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priety." And so that this suggestion of the true yellow-backed naughtiness should not fail of its effect, the sentence was wrenched from its place and set definitively at the end of. the first paragraph.

Even out of the inanities of translation, certain qualities stand forth clearly. You can hardly fail to enjoy the gusto of Colas; his naïve delight in the five senses. Always he seems surrounded by the essentials of a joyous life, namely by smoked tongues, saveloys, gudgeons, hams, chines, roast pig, and andouilles. In times of famine when everything else fails he retires with his friends to hidden cellars where they bouse at open bottles of Chablis, Pouilly, Irancy; he speaks of these associates as having bellies like great soup-pots. Colas likes equally a girl's face, a spring morning, and the clean smell of fresh-sawed wood. He possesses, in other words, something that whole generations have lacked conspicuously; a sense of the realities; a love not for the thing-in-itself, but just for things.

One expects such a fellow to wander on tangents through a whole series of amours. Colas had only one; it is the single perfect episode of the book. He was about twenty at the time; apprenticed to maître Médard Lagneau. In the neighbouring garden worked Belette, a strapping girl with eyes wide apart and a wide mouth like a weasel's. It was love and hate between them; landerida, lanlaire, lanterlu, Belette sang. If she finally decided that Colas had ceased to love her and revenged herself with the miller; if she was forced to marry the other when his hat was found hanging on an apple tree outside her window—and he inside:—all this didn't matter much. The years were still sweet; Colas came sometimes to talk over old times, and on the branch outside of her window, the cuckoo (coucou, cocu, coucon) sang instead of the nightingale.

I suppose that stories of the kind have been told a thousand times in every language of Europe. Occasionally one of them, related with absolute naturalness, stripped to the bones of description, attains greatness as if by chance. The story of Belette is such; it is the triumph of Rolland's method. Through the rest of his work are scattered episodes of similar beauty, and any final judgement of the man must rest on these. As for the remainder, one finds a character here and there to admire; the tubercular vigour of the style is refreshing to a tired world; above all one respects the huge boldness of the conception. His work as a whole, however, hardly merits the place in permanent literature to which Rolland so plainly aspires.