Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/281

 RECENT FOREIGN LITERATURE. 269 des mouettes qui s'abattent lentemente, ondulant comme de longues oriflammes, ou leurs envolements gigantesques, avec leurs clameurs stridentes et lugubres. D'une fa$on plus nette et plus consciente, mais non plus vive, Marie regrettait amerement aussi les libres stations dans les cabarets de la route.' And she ends by marrying one of her companions in the hospice, chiefly as a reason for leaving it the couple have to run away, and are assisted in their elopement by friends and their chronicler ends his history thus ; ' II ne sais pas si meme ils ont ete heureux, car en moins d'un an et demi ils sont mort tous deux de misere.' The book reveals great skill in execution and style, and real knowledge of the lives and insight into the psychology of the poor. With a few simple touches we see the Normandy coast and country- side, and realise the lives of the inhabitants from their own point of view. Le Goupils avoids the error into which too many modern novelists and poets of the lives of the poor fall when they attribute to their humble personages the feelings and desires and tastes of highly educated persons accustomed to a certain degree of luxury. Those in search of some light reading cannot do better than take up the new volume by Pierre Mille, entitled c Le Monarque.' The sketches, they are scarcely tales, under that title fill 215 of the 281 pages that form the book. They deal with the south, with a little corner of Provence, and are the outcome of the observation of an author who is ' plus curieux encore de 1'ame et de la signification des hommes que des paysages/