"AND WHEN YOU HAD EVERYTHING, WOULD YOU, THE KING, TAKE ME, A POOR GIRL, FROM HIM WHO HAS ONLY ME." VICTOR HUGO, HERNANI

Cousin,

Your letter moves me — not that I am in the least tempted to expatriate myself, above all to the United States, but because you have reminded me of the torments of my own irresolution when, living in Paris and happy there, I had to choose between settling there and returning to Lebanon. As you see, I too have lived abroad: all through the first Great War, and then twelve years at a stretch without one return to the country. To that I owe my understanding of the homesickness your children combat.

Cousin, the acclimatization of the children of emigrants has no doubt altered their temperament. As for me, I love — to the point of being unable to renounce them — the harmony of the silence on the summits of our mountains, the resounding within me of all their echoes, and the sensation of my roots clinging fast to my soil.

Even if reasons of principle did not hold me to the country, I would suffer in your cramped apartments, like cages too near the sky. I love the smell of the earth too much. And the throbbing of overcrowded, feverish countries tries me like high blood pressure.

As for the ideal of equity you praise to me, there is more of it in Europe, and in the old countries, such as France, which I love for the emancipation of her thought, her sovereign taste, and a thousand affinities.

Why I tore myself away from her, I am going to tell you. The question of material interests, which keeps so many emigrants far from their soil, did not come into it. I did not have to weigh it; I believe all the same that had I been a man, I would have solved that problem. No one will persuade me that a great number of emigrants, resolved to reorganize their country with their means and their experience, would fail at it.

What detached me from life abroad was an inner unease, coming perhaps from my conscience. It made agreement with myself impossible. The more I admired France, the more sadly I called to mind my Lebanon, its natural beauties, its stagnant resources. The wealth of France is the work of generations of beings who, humble or eminent, endowed her with science, poetry, an epic of arcades and vaults, palaces and cathedrals, museums and libraries, theaters, forests, music.

Cousin! Human dignity does not accommodate itself to living as a parasite. To live in order to kill time is to consume poison and antidote.

So one day I came back to Lebanon. It was in the days of Mr. Ponsot, High Commissioner of France, with Charles Debbas as Lebanese Head of State. Charles Debbas was my cousin and a friend of my childhood. He accompanied me on my tour of rediscovery through the country for which our childhood had sketched so many dreams. He had realized one of them: to border the mountain roads with maples and acacias. Their young verdure already shaded the somber slopes carpeted with pines and brightened the arid hillsides above the valleys. Talking as we went,