Short story classics (Foreign), Vol. 4, French I

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“Look, young man,” he began again, “see how three or four strokes of the brush and a thin glaze of blue let in the free air to play about the head of the poor Saint, who must ha...

“What!” he cried piteously at last, “show you my creation, my bride? Rend the veil that has kept my happiness sacred? It would be an infamous profanation. For ten years I have l...

“Any one can show you,” said a young officer who sat near me, “for it is well known the whole country round. It was in this château that died a great warrior, a very celebrated...

What a scene that was! I can see it still. It was not the genius of the man which I noticed, but his character. Bonaparte was not then as you knew him afterward; he had not grow...

Claude’s head sank down, like the poor caged lion deprived of his dog; but the grief, though so deeply felt, in no way changed his appetite--he was famished. Many offered to sha...

“The very same. I left you with the intention of abandoning myself to one of those varieties of which they spoke to me as being a curiosity even in the midst of our curious time...

I raised my eyes. Never shall I forget the sight which met my view. The smoke had mostly lifted, and remained suspended, like a canopy, at twenty feet above the redoubt. Through...

“How I love her!” he said to himself. He answered: “You know very well that is impossible, Eleanor. Oh, yes; if I were free, you should have no husband but me, but I do not belo...

“As the vulture in his hypnotic circling surrounds the partridge and holds him panting and motionless, so did the soul of Lelio, that great soul of a poet and tragedian, envelop...

“I was terribly frightened; I thought I had fallen into some trap. I called him back. He instantly reappeared, and his air of stupid solemnity reassured me. I asked him what tim...

“No more than any one else! The son of M. de Meynières was no more to blame than you. Like you, he had received promises, he entertained most legitimate hopes. His father, a dev...

He was no longer the “marquis” of the night before, and, this time, there was no Duc d’Aumont. The chevalier lowered his eyes sadly, and noticed that his white stockings and Rhi...

“This is what we are thinking about now: The King no longer loves the marquise, and nobody believes that he ever loved her. She has just committed an imprudence; she has set the...

“Ah, how pleased my father will be!--he who was so unhappy because of my mutilation; and who from the moment of my birth, set a whole nation at work to hollow me out a tomb so d...

So I have only to tell you this: that at the moment when the story I am about to tell you begins it is noon, that it is May, that the highway we are going to enter is bordered o...

“Ho! Ho! my good fellows!” he cried; “you are on your way to Heidelberg to perform, I see.” Wilfred surveyed the traveler from the corner of his eye, and replied briefly: “Is th...

The inn, but a moment before deserted, swarmed like a bee-hive, and lights danced about from window to window. It was evidently filled with the police. And now, at my wits’ end,...

Skull-cap of velvet, grizzled whiskers, mouth thin and evil, the eye scrutinizing, distrustful, but not profound, it was just the type of an examining magistrate, one of those m...