I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia
By $3.00 DODD, MEAD
THIS book comes as a surprise to readers of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s extremely readable but not very distinguished novels. For distinction is its keynote. It tells the story of a group of people belonging to a bygone society, and it is a group whose intelligence, simplicity, grace, courage, and genuineness are unforgettable. The story is that of the romance of Mrs. Lowndes’s and Hilaire Belloc’s English mother and French father, and of their short and perfect married life of five years; but it is also a description of all the members of the family on both sides, and of the characters and atmospheres of the homes in England and France where the children of the marriage grew up. The children themselves are living little creatures — Marie very un-English in her precocious vitality and feminine charm, and Hilaire equally unusual in his intellectual precocity; at the age of six, his comment on a picture of The Flight into Egypt was: ‘It’s lucky they hadn’t made the Suez Canal then, wasn’t it, for the donkey couldn’t have got across.’ Perhaps the most interesting part of the whole book is an account, put together from family letters, of conditions in France during and after the FrancoPrussian War. This comes home with new and added force as we read it against a knowledge of the in many ways so similar position today. E. D.