Ball

Art, like Liberty, is made to stand sponsor for a variety of things. License is their little sister, without whom they would be sad indeed, yet whose excesses are frequently embarrassing.

Last week License sported, as is her wont every June, on her favorite bank of the Seine, the left one. All one afternoon the cafes and bars along the Boulevard de Montparnasse filled slowly with semi-nude men and women, daubed and stained, and greasepainted brown, black, crimson, orange, vermilion, blue and green, with headdresses, beads and anklets intended to indicate that they were Aztecs of ancient Mexico. They were students, and eager friends* of students, and joyful models of students at the Academie des Beaux Arts. The year's work was over and preparations were in order for the annual Quatre Arts ball where all cares are lost at 9 o'clock, all caution at 12, all scruples and costumes at 3, all sanity before the dawn. . . . When dawn came, Paris gendarmes--as is customary this one night of the year--offered no objections to the staggering rout that chortled, hiccuped and quarreled homeward with grease paint run amuck and hardly enough draperies among the multitude to have warmed a frog. Scenes of Saturnalian abandonment had been enacted--frenzied dancing, delirious overtures, posturing, French embraces and the parade of "beauty unadorned," in which "La Belle Helene," a highland peasant wench but lately come to Paris, had been elected "Empress of the Voluptuous Contours" and suitably saluted by one and all. . . . Cabled the urbane United Press: "One of the worst orgies in the history of Paris."

* Invitations to the ball are issued only to enrolled members of the Beaux Arts Academy but many an outsider scrambles and scrimmages for the few extra tickets reserved.