88 FRENCH PERSONALITIES AND PROBLEMS
the literary mud-throwers of Gringoire. Here we have the standard
abuse of Cardinal Gasparri, of Woodrow Wilson, of Poincare, of
Briand, of all those who did not rise to the exalted standard of
patriotism of the Action franfaise. In quiet times Leon Daudet
was the most amusing, the most vivacious and the least merely
malignant of those bitter French polemists of all parties who made
French journalism such good reading for foreigners. Growing up
in the inner circle of the Republican ruling class, L6on Daudet had
opportunities for observing human nature and acquiring a repertoire
of more or less authentic anecdote that, added to very real literary
gifts, put him far above men like Henri Beraud. But all the faults of
the school are here, too—the contempt for the truth (the Norton
forgeries were no sillier than some of those that formed the staple
of anti-Dreyfusard controversy); the profound ignorance of the
modern world which no amount of salon smartness can compensate
for the preoccupation with private feuds and private follies.
How shallow all this is compared with the Cahiers of Barres!
Nor is the narrative very easy going for the common reader. Leon
Daudet is a devotee of the romantic method in history to a degree
that ought to have earned for him the most severe condemnation of
M. Maurras. Hardly any part of Clemenceau's story is told in a
straightforward fashion, and the reader who knows nothing of the
general history of the period, or of Clemenceau's role, will find the
thread of the narrative very hard to follow. And M. Daudet, who
has a good conceit of himself, takes time off to relate events of his
own career in a fashion that is unconsciously funny. Thus Clemen-
ceau's famous appeal to the glories of La Vendee reminds M.
Daudet of a speech he made in that department twenty years later,
a speech showing up the old-fashioned Republican dogmas to which
Clemenceau was inexplicably addicted. M. Daudet forgets to add
that La Vendee (under clerical pressure) refused to send the re-
presentative of its true traditions to the Senate.
Of course the book, since it is M. Daudet's, has many entertain-
ing and even some valuable passages. The highly spiced style of the
original is difficult to translate, and the translator has sacrificed a
great deal to an effort at idiomatic translation. It does not matter
that we should have Camille Pelletan as " First Lord of the Ad-
miralty/' but to describe the £cole Normale Superieure as the
"Training College for Secondary School Teachers" is only