Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/690

586 the new book by Madame de Noailles, Les Innocentes. We were approaching Greece and the atmosphere of these stories became more limpid, more direct, like the art of the most Mediterranean of our women of genius. These eighteen stories have a theme in common: the defense of women, those eternal victims. Men are not allowed the right to reply and stand without an advocate before the requisitory; they appear only as a series of interrogation points. (My dialogues with Mme de Noailles were always limited to that, anyhow.) But if, at last, the men should make answer, should justify themselves? Suppose someone wrote a book called Les Innocents? When I was young and read the Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, the Correspondence of Mlle de Lespinasse, I was less struck by these passionate cries than by the implacable silence of the men to whom they were uttered. Were you mute with joy, of terror, or indifference, you beautiful phantoms, Chamilly, or you, Chevalier de Guibert? No doubt you were hangmen: what would be left of you if you had given your mistresses nothing but joy?

I had also on board the New Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry which M R. de la Vaissiére has just issued (Crès). Before Corfu, when the Milky Way was like a widespread smudge of talcum we read, under the green and red lights, to starboard and to port, Apollinaire, Zoulet, Salmon, Vildrac, their luminous and secret images shooting like stars across the August sky: for each new poetic image we should have been allowed to make a wish. But there were missing, and we regretted, the names of Valery Larbaud, Cendrars, Fargue, Reverdy, and Drieu la Rochelle, from this excellent anthology.

I awoke one morning at Cephalonia. We were in Greece. The blue of the Greek flag reminded me of the cover of Joyce's Ulysses, which, I was told, he wanted to have the same colour. I landed to buy a flag to send him, but I found none. The island which lay before me, like a bow on the sea, was, I was told by the chief of police, no other than Ithaca. He explained that all of Homer's descriptions of Ithaca do not correspond to the island now so called, but to Cephalonia. How to distinguish the truth from local pride? Perhaps some day Ireland will find herself robbed by other isles of the honour or having given birth to Joyce?

I returned to Paris reconciled to white marble. My heart was full of hatred for the bluish sugar out of which are made our statues