At the opening of this season — the season of cold and frost — there appeared among us a woman's face bearing, together with the majesty of winter and the ripeness of autumn, the splendor of spring and the warmth of summer.

The Lebanese knew the writing of this “world stateswoman,” Madame Geneviève Tabouis, before the last war, from her articles in the newspaper “L'Œuvre”; and the rising gener-ation read her in her latest book, “Greatness and Abasement among the Americans.” During the war years I used to read her in the great newspapers of Brazil, which surrounded her name with haloes of admiration and esteem.

There gathered at the Lebanese Cénacle, at the invitation of its founder, that unknown fighter Mr. Michel Asmar, that company of people who wait for six o'clock every Monday to enjoy the delights of literature and thought — delights prepared, after long and arduous study, by the masters of culture in this country, and offered to us as a lofty spiritual nourishment that makes us forget for an hour the chaos of politics, the din of wearisome daily life, and the chains of the economic squeeze which not a day passes without their growing heavier on the necks of those who bear them — and those who bear them are you and I, my dear reader, and your kin and mine, and your neighbors and mine.

Perhaps I — returning from afar — am alone in a particular feeling not shared by those who enter this blessed Cénacle. For every time I hear a delightful lecture — and how many they are at the Lebanese Cénacle — I bless Michel Asmar, who makes me forget the streets of this truly shameful capital, and that dictio-nary of obscene words you hear

as you walk among these people. They were told: do not curse the creeds, nor the crosses, nor those who own them, nor the God who is in the heavens — and they heard and obeyed; but the nature that rules them insists on cursing somebody... So these people pour down upon one another's mothers and sisters and aunts on both sides a long rosary of insults, reminding us that between us and civilization lies an unfathomable chasm.

But... what have I to do with this thing that stirs my pain every hour, every time I walk among the people in the street? Let us return to Madame Tabouis.

A noble face on whose features appears that which cannot be named — I mean the quiet splen-dor that a life of study, thought, earnestness, and work stamps upon the faces of those men of letters who bear missions, who carry, along with their private cares, the cares of a humanity that no sooner leaves one volcano whose fires have subsided than it enters another blazing up anew.

The theme of the lecture was “The World after the Failed London Conference.” Madame Tabouis drew for us swift pictures of the conferences that followed one another from the last days of the war and brought the world to its present impasse. So we saw the dying Roosevelt begging the grave for an hour's respite and dragging himself to the Yalta conference — Yalta, which recorded no official protocol but heralded a mis-shapen newborn, at whose sight this humanity, which had been promised an angelic child bearing a green branch in its mouth, could only grimace.

Then she spoke to us of the part played by General Eisenhower the day he refused Mr. Churchill's plan for the occupation of the Balkans and allowed the Soviet armies to liberate Eastern Europe; and she

carried us to the San Francisco conference after Roosevelt's death — and it seemed to me that I saw the monster born at Yalta, with two small horns now sprouting on its head... And the lecture went on carrying us from Potsdam to Moscow, after the conference of the four great powers in London, where the Allies called one another out to the duel...

She said: “Georges Bidault, the delegate of France, tried to play the part of the mediating peace-maker between the two camps — Moscow and Washington — while the Communists in France were winning, in the latest elections, a third of the parliamentary seats and several ministries. Then, when President Truman declared his resolve to aid Greece, Italy, and Turkey, Russian policy in its turn opened a new page, and Molotov announced that he would protect the unity of Germany... And thus Germany was split in two — and Europe, and with it the world.”

Then Madame Tabouis spoke to us with much tact of the circumstances that led General Marshall to broadcast his famous plan, aimed at relieving the wretched of Europe in an effective way so that Communism should no longer find fertile soil; and of the meeting of Messrs. Bevin, Bidault, and Molotov in Paris; and of the refusal of the Soviets and of the countries living in their shadow to enter into any discussion of the plan — until she announced to us the birth of the Comintern a second time, under the name of the Cominform. And here she said: “The American press went mad and began to speak of a world catastrophe near at hand; and Walter Winchell — whose broad-casts a hundred million Americans listen to on the radio — sprang forward and launched his resound-ing cry: ‘Wake up, America!’ So rearmament was resumed, and men set about hastening it after the publications of the Russian Chabardze, who scattered his thunderous articles through several American magazines.”

As for this Chabardze, Madame Tabouis bestowed upon him the