And so Mlle Lenéru, one of the rare individualists of the younger generation, Mlle Lenéru, so romantic, with her love for the noble, the exceptional, with her revolt against platitude and mediocrity, repeats, in a mood of revolt and irony, the refrain of Jules Romains:-- ‘Nous cessons d’être nous pour que la Ville dise: MOI!’ This young writer, so extraordinary by reason of her depth of meditation, and the strange Pascalian vigour and beauty of her language, was the more surprising (and yet perhaps the more explicable) because of a singular infirmity: she lived immured in an interior world. If, indeed, her short-sighted vision perceived a vague image of our earth and its inhabitants, the noisiest city left her undisturbed to her reflections. Mlle Lenéru was absolutely deaf. She heard no echo of the applause which greeted the _Affranchis_. In 1918 when the comedians of the Théâtre Français read and accepted ‘à l’unanimité,’ her new play, _La Triomphatrice_, she alone remained unmoved. The blindness of Milton, the paralysis of Heine, the deafness of Beethoven, have accustomed us to these ironies, or compensations, of a mysterious fate. The humble ferment which produces alcohol when its development is checked and interrupted, flourishes as an unproductive mildew if its organism find all that it requires. An obstacle is often the stimulus of genius. But when genius has made at last a pearl of the wound, a ruby of the fissure, and turned starvation into rapture, how cruel appears the sudden fate that snatches the hard-earned prize from its grasp! Marie Lenéru died of the grippe on the 23rd of September, 1918. THE PASTORAL NOVEL There has always been a pastoral novel in France, because France is an agricultural country. Except milk, meat, and a little bread, England draws too little of her nourishment from her own resources; her plenty is a cheap import; and even the beauty of much of her landscape suggests an indifference to agriculture. We have known a French admirer, confronted with a marvellous panorama of wild Sussex heath--wood, grassy links, and gorse-covered common--contemplate the scene and sigh, ‘Rien, rien, rien, à se mettre sous la dent!’