IV INTRODUCTION

that its influence is doubly far-reaching. He is seventy this year, having been born in 1828, and this little book is proof that he has known some of the heaviest trials of lif e : yet no young man takes a more wholesome and génial view of things, or finds more cause for light-hearted cheerfulness in the world around him. His sunny, jovial disposition, his unflagging spirits, make him le plus jeune vieillard in France.

For the past forty years Francisque Sarcey has been a writer for the public press, a " publiciste," and the weight of his words has gone on steadily increasing from the day Edmond About first secured for him a berth on the staff of the Figaro. For thirty years he has been writing the Monday feuilleton in the Temps^ and to this day he shares with Jules Lemaître, of the Revue des Deux Mondes the supremacy of dramatic criticism.

He had not begun as a journalist. The son of a schoolmaster at Dourdan, a village near Paris, he was educated for the teaching profession, and was a brilliant pupil of the Lycée Charlemagne and École Normale in Paris. During his three years at the École Normale (1848-185 1) he was the classmate of many of the most brilliant men of the latter half of this century, and foïmed the friendships with About, Taine and others, that ultimately helped him on his way. For seven years he taught at varions Lycées^ but his restless énergies longed for a broader, freer field, which he found, at the âge of thirty (1858), in the press of the capital, to which he has been faithf ul ever since.

The drawback to such a lif e as his is that it is apt to leave little that is tangible behind. A few romances, less interesting than his newspaper articles, some very readable Sou-