SOURCE: Taylor, Una A. “The Short Story in France, 1800-1900.” Edinburgh Review, no. 445 (July 1913): 137-50.

In the following essay, Taylor recounts the nineteenth-century shift in the French conte from the aesthetic compositions of Mérimée, Gautier, and Flaubert to the lucid simplicity of Maupassant's short stories.

It was during the period when the genius of romanticism had saturated the public with exuberant rhetoric and eloquent sentimentalism, typified by Victor Hugo and George Sand, that the contes of Mérimée and Gautier revindicated, in different fashion and by opposite methods, the supreme value of form in composition and of that unity of effect which is twin to structural completeness. Neither, it is true, escaped the infection of contemporary taste. The infatuation of the monstrous and the exceptional possessed the imaginations of both writers, and the themes they selected by preference are insulated by abnormality of character and...