The face of _Batouala_ is the face of Esau but the voice is the voice of Jacob. Paris speaks through René Maran, as it spoke recently through Louis Hemon and his _Maria Chapdelaine_: the Paris which is subtle yet bored with subtlety and cruel yet bored with cruelty and eager for art yet bored with art. Such complex towns are hungry for idyll and for epic, the more so if, sitting at the centre of an empire, they can look out toward dim provinces and see idyll and epic transacting on their own soil. Paris, looking into French Canada, is thrilled along unfamiliar nerves at the sight of the girl of Peribonka who, having lost her dearest lover, chooses rather to stay in that hard native wilderness than to take what comfort may be found in softer regions: it is as if some Arcadian maiden had preferred Arcadia to Athens or some Shropshire lass had preferred Shropshire to London. So Paris, looking into French Africa, exults over the deeds of the black chief Batouala, who loves and fights and loses and dies, like a bison or an eagle, without a thought deeper than sensation and without a future longer than quick oblivion. _Batouala_ is no primitive piece of art: no naïve ballad of the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts of actual men; no epic even, calling up the large days of Agamemnons and Aeneases and Rolands and Siegfrieds and Beowulfs for the edification of smaller days. It is a document of civilization, of civilization turning, with a touch of nerves, from the contemplation of itself to a vicarious indulgence in the morals and manners of the jungle which, whether they exist in Africa or not, exist somewhere beneath the surface of every civilized person.