friend he has in the world, all unworthy
as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds
"My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has
been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties, making the
coffee of his good old mother and taking her poodle out for a walk.

Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure
of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns," cutting
in its sarcasm, but not bitter--from "The Captain's Vices," which
suggests at once George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ and Mr. Austin Dobson's
_Tale of Polypheme_, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a
sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies
the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic
Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous
reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk,
who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic
Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean
Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy
de Maupassant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain's
sketches in black-and-white.

An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in _The Odd Number_ has
protested to me that M. Coppee is not an etcher like M. de Maupassant,
but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M.
Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the
very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppee's _contes_ have not the
sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's--but
what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy,
poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by
those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppee's street views
in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the
shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely
to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the
varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really
rivalled either by those of M. de Maupassant, who is a Norman by birth
and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of
Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee
is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps
this is wh