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singing in London because the Opéra sings out of tune. Every period in France has this peculiarity that, with all the richness under her nose, she sees nothing there and looks for it elsewhere.
    How ridiculous are those who try to express her greatness in words! ‘Greatness, purity, constructive works.’ Such is the modern refrain. Meanwhile greatness, purity, constructiveworks are produced in a form that remains invisible to them and would seem to them a disgrace to the country. And the critics judge the works and do not realize that they are judged by them. Who makes the greatness of France? It is Villon, it is Rimbaud, it is Verlaine, it is Baudelaire. All that splendid company was put in the lock-up. People wanted to drive it out of France. It was left to die in the poorhouse. I do not mean Joan of Arc. With her it’s the trial that counts. Sad is her revenge. Poor Péguy! I was so fond of him. He was an anarchist. What would he say of the use made of his name?
    France’s attitude after the liberation was simple. She did not take one. Under the yoke of armed force, how could she? What line should she have taken? Said to the world: ‘I didn’t want to fight. I don’t like to fight. I had no weapons. I shall not have any. I possess a secret weapon. What? Since it is secret, how can I answer you?’ And if the world insists:
‘My secret weapon is a tradition of anarchy.’
    That is a powerful answer. An enigma. Enough to perplex the great powers. ‘Invade me. All the same in the long run I shall possess you.’
    Since such a Chinese attitude has not been adopted and we have talked a lot of hot air, what chance is now left to us? To become a village, as Lao-Tze advocates. To be no longer enviable save through the invisible, more spacious than the visible, and sovereign.
    Lao-Tze, speaking of the ideal empire, says: ‘To hear the cocks from one end of the land to the other.’
    What is France, I ask you? A cock on a dung-heap. Remove the dung, the cock dies. That’s what happens when you push folly to the point of confusing a dung-heap with a heap of garbage.

ON THE THEATRE
    EVER SINCE AS A CHILD I WATCHED MY MOTHER and my father leaving for the theatre, I have suffered from the fever of crimson and gold. I never get used to it. Every curtain that rises takes me back to that solemn moment when, as the curtain of the Châtelet rose on
Round the World in Eighty Days
, the chasms of darkness and of light became one, separated by the footlights. These footlights set the bottom of the wall of painted canvas aglow. As this flimsy wall did not touch the boards, one obtained a glimpse of coming and going in a furnace. Apart from this gap the only aperture by which the two worlds communicated was a hole edged with brass. The smell of the circus was one thing. The narrow box with its uncomfortable little chairs was another. And as in the rooms of Mena-House, where the windows open on to the Pyramids, in the little box the oceanic murmur of the audience hits you in the face, the cry of the attendants: ‘Peppermints, caramels, acid-drops,’ the crimson cavern and the chandelier which Baudelaire liked better than the show.
    As time passes, the theatre I work in does not lose its prestige. I respect it. It overawes me. It fascinates me. There I divide in two. I live in it and I become the child permitted by the ticket seller to enter Hades.
    When I put on
La Voix Humaine
at the Comédie-Française,and later
Renaud et Armide
, I was astonished that my colleagues should consider this theatre to be the same as any other and would produce plays there written for no matter where. The Comédie-Française remained in my eyes that house of marble and velvet haunted by the great shades of my youth. Yesterday, Marais telephoned from Paris saying they had asked him to return there, but this time on first-class terms. He asked my advice, no doubt in order that I might dissuade him. I have a number of reasons for doing so. But I hesitated