I am greeted with cries by Miss L———, a kind of charmingly affectionate American Zeppelin, inflated with fashion and pleasure. "You've come from Paris?" she cries. "Tell me about Barbette."
Of course. Is there room for anything but Barbette in Paris since Autumn? What, you don’t know, you haven't heard, you haven't seen Barbette? You date frightfully. At the Casino de Paris, in a darkened auditorium, a charming young woman, slender, blond, with delicate gestures, dressed in black tulle with a green bow, rises on the trapeze. At once she flies out in a semi-circle. Her white legs are like the hands of an enormous clock, she touches the chandelier, disappears into the flies, returns, slackens her hold on the ropes and is falling into the boxes. . . . No, at the last possible moment Barbette catches on by one leg—no, by one foot—by one toe, and in the midst of our shouts comes down to bow, takes off her wig—and before us stands a young American boy with glossy black hair. He is a mania with Paris; there are Barbette frocks, Barbette waltzes, princesses give Barbette teas, Cocteau is writing a Barbette ballet. Without that magic word you can know nothing of Paris in the early winter of 1923. I think of Swinburne: "To what strange end hath some strange god made fair . . ."
I meet Constance C——— who was yesterday a commercial traveller in revolutions and to-day a collector of tyrants. She tells me of her sentimental interview with Mussolini: "What a man! I've still black and blue marks on my arms." Like the crowd, she is the victim of the man of the day, and she is right. Where are the men of yesterday? Here the room is full of princes willing to recount the assassination of Rasputin; the Crown Prince returns to Germany and would gladly go to prison if only people would talk about him: it is vain. They are the victims of yesterday; they come too late, like Proust's letters of condolence which used to reach widows after they had remarried—they never forgave him.
Poor Proust! On an icy morning last November we met again, some of us, in the church of St Pierre de Chaillot where a year ago our grief had brought us together. From a distance I caught sight of Doctor Proust, his brother, and had fleetingly the impression of seeing Marcel Proust himself: the same black hair parted in the middle, the same magnificent Oriental eyes, the same way of bowing, very low and all of a piece, his head sunk between his shoulders; but closer at hand individual differences assert themselves and the
