OF the Nine Muses the greatest bore is Clio, although Calliope runs a close second. Fortunately, however, the stately progress of History, if not that of Epic Poetry, has always been accompanied by indiscreet memorialists—the imps of letters and diaries so well described by Lytton Strachey—who snicker and thumb their noses and, in our time, even whisk aside her toga to reveal her under-garments. Theirs is, if you like, the worm's eye view of the Great, but even when it is colored with malice, it is not incompatible with admiration. No one outside of France, so far as I am aware, has focused his vermiform lens on the last figure of our time who combined the historic and the epic and who disappeared—it seems incredible —little more than six years ago.

I have shaken the hand of General de Gaulle, which was dry and firm, just twice. I have watched him alight from automobiles in his capital and in mine. How many times I have seen him on television I cannot say. The parodist of Saint-Simon who chronicled events at the Élysée for the Canard Enchainé used to refer to "the appearances of His Majesty at the mysterious dormer (l'étrange lucarne)." And the tone was always royal, whether the General wore a double-breasted suit or his uniform or the great chain of the Legion of Honor. His head would lift, his lip curl slightly as the camera moved swiftly in upon the lined visage and the great fennec ears and the uplifted arms. Then would come the booming sonority of "Francoises, Franyais" (no one, so far as I know, ever objected to this male chauvinist precedence), followed often by a weary "Eh, oui!" and on one occasion— the insurrection of the generals in Algiers—by the Racinian