she abandons him in a first-rate boarding house in Bath.

After a week of this Mr. Preemby discovers that he is the reincarnation of Sargon, Ruler of the World. He is not actually insane, but all of his theosophical fancies have at last come to roost in one great delusion which broods over his mind. The result is naturally catastrophic. After several amusing adventures in which he announces to "his people" the coming of their lord and ruler, Sargon the Great, he is, of course, shut up in an insane asylum. Christina is desolated. Her father has disappeared, and the shock is sufficient to reveal to her that the messy love affair in which she has become involved is a stupid violation of her own honesty.

An engaging young writer, one Bobby, who for two years has been unable to write more of his novel than its title page, becomes interested in the little mustached man who is sheltered for a few days in Bobby's boarding house on his inevitable progress to the asylum. While Christina and several of her new intellectual friends are trying to discover how they can persuade the State that Sargon the Great is not insane, Bobby proceeds to snatch him out of bedlam by the simple process of kidnaping him and running off with him on a motor bicycle. At this point Bobby meets Christina and falls very naturally in love with her. Also, it is sad to relate, at the same point Mr. Wells's novel begins to go to pieces. He is not willing to let well enough alone, to tell

this simple and charming tale, to present the laundress's widower with such deft skill that one can see the little man sitting in his chair and "H'hrmp❞ing through his mustache, and to create a girl of 1925 who is every bit as real and intriguing as was Ann Veronica in those old days when women threw stones through London shop-windows. Mr. Wells must tack some sort of Utopia at the tail of this novel, as if he were a minister pointing a moral to his sermon. I do not mean that the book does not turn out satisfactorily. Mr. Preemby dies; his daughter discovers a real and very satisfactory father, and Bobby is put off without marriage. But it is too bad that one has to wade through a score of pages of rather rambling philosophy about "the new world," "the Mind of the Race," etc., etc., as a climax to a novel which no other man in England or America is capable of producing.

MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ IN THE

COUNTRY1

By LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

N TRAVELING across France the train sometimes passes a formal park, through which a

IN

great avenue, opening its vista for a second, reveals at the end of that perspective the mansard roofs and stately façade of some seventeenth-century château; and in the imagination of the traveler this little glimpse may awaken the thought of the great age of French history-that vainglorious reign, so famous in arts and arms, of Louis XIV, the Roi-Soleil. To an American or English traveler at least there may be something pompous and cold in the vision, thus suddenly evoked, of this vanished France; he may not be able easily to imagine what the personages were really like for whom these parks were laid out and these stately houses erected. But, on the other hand, it is possible that our traveler may feel himself curiously at home in this periodmore at home there, indeed, than in the democratic France of the date of his railway journey. Many of the inhabitants may seem to him like long-acquainted friends, with the very texture of whose minds he has become familiar, learning in long days of delightful conversation the things they liked and laughed at, 1 From The Dial, July, 1925.

the problems they puzzled over, and with what fears and hopes their thoughts traveled along those avenues to the Court and the wars.

Thus to reverse the time-process, thus to be transported back into the actual life of a bygone epoch, requires a spell, a necromancy we might call it, more potent than that of history: the chroniclers, the historians, and even the memoir-writers of the Grand Siècle, can at most enable us to see it, so to speak, from without-to look in, as through gates of gilded iron, upon that formal region. If then our AngloSaxon traveler can enter there at ease, can feel himself happy and at home in that society, it must be because a more intimate access, a more personal introduction, has been his privilege: he must have made the acquaintance, and have won the friendship, we may safely hazard, of the lady of genius who stands ready with her golden key to open that escutcheoned gate to those who love her. This magic instrument, the wand which this enchantress wielded (though without the slightest consciousness of its power) was nothing more than the feathered quill with which Mme. de Sévigné scribbled her almost countless letters to her daughter-letters which, in spite of their old dates and spellings, come to us across the centuries like contemporary documents, and read indeed as if they had been written hardly more than a day or two ago. With almost all the upholstered figures of past epochs it is a constant effort to believe that they once actually existed, did once indubitably breathe the air and walk in the sunshine of

this earthly scene; but with Mme. de Sévigné, so limpid is the sound of her voice, so lively her glance, so inextinguishable the spirit of life that shines and sparkles in her letters, that we find it hard to believe -we cannot really believe-that she has been, for more than two centuries, dead.

When we get to know her best, at the beginning of her correspondence with her daughter, Mme. de Sévigné was approaching the age of fifty, but her face still retained the coloring of girlhood; she enjoyed, she said, the fine blood that ran so agreeably and lightly through her veins, almost believing that she had discovered some fountain of perpetual youth -for how otherwise could she account for her splendid and triumphant health? This "divine Marquise," with her fair complexion, her blue eyes and golden hair, was a lady of rank and high distinction, who was famous for her wit and grace and beauty. She played no insignificant part in the society of her time, and her biographers have for the most part written of her as a woman of the world, a great lady of Parisian society, a wit and raconteuse of worldly gossip. The temptation, indeed, to write of this aspect of her life is a strong one: she loved the world, and appreciated in a curiously conscious way all that was magnificent in the stately age she lived in the rejoicings for victories, the pomp of great marriages, and the splendor of Versailles as it shone new-built and brilliant in contemporary eyes; the torches and gold costumes of the fêtes there, the confusion without confusion of the courtiers and music,