As he explained in a recent letter to the _Figaro_, his personages mean more than meets the eye. Aware of the symbolism of our poet, mindful that he is essentially a pupil of Mallarmé, a subtle critic has already interpreted _L’Échange_: Marthe was the Catholic Church; Laine, her seducer, was the Romantic spirit; Thomas Pollock, the friend to whom in her distress she reaches her hand, was to stand for the spirit of social activity. Nothing could be neater than this gloss, so admirably typical of our times; and I think, for my part, that Paul Claudel would have been wise to leave his ingenious scholiast in possession of his commentary. When a poet is so obscure that he needs a Browning Society or a Dante Society, or a Claudel clique, to discover his meaning, he should never turn on his interpreters, pointing-pole in hand; it is not playing the game. They have found out something--perhaps better than what he originally meant. M. Claudel, however, informs us of his real intention. _L’Échange_ was written in 1893 and 1894, at New York and Boston, where the young poet was occupied in the Consular service, and this melodrama is in reality a lyric, an expression of his own feelings during those first years of administrative exile:-- ‘I realised at last those old dreams of flight and travel to which my hero, Louis Laine, gives expression; and yet my heart was full of homesickness, of the sense of strangeness, of not belonging to my surroundings: my second personage, Marthe, expresses this regret of my native land.... From another point of view, the play, which is the drama of exile, is also that of a young man, a poet, obliged to choose between two vocations, apparently contradictory: on the one hand, free love, independent life, unfettered fancy, art; on the other hand, the obstinate, divine, conservative forces: conscience, family, religion, the Church, and a man’s sworn faith.’ But these symbolic forms of art should enjoy the divine liberty of music. Like Calverley’s lyric ‘the meaning is what you please’; or as Claudel himself puts it:-- ‘L’intérêt d’un drame doit dépasser l’anecdote qu’il raconte; il veut dire quelquechose; quelquechose de général et qui n’est étranger à aucun des spectateurs.’