Idyl

One and three-quarters centuries make a long time. Few U. S. communities are so old. In one tenth that time, many a U. S. community has changed entirely--the German and Swedish farmers of a Wisconsin county into jitney-riding city stenographers and factory hands; the Italian truck-gardeners of an Ohio township into the proprietors of a bootlegging "Little Italy." Americanization crusades and Progress have made racial slag, temporarily, of much that was pure foreign metal in the North. In the South and Far West, what remains of the Spanish scarcely suffices to fill the realty booklets.

Last week, however, there was enacted an idyl which served to remind U. S. citizens that their country has not so inaccurately been called a New United Europe. In Louisiana, near the Mississippi's mouth, there remains a section still racially pure and traditionally almost a country within a country, the Bayou Teche country of the French who fled from Grand Pre, Canada, in 1755. They are les Acadiens. Last week, like other distinguished Frenchmen before him, Ambassador Paul Claudel went there. "Vous etes ici parmi les Franc,ais," a serious local dignitary told him. "Nos ancestres sont frac,ais, nos sentiments sont frac,ais, notre religion est frac,ais." It was so surprisingly true that the good Ambassador felt himself deeply touched by it all.

It was full springtime in the South and Ambassador Claudel is a poet famed and, in the French sense, serious. It was full springtime and the poet-ambassador was finding travel restful after a winter of buzzy Washington. He had seen Florida. He was going next to Tennessee. In between came this spot of which he had heard so much and he was prepared to luxuriate in it.

With him traveled his more-than-pretty daughter, Mlle. Marie Antoinette Claudel,* blonde, blue-eyed, ready to pass from jeune fille to grande dame. Doubtless she would find New Orleans, where gallantry is understood, more enchanting than Washington, where flattery keeps its net mended to capture the mayflies of gossip so important to political life. She would share with him the warm friendliness of a sort of homecoming, but in not quite the same blissful passivity as he, Paul Claudel, poet.

At New Orleans, there was a State reception, with the very corpulent Mayor O'Keefe and other officials standing by. There were bouquets, compliments and invitations for Mademoiselle. For M. 1'Ambassadeur there was an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Loyola University, such as was given to le Marechal Foch some years ago. Then they set out with Maurice de Simonin, the French consul-general, for the small towns and villages--Donaldsonville, Napoleonville, St. Martinville, New Iberia, in the bayou country.

A steamy morning mist lay on the roads. The French peasants, for that is what they are, trudged to work. But for the trailing moss on the live-oaks it was like a southern province at home, in real France. The men doffed their hats, whether or not they knew who it was that rode in the so beautiful automobile, The women answered questions volubly and swiftly appraised Mademoiselle's beauty of which they all spoke afterwards. At Napoleonville she made them catch their breaths when she laid her freshest bouquet at the base of a new memorial inscribed Aux Morts de la Patrie.

Everywhere, the parish priest, le pere, came forward from among his children to greet the visitors. The bayous lay peaceful, their margins painted by the springtime. M. Andre Lafargue, the district's chief historian, suggested to Ambassador Claudel that "only a poet can sing with truth the beauties of this blessed place."

The poet-ambassador nodded gravely and at St. Martinville, under the oak made famous by Poet Longfellow's Evangeline, he called to him a child with bright hair and kissed her on the cheek. This broke the tension of the moment, after the long orations and the formal reply. The Ambassador chatted lightly with a grandmother before departing. Did her grandchildren talk French at home? "They may talk English elsewhere if they please," she said, "but at home, in my presence, it is a different matter."

They made M. 1'Ambassadeur and Mademoiselle climb up on roots of the Evangeline oak and embrace its old trunk. The last farewells were said with handkerchiefs, fluttering all along the road.

Back in New Orleans, Ambassador Claudel presented a message, in 150 volumes, from 3,500,000 French schoolchildren to their "brothers and cousins in Lousiana" who had been threatened by a flood. Ten-year-old Marcel Claiborne, descendant of Louisiana's first governor under the U. S., accepted for his fellows. They all sang La Marseillaise and there were French folk-songs, too. "It is for this occasion I came to New Orleans," said M. Claudel, and returned to a world where the poetry of diplomacy must be scanned to fit immigration quotas, where the poetry of races is a forgotten art.

*Another daughter is named Reine, for their father's Royalist sentiments were strong indeed when he was a younger man. In Washington, Marie Antoinette Claudel drives a Chrysler roadster, rides horseback, plays tennis, dances, but does not "gad about" as do daughters of many another diplomatist.