Grand Canal. It was an enormous bark full of light and sound, followed by a thousand gondolas and resembling those embarcations by which the Venetians transport their fruits, especially their water-melons which look like severed Moorish heads. All these people were coming to serenade us—farewell music from Venice to one who had given it so much of animation. All the boats ranged themselves around our vessel. From under the lanterns and the branches of acacia, to the accompaniment of false notes on a piano from a private dining-room, came first one, then many "of those beautiful Italian voices which dramatize even pleasure," I said, pastiching Stendhal. Two smoking candles guttered under the sea-breeze and spotted the Scarlatti score. The gondolas sparkled with polished prows and the lights of their red or green lanterns; the gondoliers, flat on their stomachs, were fast asleep; in the shadows were studied poses, mechanical dinner-jackets, and fugitive beautiful shoulders. Then, as natives go aboard steamers with the first or last gifts from dry land, everybody hailed us, came on board, drank our whole supply of champagne, wished us bon voyage, and brightened what is always so dark, a departure, even a departure for Greece.
We had brought with us Pausanias, Herodotus, Procopius, but I need not say that we read none of them. Books were not lacking; "launched without a compass on the ocean of books" as Baudelaire says, we found a priceless guide—the map of the Republic of Letters by M André Lang which appeared in the Annales in July and made a furor in Paris. In the book, that redoubtable country is traversed by a black stream called Style. All the reefs and sand-banks which make navigation perilous in the streets of Paris are here charted. Each street bears the name of an author; I was happy to find my own plotted quite straight, in an airy district, not very noisy in spite of the railway-station nearby—because it is the Station of the Nouvelle Revue Française, from which the trains depart most discreetly. The map was precious to us, and when we had no further need of it, we put it into a sealed bottle, and cast it into the sea.
The aridity of the Albanian coast made me want to read Le Blé en Herbe, by Colette; the fresh title attracted me. It is a tender summer-novel, warm, human, sensual in style, disjointed like words of love, compact as an adventure. Of a quite different charm is
