And then, on the 23rd of March, ‘Grosse Bertha’ began to thunder. The German shells fell in the centre of Paris; on Good Friday a church was shattered, with all its faithful in it; one night, at the Français, actors and audience had to take refuge in the cellars, fortunately spacious. The theatre was closed. The play was stopped in mid-career. Mademoiselle Lenéru herself retired to Brittany. After a long summer’s work and meditation, with more than one play filling her portfolio, she was full of plans for her winter in Paris, when she fell a victim to the epidemic of infectious influenza then devastating Lorient, and died there on the 23rd of September, 1918. Except Péguy, France has lost in the war no writer from whom we hoped a richer harvest. Some day we shall read _La Maison sur le Roc_, _Le Bonheur_, _La Paix_--those plays so full of thought and a sombre passion, which, to my thinking, are meant rather for the student’s chair and the fireside lamp than for the glare of the footlights. A great, active, heroic soul still moves amply through all of them and swells their sails: may they carry down the stream of the century the echo of that voice, ardent and harsh, monotonous, and yet so strangely moving, which was silenced before it had time to deliver its full message. No such rich promise was cut short by the death of André Lafon, who died of his wounds in hospital early in the war. A shepherd--that is how I see André Lafon--a charming young shepherd strolling down Mount Olympus, to whom the Muse gave, half-smiling, a dew-bespangled branch of laurel; but, ere he could twist it into a crown, the wolf came ravening and made an end of him and it! It is not for his talent that I evoke the memory of André Lafon (though I have read and re-read _L’Élève Gilles_ with singular sympathy, and love the too-slender, charming little book), but few things seem to me more romantic than the destiny of this young man. In the spring of 1912 a solitary, a sensitive, young usher in a school--before the year was out, his name on every lip, his purse swollen with those blessed ten thousand francs of the French Academy’s new Great Prize (which he had wrested from Péguy), and his slim portfolio bursting with letters from publishers. He certainly was not a Byron (it generally is _not_ the genius who ‘wakes to find himself famous’); but that is always a romantic adventure, especially when, two years later, the young laureate fills a hero’s grave. Had he a mother, still young, in some old house in the provinces, to glory in her son’s miraculous achievement, and to mourn the withering of her hopes? I often sit and think of the fate of André Lafon--as delicate and sad as one of his own stories.