At the moment when I strive to recall the events of the last two months, I review my own life in a brief instant like somebody drowning, and I am frightened to see that nothing remains but tiring and inanimate pleasures. July is the period of examinations and August that of examining one's conscience. I shall fail in the second test as I was failed in the first.
Among other great endurance contests we had the bicycle tour of France on the one hand and on the other d'Annunzio's Phedre and The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, as played by Ida Rubinstein. The lyric tragedy of antiquity attained its last acceptable phase, I believe, in the musical form of the eighteenth century, with Gluck and others; all efforts to renew it, with the exception of Hebbel's, have been useless and cruel.
I pass over in silence the antiquaries' fair which transformed the palace of Versailles into a flea-market (even the fleas were out of buying reach on account of the exchange); the Bal de l'Opéra, where Chinese styles appeared to those who still only suspected the fact as being definitely outdated; the Bal des Quat z' Arts, a resurrection of Pompeii, where the items which are hidden from profane eyes in the Museum of Naples were presented freely to the Boston ladies who inhabit the hotels of the rue de Rivoli (these were invaded at the dinner hour by slaves and freedmen, while drunken helots, painted with minium, exacted vestimentary sacrifices from Mlle Sorel to which she did not consent); a few concerts where Paderewski, the great romantic magnetizer, poured forth on the piano the same fluid which he uses to communicate with the gods and his constituents.
Out of all these ephemeral ornaments, already oxydized, there remain two authentic jewels of the sort we shall continue to enjoy and wear. One of them is the new opera-ballet of Albert Roussel—Padmavâti—one of the best works of this charming composer, a subject drawn from his study of the thirteenth century, where the author does not always escape his Russian influences, but where he writes with an amplitude and a perfection of technique superior to those of the Festin de l'Araignée, the piece which made him famous. He was not satisfied with writing only songs; he placed soloists and choirs in the orchestra. It was an attempt analogous to that which Strawinsky seems to have made for other reasons in Noces. Written in 1917—after Le Sacre, that is, and before
