Among the converts who have become almost notorious in France during the last two decades are Ferdinand Brunetière, François Coppée, Paul Verlaine, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. But it must not be forgotten that if the quartette trod the Road to Damascus they were all returning to their early City of Faith. They had been baptized Roman Catholics. All four had strayed. And widely different reasons brought them back to their mother Church. We need not dwell now on the case of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, as his was a death-bed repentance; nor with Paul Bourget, a Catholic born and on the side of his faith since the publication of Cosmopolis. As for Maurice Barrès, he may be a Mohammedan for all we care. He will always stand, spiritually, on his head. The stir in literary and religious circles over Huysmans's trilogy, En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat, must have influenced the succeeding generation of French writers. Of a sudden sad young rakes who spouted verse in the æsthetic taverns of the Left Bank fell to writing religious verse. Mary Queen of Heaven became their shibboleth. They invented new sins so that they might repent in a novel fashion. They lacked the delicious lyric gift of Verlaine and the tremendous enfolding moral earnestness of Huysmans to make themselves believed. One, however, has emerged from the rest, and his book, Du Diable à Dieu (From the Devil to God), has crossed the twenty-five thousand mark; perhaps it is further by this time. The author is an authentic poet, Adolphe Retté. For his confessions the lately deceased François Coppée wrote a dignified and sympathetic preface. Retté's place in contemporary poetry is high. Since Verlaine we hardly dare to think of another poet of such charm, verve, originality. An anarchist with Sebastien Faure and Jean Grave, a Socialist of all brands, a lighted lyric torch among the insurrectionists, a symbolist, a writer of "free verse" (which is hedged in by more rules, though unformulated and unwritten, than the stiffest academic production of Boileau), Adolphe Retté led the life of an individualist poet; precisely the sort of life at which pulpit-pounders could point and cry: "There, there is your æsthetic poet, your man of feeling, of finer feelings than his neighbours! Behold to what base uses he has put this gift! See him wallowing with the swine!" And, practically, these words Retté has employed in speaking of himself. He insulted religion in the boulevard journals; he hailed with joy the separation of Church and State. He wrote not too decent novels, though his verse is feathered with the purest pinions. He treated his wife badly, neglecting her for the inevitable Other Woman. (What a banal example this is, after all.) He once, so he tells us to his horror, maltreated the poor woman because of her piety. Typical, you will say. Then why confess it in several hundred pages of rhythmic prose, why rehearse for gaping, indifferent