In the second version, place and personages remain unchanged, but the time is altered; we are no longer modern but plunged in the early Middle Ages. Anne Vercors, the master of the farm, leaves his home not on an errand of charity to America, but in order to join the Crusade. Pierre de Craon, instead of canalising rivers, builds cathedrals: he is a great master-mason, so gifted that, by a special dispensation he is allowed at large, although a secret leper. And Violaine’s kiss of compassion infects her with his disease. This seems to me a grave artistic error, since to some extent it exculpates the faithless Jacques, the cruel Mara, who follow but the fashion of their age in driving a leper from her home. But the end: the death of Violaine, stifled under a cartload of sand, from which the treacherous Mara has drawn the back panel; and the return of Anne Vercors; and the relative repentance of the obstinate Mara; and the great mystical wind that rises and uplifts us into a region where happiness and tragedy are lost in a peace beyond understanding--all this moves us deeply in the second rendering. Each version has its beauties, and either makes us realise the Celtic base of France--at least, of the north of France. The French have ever Rome upon their lips, and their education has been strictly Latin since the time of the Gallo-Romans, but, by instinct and blood, they are Celts: no deep racial difference divides a Paul Claudel from a Synge, or a Barbey d’Aurevilly from a Walter Scott. _La Jeune fille Violaine_ presents no great difficulties to a reader broken in by a sufficient course of recent Irish literature. _L’Échange_ is simpler still--one of the most spontaneous and agreeable, as also one of the earliest of Claudel’s pieces. It is a little tragedy with four personages: Louis Laine, an adventurer, a libertine, a man incapable of discipline or of order--in fact, an Individualist, and, as such, abominable in the sight of Paul Claudel; his wife, the pure girl he has eloped with, a Frenchwoman of a type which Claudel is never weary of reproducing. Laine, an American, has carried off his French bride to the New World, a land whose traditions and conditions are contrary to all her experience. Louis Laine incarnates the mercantile American spirit, but he knows nothing of its energy, its initiative; qualities swiftly apprehended by the self-possessed and diligent Marthe. She says to the Yankee, Laine’s employer, Thomas Pollock Nageoire (Finn):-- ‘Thomas Pollock, il y a plusieurs choses que j’aime en vous. ‘La première c’est que, croyant qu’une chose est bonne, vous ne doutez pas de faire tous vos efforts pour l’avoir. ‘La seconde, comme vous le dites, c’est que vous connaissez la valeur des choses, selon qu’elles valent plus ou moins. ‘Vous ne vous payez point de rêves, et vous ne vous contentez point d’apparences, et votre commerce est avec les choses réelles.