MASTER-TALES

PARISIAN

POINTS OF VIEW

BY

LUDOVIC HALÉVY

TRANSLATED BY

EDITH V.B. MATTHEWS

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONLY A WALTZ

THE DANCING-MASTER

THE CIRCUS CHARGER

BLACKY

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN PARIS

THE STORY OF A BALL-DRESS

THE INSURGENT

THE CHINESE AMBASSADOR

IN THE EXPRESS

INTRODUCTION

THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALÉVY

To most American readers of fiction I fancy that M. Ludovic Halévy is known chiefly, if not solely, as the author of that most charming of modern French novels, The Abbé Constantin. Some of these readers may have disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's because of its bad moral, and this or that novel of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, and all of them were delighted to discover in M. Halévy's interesting and artistic work a story written by a French gentleman for young ladies. Here and there a scoffer might sneer at the tale of the old French priest and the young women from Canada as innocuous and saccharine; but the story of the good Abbé Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl the nephew loved in spite of her American millions—this story had the rare good fortune of pleasing at once the broad public of indiscriminate readers of fiction and the narrower circle of real lovers of literature. Artificial the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it was with an artifice at once delicate and delicious; and the tale itself won its way into the hearts of the women of America as it had into the hearts of the women of France.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!