her life was in danger; and he kept on waiting — until the news of her death reached him.

In the story, as you see, there are two noble men: a noble husband and a noble lover. But behind this nobility in their characters stands a saintly woman: a wife who was able to win her husband's trust, so that he permitted her to meet her beloved alone and in his own palace; and a beloved who was able to win her lover's reverence, so that he wrote of her: “In her tenderness she rose above being a goddess, and in her sanctity she was exalted above being a woman.” That loving and beloved woman stood like a heroine in the battle, duty wrestling with love in her soul and her mind wrestling with her heart, until, when mind and duty triumphed and heart and love were struck down, the body that was the field of battle had been shattered — and life went out.

And in the poet's life there is another noble woman: his wife. A woman who knew that she was binding her life to the life of a man whose heart was not wholly hers; yet her tenderness and her self-sacrifice reach such a height that they make her help her husband bring out the story of his first love... She sits beside him to copy with her own hand the pages that carry the sighs, to hear the moans and set down the whispers of passion that her husband once whispered in the ear of the first beloved — that beloved whose death by then was ten years past; and yet the passages of the book oozed with pain as though the adored woman had died only yesterday. What feeling, then, stirred the good wife in those hours? Did she forgive the dead beloved? — and the cruelest thing in life is that the dead should monopolize the hearts of those we love, for death, with its sanctity and its majesty, sheds upon the beloved person a sanctity and a majesty that no living rival can contest. Or was she, like a great woman, giving of herself and sacrificing, to offer French literature a pure, fragrant flower, and thereby making her

slow, measured way toward his heart? All we know is that we stand before another woman whose mind conquered her pas-sion — a woman so reasonable that she agreed with her husband to name their first little girl Julia, the name of the husband's beloved and a stranger to the wife: that little girl who died in Beirut during the poet's journey to the East, making her father taste the anguish of bereavement a second time.

And after all this — if you were to read “Raphaël,” you would see how this good virgin passed over the earth like a hurrying angel, leaving behind her the loveliest and purest of traces: the trace a noble woman leaves in a man, so that his soul and his pen brim over with everything beautiful and delicate. And what beauty is more beautiful than the philosophy of contentment in love, which the poet's pen sets apart for her when he says: “He who has waited has, as it were, beheld.” Or the philosophy of chastity, summed up in this sentence: “The pleasure of love in contemplation and deprivation is greater than in indulgence and surfeit.” Or the philosophy of utter devotion, summed up in this sentence: “Death is accomplished not by loss but by forgetting.” Or the philosophy of happiness in love, summed up in this sentence: “I am no longer a human being at all; I am one great hymn of praise. I have seen her, and that suffices me as nourishment for my contemplation.” Or the philosophy of purity, summed up in this sentence: “I seek from love no reward but the happiness of loving, and my secret com-muning.” Or the philosophy of... but no — read “Raphaël,” and let it leave its good trace in your soul. In it is a love that rises above itself, a fidelity without equal, devotion, reason, and a poetry that is the poetry of the tender Frenchman whom they called the poet of love and beauty — though had they been just, they would have added: and the poet of fidelity and deprivation.

Acre — Palestine