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How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him four times? There was one way out of her troubles, that to which Alphonse Daudet's and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone.

One of these met with tremendous success. It was Andre Theuriet's Jean-Marie, and was produced in October 1871. This one-act play is a veritable masterpiece, and it took its author straight to the Academy. Porel, who played the part of Jean-Marie, met with an enormous success. He was at that time slender, nimble, and full of youthful ardour.

Theuriet's appearance in letters and his popularity are, I think, to be taken as a sign that a healthy change is going on in the taste of French readers. His books, consciously or unconsciously, are a protest against the system in which young girls are brought up in France, and which most intelligent Frenchmen deplore.

Of some literary men one creates in his mind's eye a picture of which the colors are the impressions produced by their books, and I had imagined Theuriet either a youngish man with a pretty wife or a gray-haired paterfamilias with two or three grown-up sons and daughters. Theuriet's hair is partially gray, to be sure, but he is unmarried, and by no means bon enfant as regards personal appearance.