union, a more honourable union than the old and immoral alliances commanded by interêt d' État, between one's own country and the others. If, in literature, we still make use of a background, it is only to distract the reader, and profiting by his lack of attention to impose modern truths upon him. Already a better educated public knows enough to take the information it is given with a little grain of salt. One of the achievements of realism was the fact that the reader could believe everything, for everything was exact, even if nothing were true. The public to-day is better schooled; it is infinitely more supple, more intelligent; it progresses from one hour to the next. Among so many reasons to despair, we have this one real comfort; I insist upon it. One can be inexact without being called a practical joker. To take an example from the so-called exotic literature (this second-class voyage within the reach of every pocketbook) consider in what utilitarian spirit an ordinary reader followed Loti thirty years ago into a description of the Pacific. And put a reader of the present day before one of those foreign landscapes raised to the second power (as in the case of Larbaud) where everything is so impregnated with the atmosphere of another nation that it is not even necessary to describe; set him before one of these conscious "frauds" that are Giraudoux's Pacific, MacOrlan's Germany, or the Russia of Delteil, and ask him if he does not experience a rarer pleasure and, under these extravagant appearances, if he does not find a lesson that is much more profound, more profitable? The realism of yesterday was only an infidelity. The free invention of to-day is neither an imposture nor a contradiction; it is art which truly, usefully, has attained its liberty.
The last dove to be released from our literary ark is the Prix du Nouveau Monde, founded to bind the intellectual union between France and America: a prize due to the generosity of Mrs Keep. I was member of the jury. Our prize had the fortunes of a trap-pigeon; it was fired at; this bird which we released fell like a boomerang upon our proper noses. I can speak about it more freely because—so it is said—1I did not vote for the laureate, Radiguet. And however his book, Le Diable au Corps, is an important document, a revelation of the war spirit of a boy, and it is the first testimony of a generation which, if I am not mistaken, will play us all sorts of tricks. There is no reason to become indignant; one can only
