novel, and the editor of a weekly paper said that it was too long for a short story.

In time, of course, his luck turned; he had plays performed and stories published; and at last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on that collaboration of nearly twenty years' duration to which we owe "Froufrou" and "Tricoche et Cacolet," on the one hand, and on the other the books of Offenbach's most brilliant operas—"Barbebleue," for example, and "La Périchole." When this collaboration terminated, shortly before M. Halévy wrote The Abbé Constantin, he gave up writing for the stage. The training of the playwright he could not give up, if he would, nor the intimacy with the manners and customs of the people who live, move, and have their being on the far side of the curtain.

Obviously M. Halévy is fond of the actors and the actresses with whom he spent the years of his manhood. They appear again and again in his tales; and in his treatment of them there is never anything ungentlemanly as there was in M. Jean Richepin's recent volume of theatrical sketches. M. Halévy's liking for the men and women of the stage is deep; and wide is his knowledge of their changing moods. The young Criquette and the old Karikari and the aged Dancing-master—he knows them all thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, nowhere can one find more kindly portraits of the kindly player-folk than in the writings of this half-author of "Froufrou"; it is as though the successful dramatist felt ever grateful towards the partners of his toil, the companions of his struggles. He is not blind to their manifold weaknesses, nor is he the dupe of their easy emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their failings, and towards them, at least, his irony is never mordant.

Irony is one of M. Halévy's chief characteristics, perhaps the chiefest. It is gentle when he deals with the people of the stage—far gentler then than when he is dealing with the people of Society, with fashionable folk, with the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling us of the young loves of millionaires and of million-heiresses, his touch may seem caressing, but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws none the less. It is amusing to note how often M. Halévy has chosen to tell the tale of love among the very rich. The heroine of The Abbé Constantin is immensely wealthy, as we all know, and immensely wealthy are the heroines of Princesse, of A Grand Marriage, and of In the Express.[A] Sometimes the heroes and the heroines are not only immensely wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth; such, for instance, are the young couple whose acquaintance we make in the pages of Only a Waltz.

There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. Halévy's treatment of all this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things. There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer. The amiable egotism of the hero of In the Express, and the not unkindly selfishness of the heroine of that most Parisian love-story, are set before us without insistence, it is true, but with an irony so keen that even he who runs as he reads may not mistake the author's real opinion of the characters he has evoked.

To say this is to say that M. Halévy's irony is delicate and playful. There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halévy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as are so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they have brought on themselves.

Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow blindly. Now, while the author of Salamnbo was a romanticist turned sour, the author of Carmen was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony. To Gustave Flaubert the world was hideously ugly, and he wished it strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he detested it the more because of his impossible ideal. To Prosper Merimée the world was what it is, to be taken and made the best of, every man keeping himself carefully guarded. Like Merimée, M. Halévy is detached, but he is not disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste, nothing corroding—as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner short stories of Maupassant.

More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian. Whether or not the characters of his tale are dwellers in the capital, whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the Seine, the point of view is always Parisian. The Circus Charger did his duty in the stately avenues of a noble country-place, and Blacky performed his task near a rustic water-fall; but the men who record their intelligent actions are Parisians of the strictest sect. Even in the patriotic pieces called forth by the war of 1870, in the Insurgent and in the Chinese Ambassador, it is the siege of Paris and the struggle of the Communists which seem to the author most important. His style even, his swift and limpid prose—the prose which somehow corresponds to the best vers de société in its brilliancy and buoyancy—is the style of one who lives at the centre of things. 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.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

ONLY A WALTZ

"Aunt, dear aunt, don't believe a word of what he is going to tell you. He is preparing to fib, to fib outrageously. If I hadn't interrupted him at the beginning of his talk, he would have told you that he had made up his mind to marry me from his and my earliest childhood."

"Of course!" exclaimed Gontran.

"Of course not," replied Marceline. "He was going to tell you that he was a good little boy, having always loved his little cousin, and that our marriage was a delightful romance of tenderness and sweetness."

"Why, yes, of course," repeated Gontran.

"Nonsense! The truth, Aunt Louise, the real truth, in short, is this, never, never should we have been married if on the 17th of May, 1890, between nine and eleven o'clock, he had not lost 34,000 points at bezique at the club, and if all the boxes had not been sold, that same night, at the Bouffes-Parisiens Theatre."

Gontran began to