Ten Tales

Ten Tales, by François Coppée

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Title: Ten Tales
Author: François Coppée
Contributor: Brander Matthews
Illustrator: Albert E. Sterner
Translator: Warren Walter Learned
Release Date: January 15, 2007 [EBook #20380]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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TALES ***

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[Illustration: FRANÇOIS COPPÉE.]

FROM THE FRENCH

Ten Tales
By
François Coppée

Translated by WALTER LEARNED, with fifty pen-and-ink drawings by
ALBERT E. STERNER, and an introduction by BRANDER
MATTHEWS
NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1891

Copyright, 1890, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.
THE CAPTAIN'S VICES
TWO CLOWNS
A VOLUNTARY DEATH
A DRAMATIC FUNERAL
THE SUBSTITUTE

AT TABLE
AN ACCIDENT
THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF
THE FOSTER SISTER
MY FRIEND MEURTRIER

INTRODUCTION.
The conte is a form of fiction in which the French have always
delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the
jongleurs and the trouvères, past the periods of La Fontaine and
Voltaire, down to the present. The conte is a tale, something more than
a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is
at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the
direct swiftness of a ballad. The Canterbury Tales are contes, most of
them, if not all; and so are some of the Tales of a Wayside Inn. The
free-and-easy tales of Prior were written in imitation of the French
conte en vers; and that, likewise, was the model of more than one of the
lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin Dobson.
No one has succeeded more abundantly in the conte en vers than M.
Coppée. Where was there ever anything better of its kind than L'Enfant
de la Balle?--that gentle portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed in a
chain of occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical managers and
at their hostility towards poetic plays. Where is there anything of a
more simple pathos than L'Épave?--that story of a sailor's son whom
the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that
killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship M.
Coppée loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of Paris,
he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate fidelity.)
But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the streets of
the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story some incident of
daily occurrence made significant by his interpretation; he chooses

some character common-place enough, but made firmer by conflict
with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he puts into his poems
are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the unknown; and it is
the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin
sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-title
Mrs. Stowe gave to Uncle Tom's Cabin would serve to cover most of M.
Coppée's contes either in prose or verse; they are nearly all pictures of
life among the lowly. But there is no forcing of the note in his painting
of poverty and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and
the whites. The tone is always manly and wholesome.
La Marchande de Journaux and the other little masterpieces of
story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems
but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated
poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the
tales which M. Coppée has written in prose--a true poet's prose,
nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm--these can be Englished by taking
thought and time and pains, without which a translation is always a
betrayal. Ten of these tales have been rendered into English by Mr.
Learned; and the ten chosen for translation are among the best of the
two score and more of M. Coppée's contes en prose. These ten tales are
fairly representative of his range and variety. Compare, for example,
the passion in "The Foster Sister," pure, burning and fatal, with the
Black Forest naïveté of "The Sabots of Little Wolff." Contrast the
touching pathos of "The Substitute," poignant in his magnificent
self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past
goes back willingly to