ii
The Delicate Case of Mlle. Celestine Bon
Among the really great problems that Armageddon called into being, the affair of Mlle. Bon can hold no place. Its interest is circumscribed, affecting as it merely does one woman and two men, or even, as you may judge when you have heard, one woman and about seven-eighths of two men. Yet I feel that it is not without a certain dramatic poignancy of its own. It might not have appealed to the Greek tragedians, because, for that matter, they would have experienced some difficulty in understanding its details; but the late W. S. Gilbert could have turned it to good account, and I can conceive that Mr. Bernard Shaw would have revelled in its possibilities as a problem play—had he not given up writing plays. For myself, I can only tell the plain unvarnished tale as—or as nearly as is feasible—it was told to me.
Célestine Bon was, as you will have guessed, French, but in order to understand her difficulty and the entirely proper vivacious fluency with which she handled its recital you had better appreciate how exquisitely French she was. She lived with her parents in a small town at no great distance from Paris, but on the safe side of the war map, and she had two suitors, Raoul, whom she adored, and Jean, whom she loathed. As Raoul was rich and virtuous, while Jean was certainly poor and of doubtful repute, this disposal of her affection would
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