Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/278

266 RECENT FOREIGN LITERATURE. HERE is a custom, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, that when a new writer takes for his pro- vince something akin to that of a great author who has attained classical honours, his critics immediately institute a com- parison or a contrast, generally to the detriment of the last comer in the field. And so, wherever I have heard or read anything about Marc Le Goupils' new book, 'Le Carrefour,' the names of Maupassant and Flaubert have been at once introduced. But Le Goupils needs no such intro- duction. His Normandy sketches may seek the suffrages of the public on their own merit alone. The volume contains eight short stories, mostly dealing with the charafteristics of the Norman peasant. We are shown his selfishness, meanness, almost his inhumanity when it is a question of helping fellow-creatures in distress who are totally unable to repay in kind any assistance that may be rendered. The author describes in masterly fashion how the poor tramp a woman of sixty found in a dying condition at the cross-roads where four parishes meet, is carted about in a wheelbarrow from one parish to another, because, wherever she died, that 'commune' would have to bear the expense of her burial, until she is at last in the