O Summer... Farewell!!

We need a beauty that springs from rosy cheeks and eyes shining with the work of precious health: for our homeland needs strong mothers for tomorrow...

Summer has passed, with its good and its ill.

It passed escorted by sighs... sighs of regret from those who basked in its bliss... who roamed and reveled at its parties... were refreshed by its breeze, and dreamed on the mountaintops beside its waters.

And it passed escorted by sighs as well... sighs of relief from those who were scorched in its inferno, whose bodies melted away with its sweat... whose souls expired in its heat, until they counted the hours, not the days, awaiting its unlamented departure.

For both of these, the most prominent feature of the summer was the beauty-contest festivities. Some, drowning in luxury, saw them with their own eyes; others were denied them and consoled themselves with pictures... pictures of enchantresses enthroned in the newspapers — and the papers were certainly not stingy with these pictures, plentiful as they were.

Beauty contests and the choosing of their queens were not confined to a single country... From the coast of France, where three beauty queens were elected for the Riviera... to Belgium, which elected two queens; then Britain, which contented itself with a queen for Dover; then Los Angeles, which followed suit; then Egypt, which elected — besides its many beauty queens — a queen of the cinema to represent Egypt at the cinema congress to be held in Rimini, Italy; down to the dozens of queens of beauty and elegance elected in most of the summer-resort towns and villages of Lebanon.

After all that, I do not know who first thought of these contests; my best guess is that some infatuated lover whispered in his beloved's ear, in a moment of serenity: "You are the most beautiful on the face of the earth... you are a queen of beauty." The whisper stopped there — and the idea was born!!

Of all these elections, I find the most inspired to be the one conducted by the London Daily Express, for it invented something new: it elected not a queen of the seashore or of elegance or of beauty... but searched among the thousands of bathers on the Channel coast and elected a queen of health — everything in her appearance bespeaking energy, youth, and well-being.

And I believe that we today stand in the greatest need of such a choice; for if you observe our girls you will see no sign of health, despite the constant exercise on the beach and in the dancing circles... indeed, despite the makeup and everything else, you will notice a sallowness, especially around the eyes... The cause of this, without doubt, is that excessive thinness: woman has submitted blindly to the command of fashion... and fashion has tyrannized, no longer content unless a girl becomes like a willow bough — or, more precisely, like a stick of firewood with a dress hung on it.

History has never once known woman to reach this degree of emaciation, and never once has it told us of a thin woman who reigned over hearts and ruled them; indeed all the enchantresses of history, from Cleopatra to Madame de Pompadour and their like, were full of figure — and if natural fullness failed them, they made up for it with artifice.

It is of course not possible to go back to those days... But the girl of today has carried thinness to the point of getting angry at herself and sentencing herself to a harsh diet if she finds her weight has risen a single kilogram above what she supposed fashion to be... carried it so far that most of the world's physicians have grown fearful for the new generation and have warned repeatedly of a general collapse in health.

Girls' exercise today is confined to the sea and to dancing... The sea lasts a few months only... As for dancing, it takes place mostly in halls where clouds of smoke gather and the dancers breathe them in... If we add to this the work the girl performs, whether in an office or in a shop — all of which drains much of her strength — we understand why the thinking of the world's great newspapers, like the Daily Express for example, turns toward choosing a queen of health, and thereby toward encouraging this side of things.

The most advanced countries of the world find themselves today in need not of a sickly beauty created by makeup... but of a beauty that springs from rosy cheeks and eyes shining with the work of precious health... For the homelands of men are never in greater need of anything than of strong mothers for tomorrow, to give them a strong generation.