SARDONIC TALES. By Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. (Knopf. 7s. 6d.)—This volume
of short stories, which Mr. Arthur Symons has described as possessing " every classic quality of the French conk, together with many of the qualities of Edgar Allen Poe and Ernst Hoffman," was first published in France in 1883. It is now translated by Mr. Hamish Miles and appears in the " Blue Jade Library." The tales are characteristically French and clever. Stark directness of observation is combined with fertility and originality of imagination, now lively, now macabre ; and the foibles of humanity are exposed with rapier-like irony. A typical story is that which describes how two sisters, unselfish in their desire to keep their aged parents in comfort, become prosti- tutes, and how the younger of them then violates her singleness of purpose by developing for one of her clients a genuine and unremunerative passion ! Thus the author loves to turn conventional values upside down. But, though he is among the so-called " realists ' for whom the thorn is the truest part of the rose, humour and an underlying sympathy save him from mere nastiness.
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