That there is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a French short-story, Ludovic Halévy’s fictional work illustrates perfectly, for in theme, tone, and treatment it is French. More specifically still, it is Parisian. As Professor Brander Matthews observes in his discerning introduction to Parisian Points of View, a collection of our author’s stories, “Cardinal Newman once said that while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the other, may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.” His was indeed the Parisian point of view, his the sympathetic understanding of the pursuits, the temperament, the ideals, of the dwellers in the Capital of Europe.

One service above others Halévy rendered to his Paris: while so many writers have given an unfortunate though piquant character to the French short-story by depicting chiefly the roué and the woman of easy manners, the vulgar money-king and the broken-down noble, the complacent pander and the sordid tradesman of Paris, this writer mostly chose to depict other types. He knew the gay city as few other writers of his day knew it, yet nearly all of his little fictions may be read aloud in a mixed company. The explanation of this wholesome spirit is simple—unlike the others, Halévy had not come up from the provinces with eyes ready to pop out at the city sights. From boyhood he knew all sides of Parisian life, and saw things in correct perspective, so he did not interpret light-heartedness to be lightness, nor gayety to be abandon. All sorts and conditions of men move in his stories, but the vicious, the sensual, the mean, are no more prominent in the Paris he paints than they are in the real Paris—and that means that they exist in much the same numerical proportion as in any other metropolis.

Halévy’s life does not lend itself to anecdote, for it lacked stirring events, yet his every large step marked a specific advance in his work.

On the first day of January, 1834, he was born in Paris, of Hebrew parents. His father, Léon Halévy, had attained to some distinction as a poet, and his uncle, Fromental Halévy, was not only director of singing at the Opera, but a celebrated composer as well. Upon completing his formal education at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, the youth entered the civil service in the Ministry of State, in six years rose to be chef de bureau at the Colonial Office, and finally became editor of the publications of the Legislative Corps. In these public offices he gained that inside view of official life which is apparent in his works.

Very early Halévy began to know the theatre, for through his uncle’s influence he was as a youngster of fourteen on the free-list of the principal theatres of Paris. Scarcely was he a man before he began the writing of numberless books for operas, burlesques, and dramas, the materials for which he had been gathering while meeting theatrical people of all grades. By and by some of these were published, some were acted, and at length he enjoyed a vogue. In collaboration with Henri Meilhac he wrote a number of opera books, notably La Belle Hélène, Blue-Beard, The Grand-Duchess of Gerolstein, The Brigands (all with music by Offenbach), Carmen (founded on Mérimée’s story), with music by Bizet, and The Little Duke, with music by Lecocq. These bright operettas and operas are typical of that mocking and practical spirit of the Second Empire which laughed away the old ideals with a zest worthy of a nobler occupation. His heavier play, Frou-Frou, though well known about a generation ago, is not so meritorious as his dramatic skits and sketches.

But Halévy’s work for the stage bore heavily upon his later success, for when he left the dramatic field to give almost exclusive service to the novel and shorter fiction, he by no means forgot the training of the earlier period. Always his understanding of the people of the stage is apparent. In many a tale these folk appear, and never is the hand that leads them forward ungentle, even when the words of the introducer are tinged with irony.

As for form, it is not especially in his plot-structure that we see traces of Halévy’s training in the drama, for he seldom emphasizes plot at all. But when he does depart from his favorite sketch form to attempt the short-story, he still writes simply; and so inevitably do the incidents succeed one another that there scarcely seems to be even a plot. Halévy’s early apprenticeship to the drama is most clearly seen, however, in his precision of outline, clear characterization, sense of dramatic values, unerring climax, and suppression of needless details.

Halévy took an active part in the Franco-Prussian War, vivid impressions of which he has given us in Notes and Memories and The Invasion—volumes which are half chronicle, half story-telling, and wholly delightful. After the catastrophe of Sedan, his fictional work dealing with theatrical folk began to appear. Madame Cardinal (1870), Monsieur Cardinal (1871), The Little Cardinals (1880), and Criquette (1883), are not really novels, but connected stories and sketches, giving a panorama of people and affairs theatrical—naturally, not of the loftiest tone. Halévy has drawn no more vivid characters than the Cardinals, father and mother, with their comedy anxiety as to the immoralities of their young ballet-dancing daughters, Pauline and Virginie, whose love affairs are portrayed with gayety and comical reality. The little Criquette is an actress who makes her début at the Theatre Porte-Saint-Martin. About this interesting central figure flit a score of perfect types of player-folk—clown, provincial manager, ardent young actor, the demi-mondaine actress, authors, chorus girls, and all the rest. Criquette is Halévy’s longest tale, and shows the sketch-artist and raconteur at his best.

