In _La Vagabonde_, we see her as a music hall star, dropped from the sphere of the woman of the world, and all the happier in her new orbit, although aware she is a stranger there. Men, of course, pay her court, and one of them, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel (whose tender, bourgeois, authoritative nature is admirably depicted) comes very near to being her lover, and proposes to make her his wife. But Max, good, solid, faithful, is the least subtle of lovers--a great, affectionate Newfoundland dog of a man. And Renée Néré, the vagabond, who has borne so resentfully the yoke of her first husband’s heart, fears to suffer as much from the narrowness of a second husband’s brain. She cannot resign her liberty to an inferior, and, on the eve of their marriage, she sends him a cruel little letter:-- ‘Max, mon chéri, je m’en vais,’ and is off with her troupe on a tour to the New World. On the first page of _L’Entrave_, she has met again with this old lover, or rather, herself unrecognised, she has seen him pass, one day at Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais, he, his young wife, and his little child. He has not mourned her long! And Renée feels oddly dispossessed: no one, nothing, belongs to her; she has no place in the world for she is no longer a star of the stage. A convenient inheritance has given her the means of liberty--that liberty she coveted of old--and she strays from hotel to hotel on the Riviera mixing with theatrical visitors, frequenting the better sort (which, I suppose, means the wealthier sort?) of demi-monde, yet oddly out of place among these amiable barbarians who have neither an idea nor an ideal. The most barbarian of all is little May, a young hetaira _à la mode_, fresh, fair, and five-and-twenty. Renée is a dozen years older and ought to know better; but she steals poor May’s lover away from her; and she shackles herself with this uncultivated young man for life, because she loves him; and it is the first time that she has loved. Ah, she no longer asks herself: is he her equal?... Madame Colette, like her heroine, has consented to the hobble, to the shackle, to _L’Entrave_. She, too, has married, has found for herself again a place in organised society, has seen open out before her unsuspected interior horizons, and murmurs perhaps, like Renée Néré:-- ‘Se peut-il, Beauté, que je te préfère l’âme qui t’habite?’ And I await her next novel with almost a tremulous expectation. MADAME MARCELLE TINAYRE