that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing well for the eternal gods to see. Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets, sculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and drink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits (if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed Provençals, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to whatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a ladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One of the Provençals used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us old songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and dropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places in the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More than once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I have seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper about the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the flute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet. 1909. THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation (a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and, finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or, if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that has long since faded away. He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the prologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote: