That is to say, she went on the music hall stage and was immensely applauded; and I am sure she is a splendid variety artist--just as I am sure that Marguerite Audoux must have had a lovely ‘cut’--just as I know (and as any one who goes to the Place des Vosges can see) that a great cabinet-maker was spoiled in Victor Hugo.... The music hall feeds its flock. After a few years Madame Colette returned to literature--returned, I mean, to the exclusive practice of literature, which she had never really abandoned--henceforth independent. A Paris music hall may appear a strange place of purification, but it all depends on what one is used to. The courage, the indefatigable industry, the gentleness, the charity and kindliness of her new companions impressed Madame Colette; and she admired the relative pureness of their lives. We see her, in our fancy (like Roumanille when he contemplated the lambs frisking in the meadows), gazing on the clowns, and the quick-change artists, and the circus-riders, and the dancers, and the leaders of performing dogs, as she murmurs:-- ‘Coume fan ben tout ço que fan! Et l’innoucénço, coum es bello!’ And gradually her novels showed the influence of a healthier environment. It is true that at first she wrote _Les Vrilles de la Vigne_. But her last three volumes possess (with rare literary beauty) a freedom of soul and a sensitiveness which at least, to my thinking, go far to compensate a little colour-blindness as to morality. Experience has rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; it has shown her how to organise her impressions, so that her art--simple as it is and apparently facile--has some of the qualities of a philosophy. In the terms of a metaphor dear to Mr Henry James, her novels henceforth are, not a slice of life, but an extract, an elixir. Not that her last three volumes--_La Vagabonde_, _L’Envers du Music Hall_, and _L’Entrave_--are to be recommended without precaution. They are very free; they describe a world beyond the precincts of conventional morality, and they are also very Pagan. There is mighty little inner life in the world of Colette Willy! But those who read Mr Compton Mackenzie or Mr Maxwell will, after all, find nothing more alarming in _La Vagabonde_, or even in _L’Entrave_. And they will admire a natural and yet exquisite faculty of expression--it is difficult to write with a more delicate exactness than Madame Colette--and also a psychology, and a sort of disenchanted mansuetude, that go hand in hand with a love of youth, a sense of youth, quite extraordinary. For my part, I find the lady very taking; but I do not recommend her to the more serious admirers of Paul Claudel.