It was in the first week of August, 1914. The crowd on the seafront was outwardly as gay as ever, only buying up the evening papers with a little more eagerness than usual to read the exciting news from Belgium. We had not had time to realize what war meant. Some one held out a paper to me and said, quite casually, “I see Lemaître’s dead.” This event seemed to me for the moment bigger than the war itself. At any rate it came more intimately home to me. The world in an uproar, nations toppling to ruin, millions of men in arms—these are only vague mental pictures. They disquiet the imagination, but are not to be realized by it. The death of your favourite author, the spiritual companion and solace of half a lifetime, is of an infinitely sharper reality, and you feel it as though it were a physical pang. Lemaître died where, whenever he could, he had lived, at Tavers in the Loiret, the heart of France. He was always writing about Tavers, though he never named it by its name. In describing the far-off cruises of Loti and the indefatigable touristry of Bourget he says:—“There is somewhere a big orchard that goes down to a brook edged with willows and poplars. It is for me the most beautiful landscape in the world, for I love it, and it knows me.” To understand Lemaître you must keep that little _vignette_ affectionately in your mind, as he did. M. Henry Bordeaux, in his charming little monograph “Jules Lemaître,” rightly insists upon Lemaître’s passionate love for his native countryside. But you never can tell; his insistence seems only to have bored a recent reviewer of the book. “The insistence on Lemaître’s patriotism and on his being ‘l’homme de sa terre’ is a little wearying; of course he was ‘l’homme de sa terre,’ but he was many other things, or we should never have heard of him.” As who should say, of course Cyrano had a nose, but he had many other things, or we should never have heard of him. But Cyrano’s nose was a conspicuous feature, and, if we are not told of it, we shall not fully understand Cyrano. So with Lemaître’s love of his countryside by the Loire. It made him, to begin with, an incorrigible stay-at-home. In this, as in so many other things, he was a typical Frenchman. We English, born roamers as we are, take for granted the educative influence of travel. Places and people, we know by elementary experience, are only to be realized by being seen on the spot. Lemaître thought otherwise. Why, he asked, need I go to England? I can get all England out of Dickens and George Eliot and my friend Bourget’s “Impressions de Voyage.” And then he drew a picture of England, as he confidently believed it to be, that is about as “like it” as, say, the average untravelled Englishman’s notion of Tavers. He was never tired of quoting a passage of the “Imitation” about the variety of changing sky and scene. But a cloistered monk is not exactly an authority on this subject.