But American readers doubtless know Ludovic Halévy most affectionately by his “Abbé Constantin,” which has gone through more than one hundred and fifty editions in France, besides numberless printings in other lands. In its first year of issue, 1882, at least thirty-five editions were required to meet the demand. It is a novelette in length, and a simple story in plot. Charming, ingenuous, idyllic, popular with all classes, it is a refreshing breath from rural France. The large estate of Longueval, comprising the castle and its dependencies, two fine farms and a forest, is announced for sale at auction. The Abbé Constantin, a warm-hearted, genial, self-sacrificing priest, quite the typical Abbé of romance—“a Curé, neither young, nor gloomy, nor stern; a Curé with white hair, and looking kind and gentle”—has been for three decades the village priest. He is disconsolate at the thought that all his associations must be broken up, and is all the more distressed when he hears that an American millionaire has bought the property. Lieutenant Jean Renaud, his godson, the orphaned son of the Abbé’s old friend, the village doctor, is about to sit down at meat with the old priest when two ladies arrive—the wife of the millionaire purchaser of Longueval, Mrs. Scott, and her sister, Miss Bettina Percival. How these bright and fascinating women win the heart of the benevolent priest, and adapt themselves to their new surroundings, and how Lieutenant Jean and Miss Bettina find their happiness, furnish the incidents for this crystal little romance.

“A Marriage for Love” (1881) is the most popular of Halévy’s longer short-stories. A young French officer marries a well-bred and ingenuous girl. Soon each discovers that the other has kept a diary from childhood. Thinking that the declarations of love which she sees written in her husband’s journal refer to some other woman, the young wife cries out, but is consoled by his protests, and it is agreed that they shall read aloud passages from their own diaries, turn about. With all the naïveté which it seems the special province of English eighteenth-century and French nineteenth-century writers to depict, these young people disclose in this fashion the birth and growth of their mutual love. A simple story enough, yet refreshing in the midst of so many Gallic records of marital infidelity.

Of Halévy’s shorter stories several stand out in particular. “Princess” tells with admirable directness how “the bourgeois heroine ... contrives to escape the lawyers ... and marry a real prince.” “A Grand Marriage” is the equally uncomplicated narrative of how the betrothal of an alert young Parisienne is arranged by her parents, with the clever and worldly-wise assistance of the prospective bride.

“The Most Beautiful Woman in Paris” is more a study than a story, yet the firmly wrought, breezy narrative style of the author is here at its best. The story runs that a social connoisseur, Prince Agénor, upon seeing at the Opera the wife of a lawyer, pronounces her to be the most beautiful woman in Paris. Then ensue flattering newspaper notices, the inflamed ambition of the advertised beauty, costly gowns, a new coupé—all that madame may appear fittingly at a social function at which it is announced that she is to appear, as well as the Prince. Madame does appear, but she is neglected because the Prince forgets to come to make her acquaintance—he has already found another “most beautiful woman in Paris.” The author’s narration is lively, as always, and his social observation confident and minute, while his characteristic, playful irony is second only to that of another unique story, “The Chinese Ambassador.”

In this we have as a motif the unsettled political conditions existing at the close of the Franco-Prussian War. The story is told with delightful humor, in diary form, by a Chinese Ambassador Extraordinary who has been sent to France and England with rich presents to placate the French and English governments, and also to arrange official reparation, for the massacre of some foreign residents in China. Then follow a series of confusions. There is no longer an Emperor in France, there are three rival French Republics, and another coup d’état seems imminent. So the Ambassador, not knowing whom to approach, keeps the presents, and waits. Soon he goes to England, where he meets the Queen. She accepts the apologies as well as the presents, but in conversation with some French women at a social function in London he finds that there are three claimants to the French throne, Napoleon III, the Duke of Orleans, and the Count of Paris—all in exile—to say nothing of the three rival presidents, Gambetta, Thiers, and Favre. He is again much in doubt as to which to approach with his mission, as he receives such contrary advice from all quarters. Upon his return to Paris, however, he finds the government has again changed its capitol, and that a seventh government is in the ascendancy—the Commune. When he learns that Paris is burning, he concludes that it is “a dead, destroyed, and annihilated city.” In two weeks, however, order is restored, and the Ambassador decides that it is still the most beautiful city in Europe, and the most brilliant, for the Republic of M. Thiers is now undisputed. To him he delivers his mission.

“The Story of a Ball Dress” is couched in an old form—the ball dress tells its own story; but we have a kaleidoscopic picture of the change of affairs before, during, and after the war—that war which plays so large a part in the writings of both Daudet and Halévy.

“The Insurgent,” first published in 1872, follows, in translation. It is without doubt Ludovic Halévy’s most intense and dramatic short narrative, yet none is more simply told. In this expanded anecdote the writer actually becomes the Insurgent, and so vigorous, so sympathetic, is the portraiture that every word comes sincerely and naturally from the soul of the speaker. Halévy does not speak as such a one would—he is the Insurgent—life, breath, and word. It is a miracle of compression—not the compression of conscious literary art, but the tense, naïve, open brevity of one who has no embroideries for his words, no masks for his sentiment, no apologies for his acts, but goes, as with the cleavage of an axe, straight to the heart of what he means. Yet with all of this brusk, speedy simplicity, abrupt, halting and rudely frank in style, there is a note of poignant pathos at the close that leaves the eye misty and the heart warm.

In no one of Halévy’s stories do we see so clearly the application of his robust, sincere literary creed as confessed in his own words:

“We must not write simply for the refined, the blasé, and the squeamish. We must write for that man who goes there on the street with his nose in his newspaper and his umbrella under his arm. We must write for that fat, breathless woman whom I see from my window, as she climbs painfully into the Odéon omnibus. We must write courageously for the bourgeois, if it were only to try to refine them, to make them less bourgeois. And if I dared, I should say that we must write even for fools.”