Stories By English Authors: France (Selected by Scribners) — Background and Themes

Contrasting Gambling Houses

Wilkie Collins's 'The Traveller's Story of a Terribly Strange Bed' offers a sharp shift in tone. The narrator scorns the 'ghastly respectabilities' of a fashionable gambling-house and seeks 'genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken gaming.' The description of the second gambling room emphasizes silence and tragedy: 'The quiet in the room was horrible.' The players are types—'the thin, haggard, long-haired young man,' the 'flabby, fat-faced, pimply player'—and the croupier's voice sounds 'strangely dulled.' This contrast between the two gambling venues sets up the story's central tension between appearance and reality.

The Narrator's Descent into Play

Collins's narrator insists he was never a gambler by nature: 'My gaming was a mere idle amusement.' Yet on this night, winning 'prodigiously' intoxicates him. He notes that he lost only when he attempted to calculate chances, and won when he left everything to luck. This psychological shift—from detached observer to passionate player—is rendered in the first person, drawing the reader into the narrator's growing obsession. The passage illustrates how the story uses interiority to build suspense, a technique distinct from Stevenson's more external, descriptive approach.

Recurring Motifs Across the Collection

Both excerpts share a fascination with marginal spaces and characters. Stevenson's Paris is a city of 'poor people' and a 'young rascal' poet; Collins's gambling den is filled with 'blackguards' and desperate men. The settings are rendered with precise, almost tactile language—snow that 'fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence' versus a room where 'even the voice of the croupier sounded as if it were strangely dulled.' These details suggest that the collection as a whole may explore how environment shapes human behavior, though the excerpts alone do not reveal the full arc of any story.

Narrative Voice and Structure

Stevenson uses a third-person narrator who observes Villon and the city with a detached, almost cinematic eye. Collins employs a first-person narrator who recounts his own experience, creating immediacy and a sense of unreliable memory. The opening of Collins's story includes a 'Prologue to the First Story,' hinting at a framing device that may connect the tales. The variety in narrative perspective—from historical omniscience to personal confession—offers readers a range of entry points into the fictional world of France, though the excerpts provide no evidence of how these voices interact or resolve.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the distinct narrative strategies each author employs. The excerpts reveal a deliberate juxtaposition of styles: Stevenson's atmospheric historical fiction, Collins's psychological thriller, and the other authors' contributions likely offer further variation. Pay attention to how each story constructs its setting and narrator, as these choices shape the reader's experience of France as both a real and imagined space.

I keep thinking about those stories set in France—how their ghosts feel more like weather than hauntings, settling in without knocking. Under the Deodars — Inside the Classic left a similar hush behind for me, the way certain places seem to hold a room’s whispered conversations long after. It lingers quietly, not insistently, like a memory you’re almost glad to carry.