One of the coolest spots in Paris at this season when, pitiless as reason, the sun cuts the city and makes the river tremble, is the Victor Hugo Museum, a romantic annotation on the margin of the classical poem which is the Place des Vosges. My friend Raymond Escholier, who, as well as being a good novelist, is its conservator, offers us another pleasure at this moment: an exposition of Daumier and Gavarni. (I must admit that during the hour I passed there I saw only Americans.) Between two windows, under glass, I stopped to examine the palette of Daumier, the one with which he painted for the last time, covered with a thick crust of red clay, of dried blood, of the dark tones of an ardent soil, colour of tannin. What emotion! He could have painted with anything; he had no need to charm; he had need to prove; he had no need to amuse, this man who during his lifetime was never considered except as a caricaturist; he had to conduct the rudest and most complete inquest which has been left us on an era. He did not escape the terrible lot of almost all French painters of the nineteenth century, that long martyrology, but the glory which he knows to-day consoles us, in spite of Forain.
And now I am going to leave Paris for Athens. In the sea which is catching fire I can see a white ship gliding already. It flies the American flag. "I am taking you on board," my amiable hostess told me, "but on condition that you do not tell me the Acropolis is ugly." I shall not tell her; if it is true, I shall write it.
