Mr. Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial every day, and very often he prints with it the speech, or speeches, he made the night before. In a time like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't say too much; they must be "like the French Academicians, who never stop writing." Now and then, in the intervals of fanning the sparks of war, he takes his readers behind the scenes of European politics, of which he knows about as much, perhaps, as any one. I arrived in Paris the 31st of December, 1912, in the evening. M. Poincaré received me the 1st of January, at half past eight o'clock in the morning--an absurd hour in Paris. But I had to go to London in the afternoon, and M. Poincaré to the Elysee at ten o'clock for the felicitations of the New Year. I asked M. Poincaré for the support of France in our difficulties with Bulgaria. M. Poincaré said... I said... and later events proved that I was right. He is always sure of himself, like this--no doubts, no half-truths, everything clear and irresistible. I went to see Mr. Ionesco one evening in Bucarest--a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table. The room, the man, the facile, syllogistic sentences in which it was established that Austria-Hungary was already moribund, that Germany could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente--it was like the first scene from some play of European society and politics: one of those smooth, hard, swiftly moving things the Parisian Bernstein might have written. Across it I couldn't help seeing the Berlin I had just left, and people standing in line with their sandwiches at six o'clock to get into the opera or theatre--the live human beings behind that abstraction "Germany." And I said that it seemed unfortunate that two peoples with so many apparent grounds of contact as the Germans and French must so misunderstand each other. Their temperament and culture were different, to be sure, but they were both idealistic, sentimental people, to whom things of the mind and spirit were important. It seemed particularly unfortunate that everything should be done to force them apart instead of bringing them together. Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience. Unfortunate, no doubt, but what do you wish? War itself is unfortunate--we must take the world as it is. No, they were with France and down with the Germans. France conquered meant the end of Rumania, subservience to Austria; France victorious, freedom, fresh air.