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instinctstraight to the mark, but did not know how to use it. One can guess what the friendship meant to me of the creators of
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
and of
Les Noces
. I elbowed my way through a mass of quarrels, disputes, trials for heresy. I searched for myself. I thought I recognized myself, I lost sight of myself, I ran after myself, I caught myself up, out of breath. As soon as I succumbed to some spell I was up in arms against it.
    That youth progresses by injustice, is justice. For soon enough comes the age of looking back. One returns and can then enjoy what one strode over or trampled underfoot on one’s way.
    The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.
    In 1917, the evening of the first performance of
Parade
, I did astonish him.
    This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.
    A little while later the
Joseph
of Hofmannsthal was given a triumphant reception. I was in his box. At the tenth curtain call Hofmannsthal leant over to Diaghilev: ‘I would have preferred a scandal,’ he told him. And Diaghilev, in the samemanner he had used when he said to me ‘Astonish me,’ replied to him: ‘But you see … you see that’s not so easy.’
    From 1917, when he was fourteen, Raymond Radiguet taught me to distrust the new if it had a new look, to run counter to the fashions of the
avant-garde
. This puts one in an awkward position. One shocks the right. One shocks the left. But, at a distance, all these contradictions come together under one label. Clever the one who can sort this out. The young people who visit our ruins see only one style. The age called ‘heroic’ displays nothing but its daring. This is how a Museum works. It levels. Ingres and Delacroix side by side, Matisse with Picasso, Braque with Bonnard. And even, let me say, in a recent revival of
Faust
, the old garden set, the work of Jusseaume, had become, thanks to dust and unconscious similarities, a magnificent Claude Monet.
    But this phenomenon of perspective does not concern youth. Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
    * The Greek soothsayer. E.S.
    †
The Impostor
, translated by Dorothy Williams. Peter Owen, 1957. E.S.

ON FRANCE
    FRANCE IS A COUNTRY THAT DISPARAGES HERSELF . This is all to the good, for otherwise she would be the most pretentious country in the world. The essential thing is that she is not self-conscious. Whatever is self-conscious neutralizes itself. In my novel
Les Enfants Terribles
I took great care to show that this sister and this brother were not self-conscious. Had they been conscious of their poetic strength they would at once have been aesthetes and have moved from the active to the passive. No. They loathe themselves. They loathe their room. They want another life. That, no doubt, of such as imitate them and lose their privileges for a world that only exists through the certainty that privileges are elsewhere and that they don’t possess any.
    I have at home a letter of de Musset’s written at the period most rich in genius. He complains that there is not one artist, not one book, not one painter, not one play. The Comédie-Française, he says, is crumbling in the dust, and Madame Malibran is