pretty because it marks the malice of Montesquiou as worthy of Saint-Simon. Montesquiou was related to the Marquise de B. who for years surrounded him with admiration and solicitude. Every day she wrote to him, opening her heart and seeking for affection and spiritual aid. The day after the death of the poet his secretary presented himself before the marquise and told her that in accordance with the last wishes of the deceased, he was handing over a package to Madame la Marquise. . . . And this packet contained, carefully filed, all the letters written in many years by her to Montesquiou, and not a single one of them had ever been opened by him. I can still see my poor Marcel Proust in the depths of his copper bed, transported with admiration for this posthumous malice.
We must quit these Parisians for, even in Paris, Europe is the fashion. Those of us who have been "good Europeans" since their youth, can only rejoice at this. Later we will leave behind "l' Europe aux anciens parapets" as Rimbaud said, and become cosmopolitan—it will happen sooner than we think—and after that it will only remain for us to become human, which will not be the easiest thing in the world. To-day the fortifications of Paris are razed and Paris is justly called a free city. "A Frenchman really has no need to put his nose out of doors" Kipling said to me once—he who never had to regret having put his nose, with the golden spectacles, out of doors. Not even Cocteau—Cocteau the Parisian, as Picabia calls him—who declares that he has taken root in the asphalt, comparing himself to a chestnut tree on the boulevards, fails to regard the far horizon with his restless and piercing eye. Europe is in the headlines. After L'Europe Nouvelle, we have La Revue Européenne, edited by Valéry Larbaud, Jaloux, Germain, Soupault—names inspiring confidence; there is Europe where we find Vildrac, Arcos, Duhamel, and others. In Patrie Européenne Arcos is tracing, in the style of Whitman, a programme to which one is bound to subscribe. The apostle of nationalism, Maurice Barres himself, presided recently at a banquet and scrutinizing the horizon announced "a literature having the feeling of a greater world and of countries spread over the face of the globe." It must rejoice us to see a kind of union sacrée forming in France on these questions—a thing which appeared distant enough on the morrow of the Peace.
In its forms the modern spirit still gives offence. Publicity, cer-
