Jules Romain is one of the most prominent representatives of French writers. Like no one else, he knows how to observe the life of a collective - a crowd, an army, a street, a house, a peasant community, a family - in a word, any, even the smallest, group of people, consciously or unconsciously animated by a common idea. It seems to him that each such group represents a unique living being whose life has a rich future ahead of it. Faith in this future fills the works of Jules Romain with enormous pathos, cheerfulness, optimism - qualities so rare in the usually pessimistic or skeptical background of European literature of the 20th century. The third volume of collected works includes two collections of short stories, “The White Wine of La Villette” and “The Powers of Paris.”