". . . Except Good"

The ancient maxim, Speak nothing about the Dead except good, was never more flatly disregarded than last week, in Paris, when M. Paul Valery, poet of severe Classicism, was received by the French Academy, amid pomp, and took the seat once occupied by that late famed trifler with life and words, M. Anatole France.**

It is the duty of each member of the Academy, when he takes his seat, to pronounce an oration upon its previous occupant. Last week M. Valery said about the late "M. France" almost everything ". . . except good." Custom made it impossible to utter flatly derogatory statements; but Poet Valery said, with heavy sarcasm:

"My illustrious predecessor would not have been possible or even tolerable in any other country but France, from whom he took his name--a name extremely difficult to carry and which it took great hopes to assume.

"The glory of my predecessor is paradoxical, due to the literary turmoil which made the public rush to him as to an oasis. They were at once pleased with his agreeable language, which could be enjoyed without too much thinking and which pleased by its limpidity, despite the fact that often it revealed an ulterior meaning of not too reassuring a nature.

"He gave the delicious and precious sensation one gets from enriching oneself without effort of understanding and without study, and of witnessing a spectacle without paying. His dilettanteism, his diversity of information and his knowledge were other great sources of his favor."

**"France" was his pen-name. His true name was Jacques Anatole Thibault.