SOURCE: “The Turbulent Spring of Experience,” in The Saturday Review, Vol. XLII, No. 4, January 24, 1959, pp. 18, 31.

In the following essay, Vigée reviews Across Paris and Other Stories, praising Aymé's characteristic “duality,” which, Vigée notes, requires readers to approach his writing with both “childlike innocence” and “ferocious irony.”

For more than thirty years Marcel Aymé has captured the fancy of French readers of fiction, both young and old. By now he has become something of an ageless classic, the heir of the anonymous medieval fabliaux writers. Yet, in spite of an abundant literary production, ranging from comedy or satirical essay to the novel and the children's tale, he remains a puzzle to orderly critics. They would like to label him and find themselves lost in contradictions as they compare him simultaneously to Rabelais, Voltaire, Franz Kafka, and Alphonse Daudet! There is, in this clearest of all authors...