FOR EACH of these selections destined to compose a “French Reader,” many considerations and scruples and values had to be kept in mind. Dominant among these was the desire to elect a representative work from several major French writers, and to elect one not anthologized previously or not often anthologized.
It is surmised, it is even hoped, that the readers of this book will be, first, those students who are learning the French language and who are being introduced to the history of French literature. Then, French has been so constantly in the curriculum of our schools and colleges, that there are a vast number of readers who once studied French, who wish to maintain some facility in reading the language and who will be helped in having a fairly close translation facing the French text. This procedure is followed not in order to encourage indolence but rather to provide a method of steady reading in a foreign tongue so that the apprehending and the enjoyment of the literary work will not be impeded.
The collection proposes considerable variety in styles, in philosophies and in literary creeds. The span from Voltaire to Albert Camus is approximately two hundred years. Such is the mysterious power of story-telling in its highest instances that the ten selections taken from these two centuries of French prose, reflect not only aesthetic beliefs of various literary schools but also the preoccupations of French civilization during this time with the metaphysical and psychological problems of man.
Hence, Voltaire, representative of the 18th-century “enlightenment” is both the neo-classicist in the clarity, swiftness and wit of his philosophic tale, and the satiric philosophe who questions the rules of authority and the vanity of man’s ambitions. Balzac in his novella is both the realist in his study of the determining factors in a character’s environment, and the visionary who sees behind the individual the “species” (the spécialité) which he represents. From the pictures in a stained-glass window Flaubert drew the material of his saint’s legend and resurrected the medieval world of the hunt and the supernatural resolution of a chosen life. Such a work as Spleen de Paris of Baudelaire testifies to one aspect of the romantic imagination and to the emergence of a new literary form. The brevity of the de Maupassant story makes it into a vignette, whose utter simplicity corresponds to the poignant human sentiment it transcribes.
The 20th-century selections represent even more variety in form and theme. Claudel’s piece is a monologue spoken by Judas Iscariot. Through the violence of satire and the juggling of chronology, many of Claudel’s grievances are clarified as the portrait of the man Judas is drawn. Gide’s use of the Bible is totally different. He gives to the famous parable an interpretation of his own, a “Gidian” interpretation, in the four dialogues which make of the work a miniature play. From the autobiography of his childhood, we have chosen one chapter in which François Mauriac evokes a memory of his school in Bordeaux. The last two selections are closer to traditional forms of story-telling. Marcel Aymé’s humor in his account of the man who can walk through walls, does not conceal his fine sense of observation of characters and the ease with which he evokes their setting. Camus’ Algerian story is a serious humanist meditation on a conflict of wills and the problem of justice.
It would be futile to try to impose some unifying principle on this book, to discover in it some literary progression and thematic plan. Each of the ten pieces stands by itself, by its own distinctiveness, by its own testimony to French literary art. It is not necessary, then, to seek for some arbitrary order. The selections are printed in chronological order. But since it is true that each selection is of its time, of its particular generation in French history and in the history of French literature, there is visible in the book—faintly, perhaps, because of the brevity of each piece—a sequence of signs, of preoccupations, of styles which have their specific place in the evolution of a literature and of an attitude toward mankind. Artists of the stature of these writers cannot fail to impress, even on their briefest writings, their mark which is both their manner of writing and their particular vision of the world.
French literature, more clearly than other literatures, resembles a succession of kingdoms or royalties, each one of which has been overthrown in some literary revolution, in order to make way for the successor. The theocentric medieval world, Renaissance humanism, classicism and romanticism were vast powerful dynasties which have now disappeared but which are still apparent in certain aspects of the more rapidly succeeding literary movements of the past century and which are discernible in the ten selections of the volume.
WALLACE FOWLIE