a brutal Thackeray. M. Jules Claretie has written many novels. But he has also written plays, histories, biographies, leading articles: he is the most indefatigable of writers, as he is one of the most intelligent and clear-headed. He has, however, the defect of being a literary Don Juan, wasting his smiles amid the _mille e tre_ instead of consecrating his pen in legitimate wedlock to a single Muse. The immense facility with which he writes is fatal to the enduring success of his novels. They abound in powerful episodes and strong bits of description, and here and there some single scene, original in conception and forcible in treatment, starts out from the m
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