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The peasant-narrator is a philosopher with ideas about everything. He tells what he thinks of the an den regime, of Napoleon, of the bourgeois king. Louis Philippe, of Napoleon III, of the Franco-Prussian war, of the French foreign policy that led to that war, of M. Thiers and the Third Republic, of the Paris Commune, of the changing status of women through all this time. He also expatiates upon the qualities of French soil, wine and scenery in the different provinces surrounding Pargny, which is on the River Aisne. All this gives The Iron Mother, which might have been just another story of a dominating female, a salty, Gallic flavor, which will take U. S. readers into the atmosphere of a culture that is far, far away in spirit. The translation, by Vyvyan Holland, is supple, muscular—French prose rendered in good English prose.