George Weller’s Greeks in _The Crack in the Column_ appear surprisingly like Latins: “Each Greek is a volcano, and when he may erupt no man knows, not even his friends who must quake with him, not even himself.” In the number and complexity of their political parties they resemble the French, yet in one way they seem to retain something of the Greeks of antiquity viewing Imperial Rome. Small and impoverished in the shadow of newly-risen giants, they cherish their role as inheritors and transmitters of a great culture. At the book’s end, Nitsa, like Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, retires with her reflections: The whole world is philhellene, as proved by the retreating Germans leaving a wreath on the Tomb of Ignotos before they roared north to die in the ambushes of the Slavs. But most self-surrendering of the philhellenes are the Americans. These young antiques deserve the most utter respect, the kindest care. FRANCE: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT The novels by Frenchmen in this study reveal relatively little about national character and behavior. Stendhal deals with Italians and Malraux primarily with Chinese. However, the ambitious Ferral, head of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium in _Man’s Fate_ may be revealing. He hopes to make enough money in China to return home and buy the leading French news-gathering and publicity syndicate. With this power he hopes to regain office and “pit the combined forces of the cabinet and a bought public opinion against the Parliament.” In Malraux’s words one catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting upon vanished days of affluence: The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to pass on to colonial peoples. In _Presidential Agent_ Sinclair presents the French as a people who have installed a rotten government to manage their affairs, a government eager to join with Britain in obtaining temporary surcease from German threats to its financial holdings by hypocritically sacrificing Czechoslovakia. They had decided upon “a compromise with Hitler as the cheapest form of insurance.” M. Denis admits the resultant loss of power in Central Europe, but consoles himself with the thought that “we still have North Africa and the colonies, and we are safe behind our Maginot Line. Above all, we don’t have to make any more concessions to revolution at home.”