France Speaking

AMID the choir of voices that have been raised to describe and interpret the fall of France, that of M. de Saint-Jean is one of the most lucid and convincing, as it is one of the least angry and partisan, it would be impossible to classify him, on the basis of this personal record of experiences and impressions, as an official in the Ministry of Information during the war, as a man of the Right or of the Left. He writes always as a Frenchman, adhering to a common denominator of French principles of humanism, tolerance, respect for individual personality. He has much to tell of the inside story of politics in Paris during the war, and what he says bears a stamp of authenticity and is free from dubious sensationalism. But one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the revelation of the author’s own personal philosophy under the stress of war and final rout and collapse. Individuals, as he says, no longer live dangerously, but peoples have always lived dangerously. One of his best epigrams reads as follows: ‘ France, a nation which thinks a great deal about the art of living. Germany: a nation which thinks a great deal about the art of killing.’ During the great retreat he was temporarily quartered in a house in Tours where Anatole France had once lived across the way from the home of the aged philosopher Bergson, and he observes from a full heart: ' The nation which produced Bergson and France has not been able to protect herself against the inferior tribes who dream only of conquest.’ W. H. C.