She says to her friend Christian: —

“How beautiful these freckles are!

As though an angel had sown them on your face —

grains of wheat for the birds of the sky!”

Rarely does a great newspaper or magazine appear these days without something new and curious in it about the French child Minou Drouet, who has never ceased to be the preoccupation of the literary circles and the first subject of their debate!

The uproar around Minou Drouet began when the French publisher Julliard brought out a collection of her poems. The papers passed the news along, and the public was not long in splitting into two camps: the first cheering the prodigy child and calling her “the wonder of the century,” and the second saying: there is a monstrous deception here, and someone must surely be prompting her to these writings — most probably her adoptive mother, who for four years now has been giving her instruction and urging her on to reading and to ranging widely in it. And here it asks: is it enough to push the little ones down the road of learning and letters to make of them, at a very early age, scholars and men of letters?

As the days passed, the breach widened between the two parties, the one for her and the one against her — which moved the child Minou to present herself, alone, at the headquarters of the society of writers, authors, publishers, and musicians, after she had requested by letter the appointment of a time for a writer's examination.

The examining committee and jury convened, and its president declared to the newspaper “Paris-Presse” that it was the first time that he